Monthly Archives: September 2010

The oppression of Dan Hannan

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While I welcome Dan Hannan’s long tradition of cross-ideological respect and general niceness, it’s interesting to read this piece, as I feel it may give an insight into why Dan is so right wing.

We all have our Weltanshaunge, and I’m no different. I live in a world where the right effectively dominates all forms of media, which is why it came as such a big surprise to me that the right was the first in this country to us blogging for real world political effect, as useful as blogging on the left has always been for making contacts and debating ideas.

For me, blogs offered your average every day socialist an opportunity to broadcast for free, in a media world ruled by the corporate capacity to editorialise and distribute, something the left, representing and comprising of those who are less well off and less in control of their own time, have little access to.

In Dan’s world, however, there genuinely is a big ugly biased BBC stalking the media world, and despite the enormous sales of right wing papers across all classes (a crucial aspect the left misses out on), and the various Sky News, ITV and 5 Live semi-monopolies leaning to the right in their every implicity, the BBCm secretly left wing despite all its impartiality policies, always gets in the way. Has he ever heard 5 Live?

It’s so far from my reality that it must have a part in demonstrating the difference between us.

What about the underlying logics? Does Dan Hannan believe that the right is oppressed, despite reaching far more people than the BBC and being able to heavily outspend Labour at elections? With all that private cash sloshing around among the people whose interests they put first?

Mandelson, which Mandelson?

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Cabinet minister Lord Mandelson described it as a “Blair plus” manifesto and denied Mr Brown had had to be converted to his predecessor’s public service reforms: “He invented New Labour with Tony Blair and myself and others.” -12 April 2010

Peter Mandelson has waded into the Labour leadership contest by criticising Ed Miliband for producing a “crowd-pleasing Guardianista” general election manifesto - 19 September 2010

I’m not sure which himself his Lordship prefers, but I think both of them will succeed in pushing people towards Ed Miliband. He’s worked wonders for Ken Livingstone’s campaign already.

It’s precisely tired, overexposed and evidently confused figures like Mr Mandelson we need to see a bit less of in the Labour Party. Clear the decks, start fresh. Move on.

UPDATE: Former Compass Youth Chair, poet and renaissance man David Floyd points out via facebook that:

“What Peter Mandelson amusingly calls a ‘crowd-pleasing Guardianista’ manifesto did not gain the support of The Guardian at the last general election. They backed the Liberal Democrats.”

I would also add that as well as failing to please the Guardian, it also failed to please the crowd, which by definition is rather larger than the Graun’s readership…

Is the blog dying as a medium?

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One of the things I have recently discussed with Andrew Regan, formerly of Bloggers4Labour, is whether blogging is dying as a medium. I thought I might reproduce the (public domain) conversation, because it certainly got me thinking.

It all started off with Andrew bringing the closure of Mashable to my attention, followed by his initial comment:

Hmm, shame, but while RSS/Atom are essential for any kind of blog subscription/reading, the mere ability to aggregate blogs is pretty small beer these days. It’s all about: finding links; smart/collaborative filtering; discovering new content; easy in, easy out, etc. GR is pretty crap at this too, but… perhaps a new generation is waiting in the wings…?

It seemed to me that this touched on something deeper:

Personal view is that the blog as a medium is dying.

Comments are drying up too, largely because facebook and twitter provide instant alternative. What has happened to politics via shorter and shorter TV slots has happened to online debate i…n just 5 years.

The exception of the dying blogs claim is the big names and famous faces – comment also seems to be concentrating. IMO, once again, this kind of destroys what is positive about the medium.

I hate to be sad about progress, but I’ve come over all Burke on this one.

I think that blogs include a lot that social media doesn’t cover, but taht the conversation is moving inexorably in this direction. I myself have tweeted hundreds of times since writing my last post.

Now I should add as a caveat that some blogs are doing well – but most of them are either written by people who are verging on genius (naming no names), or people who have put a lot of resources, sometimes other people’s, besides a substantial chunk of life into their blogs. They are not necessarily very personal – one might reflexively call them ‘websites’ rather than blogs.

I think this means we shut out up-and-comers. A few years ago (on my old blog) I wrote a post celebrating the end of Top of the Pops and the subsequent de-concentration of power over popular music and the listening habits it depends upon. On a certain level this is taking place with blogs vs Twitter or facebook, but on another level there is actually a concentration taking place. I think Left Foot Forward and Liberal Conspiracy are very good, but LibCon in particular hosts a lot of people who used to have a platform as their own, and are now semi-dependent on being noticed by Sunny, or suchlike. It’s good that I like Sunny too, but I think the general underlying trend is one of power concentrating, unhealthy for any market, I think most of us would agree – especially one where a consumer is aware of no loss when they refuse to explore their full rate of options.