Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Industrial Action

    The recession has brought industrial action that we haven’t seen since the 1970s as union members blame foreign workers for taking British jobs. The flashpoint has been at Lindsey refinery operated by Total. Lindsey sits at the mouth of the Humber river. The inciting incident involved an Italian subcontractor doing maintenance on the refinery who brought in Italian and Portuguese workers, which there was high unemployment in the area. The underlying nationalism is the populist dark side of the globalisation boom.

    My parents came to the UK when my Dad came over to work in the shipbuilding industry in the mid-1960s. Most of my friends have worked abroad: engineering in the Middle East, construction in Germany, web development and PR in North America and Asia Pacific.

    Newsnight highlighted two things of interest to me in the strike.

    First of all is the conflicted politics around the strike. Traditional left-wing allies of the strikers like the Socialist Workers Party  are between a rock and a hard place as they can’t allign themselves with worker solidarity and a doctrine of protectionism that smacks of racism. Secondly this gives the far right yet another opportunity to get a hook into the angry disenfranchised white working-class. There is a large amount of government money already going into community engagement programmes to try and deal with this problem and other organisations have ongoing efforts to deal with the BNP head on, however the industrial action is like putting petrol on a fire. I could see this feeding into a broader anti-globalisation right wing populist fuelled reactionary politics focused on Euro-skepticism.

    The second thing is the way worker politics has been extended and expanded via web 2.0 platforms. British Wildcats is a WordPress-based blog which seems to have far-right sympathies. It presents a professional looking face (even if the copy is hackneyed) to the movement using Google Maps integration, downloadable leaflets and blog posts to spread its message.

    British jobs for British workers Facebook group

    Over on Facebook I found 487 groups relating to British jobs for British workers. The top-ranked group: British Jobs for British Workers has 27,094 members. It used to be that the printing press and the xerox machine were tools of subversives. The CIA used to smuggle photocopiers into the Soviet Union for that very reason. Now it’s blogs and social networks.

    More related content can be found here.

  • Wired Style Guide

    I was looking through my first edition copy of Wired Style guide – Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age edited by Constance Hale and it struck me that many of the sections in the book were also maxims for bloggers and those involved in social media.

    Hale isn’t a technologist or a staffer at Wired. Instead she is a journalist’s writer. She has run conferences for mid-career journalists and a writing retreat. Beyond her website I am not too sure how qualified she was to prognosticate on the digital age for the Wired Style Guide. 

    Wired Style Guide sleeve

    So I decided to convert these titles from the Wired Style Guide into the maxims I had imagined:

    • Voice is paramount – a blog is a deeply personal thing and the challenge at first is finding your ‘blog voice’. This takes time to establish. It needs to be true to yourself and have enough cojones to express your opinions
    • Be elite – In the words of Wired: “Shared knowledge connects the writer and the reader. It forms the bridge from the type on the page (or the screen) to the deeper meanings and nuances for words”. This comes down to seeking knowledge, knowing your readership and the norms of the subcultures that they belong to. Even if you don’t belong to a community act like you do
    • Transcend the technical – there is so much written about the technical aspects of the web, be prepared to get beyond that at the end of the day it is people like you that social in social media
    • Capture the colloquial – So much of what makes a community is the informal lexicon that is particular to them. Think about Twitter in the course of a couple of years we now have the Fail Whale, twitterati, twitterverse, RT (re-tweet). Capturing this colloquial language in your writing helps to put your work in the midst of your readership subculture
    • Anticipate the future – Whilst we are more likely to get predictions of the future wrong, it also makes great copy. If you are going to anticipate the future, think about the things that are unchanging in life: the need for self-expression or the need to belong being two unchanging requirements for people in general
    • Screw the rules – Rules are made to be broken and knowing when to break them. Going against rules or expectations is a great way to inspire creativity – gorillas don’t really play the drums
    • Grok the media – The style guide defines grok as “A verb meaning to scan all available information regarding a stiuation, digest it and form a distilled opinion.” Being a ferocious reader of blogs, books, papers and the mainstream media makes you a better blogger. And even if it doesn’t, you’ll at least be better informed
    • Go global – Global village used to be a cliche that would be bandied around before globalisation made middle-class people think that their future is under threat, since then an international outlook has taken on a more sinister tone. However looking at international trends: from mobile marketing in South Africa to social networking in Japan allows us to better understand how technology and culture interact and increases the likelihood of being able to anticipate the future

    More on similar books to the Wired Style Guide here.

  • Harris’ Law

    I came across Harris’ Law due to Jason Calacanis. Jason Calacanis has touched on the issue of overconnectivity in a recent editon of his email newsletter. It dealt  with more certainty about the adverse social effects that connectivity brings which I first heard raised by Eric Benhamou of 3Com when he spoke about a decade ago in a keynote at Networld+InterOp in Paris.

    Key to the mail was a concept that Calacanis called Harris’ Law (after his friend Josh Harris):

    At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

    That sounds excessively harsh in most circumstances, since most social networks mirror life and society. Yes 4Chan and 8Chan can have lots of repulsive content on them. This is less about inflicting pain but more about the kind camaraderie that disgusting jokes brought in the school yard. Yes there are too many incidents involving bullying or hate speech on online communities, but it only makes up part of the content on these communities.

    Political groups aren’t motivated by ‘inflicting damage on the opponents, but by their concerns of things going on around them’. Their tribal ‘wars’ are reinforcing the community and manifesting those concerns rather than being purely about inflicting suffering.

    Even communities like Anonymous that seem to be full of pranking rally around some moral causes such as opposing Scientology or the Iranian government’s oppression of protestors.

    I wanted to end this post on a timely reminder which I have taken from Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame’s twitter feed:

    “People matter, Objects don’t”. That’s all you need to know about social media.

    Harris’ Law is also a good reminder to think about mental resilience and good hygiene practices with regards online interactions.

    You can subscribe to Jason’s email list here. More related content can be found here.

  • Feedburner

    Google is incorporating the Feedburner service that it acquired a couple of years ago into the Google infrastructure. So they’ve been getting Feedburner users like this blog to move to a Google ID. On the surface this makes sense as they are the masters of cloud computing and service provision.

    I had a good experience when Yahoo! did the same with Flickr, so went into this transition in good faith. Unfortunately Google didn’t have the good sense that Yahoo! did to leave well alone the functions and features and seem to have been tampering in a ‘boot stamping on the face of users’ kind of way.

    So far my experience has been underwhelming to say the least, hell that’s being polite: it sucks and I don’t mean that in small way.

    I used Feedburner to keep track of the traffic on my feeds, to provide me with a simple (Googly) web analytics dashboard and provide the ‘flare’ on each blog post that allows you to share the post via delicious, Facebook etc.

    • My feed traffic is down, these things happen and it should pick back up as Google gets its act back in order
    • I no longer have access to my web analytics, I presume that Google did this to force users like myself to use their own Analytics offering. Now both are free but I preferred the simplier one on Feedburner for my blog. I don’t need or want Google’s industrial strength version – if for no other reason than its user experience is destinctly un-Googly
    • The ‘flare’ which provides my sharing functions seems to be broken on new posts, severely affecting the ability of my readers to  socialise or share my blog posts

    The saddest part of all this is that Google will blindly trundle on thinking that they have done the right thing and this kind of behaviour will be even more common place as it hits the rapidly approaching ceiling on its search business and moves from being a hip young growth business to a blu-chip value stock like Dow Chemical, IBM, Microsoft or GE. Is it a small sign of a larger ailment: has Google has become ‘middle-aged’ before its time? You can find similar content available here. 

  • Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris

    Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris is on one level yet another book talking about the Iraq conflict, on another level it is a classic tale of realpolitik and the malaise of bureaucracy: a lack of resources, ignorance and revenge provided the ideal conditions to produce a barbaric regime for the interrogation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

    Standard Operating Procedure shows how the slow descent into barbarity relies as much on good people being prepared to do nothing as much as the actions of the main protagonists. If Gourevitch has any fault in this work, it is that he fails to find anyone guilty at all, since the blame is spread widely and thinly like peanut butter in a sandwich. The real issue is that most people involved are guilty and Gourevitch is has failed to give us his opinion and point out where he thinks that the buck should stop.

    Is it the gung-ho general staff who want results? Is it the private contractor firms working with the intelligence services who are using staff with a wide variance in their range of expertise? Or is it the US Army for not giving the soldiers the skills and authority to run their jail like a jail? Maybe it’s a confluence of  all of the above.

    From a PR perspective it is interesting how photography which was taken to document the unusual as a kind of CYA (cover your ass) tactic by the soldiers involved. Instead the photography ended up being used as the stick to beat them with.

    The power of the photographs was their weakness rather than their strength. The reason for this was that we the public, were not interested in the context around the apparent stories that the pictures told. More book reviews here.