Geert Lovink, in his book ‘Zero Comments’ (2007), argued that blogs were the cause of a “decay of traditional broadcast media” … exhibiting “a ‘nihilist impulse’ to empty out established meaning structures.” In a network based on reciprocal linking and peer-recognition, he wrote that the “lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or ‘zero comments’.”

Zero Comments is something that I know about….

The report MPs online: Connecting with constituents published today by the Hansard Society touches on the decay of traditional media in its investigation into the attitudes of our Parliamentarians towards ‘new media’, it’s use and its value to them in political communications.

The internet creates “an opportunity to restructure communication between MPs and their constituents” writes Andy Williamson in the Background to the report. ” This has,” he writes, “led to both an increase in opportunity and, in some cases, motivation for MPs to communicate online.” He continues

“It is not just the volume and immediacy of communication that is changed by the internet, new network technologies change the very nature of communication, conversation and engagement and this is clearly visible across the wider online world.”

While the use of ICT has increased year on year, much of the experimentation with internet based communications by political parties, elected representatives, government departments and other bodies such as local Councils tends to miss opportunities for modifying the practices of communication away from vertical, uni-directional marketing and message propagation. Frequently we see not ‘zero comments’ but actually no comments at all. Where the experiment is with a ’social networking website, some corporate bodies have ‘zero friends’ (although Stockport Council has a few friends now, following an ‘OLD media’ source printing a story about it).

Andy Williamson concludes that

The internet has had a demonstrable impact on parliamentary communication. Most MPs are now communicating online and many have websites, some blogs and a handful maintain a presence on social networking sites. Although the internet does clearly support MPs to become more independent, the primary paradigm remains rooted in the party model. The foregoing suggests that the internet is a tool to communicate outwards, self-promote for the purposes of re-election and to gauge opinion and it is not seen as a tool to aid representation or to enhance engagement: internet-based communication by MPs is largely about delivery and devoid of strategies for engagement.

(MPs online: Connecting with constituents, 2009, p. 6)

I’ve just finished a paper on social, peer-to-peer, participatory financial models. In the paper I contrast traditional banks and interest bearing capital transactions to these emergent models. I’ve been looking at three different examples of these new business models, Zopa, Kiva and Open Capital, considering to what extent these organisations are challenging established practices.

The full paper is available as a PDF. As soon as I’ve got my LaTeX/HTML conversion working I’ll post that too.

How I would have rigged the Goldsmiths College Student Elections and some recommendations for the future.

There are many ways of rigging an election and, with increased abstraction and dispersal of the act of voting, influencing the outcome of ballots gets easier and easier.

Let’s just think for a moment what takes place when a student votes. First of all, the student needs to be co-present with the ballot! This is a given and the only part of the process that can not be virtualised. The student presents some ID before being given a ballot paper. The ballot is privately completed and cast into the ballot box.

The Goldsmiths College Students Election e-Voting was extremely vulnerable to exploitation by someone with malicious intent. The e-voting mechanism virtualised the ballot paper instead of virtualising the whole process. Anyone visiting the goldsmithsstudents.com website was able to download a Microsoft Word file. This file used a macro to capture the input of the user; in this case the ranking of the preference of candidates. A student was expected to complete the form, save it, then send the file as an attachment from their college email account to su@gold.ac.uk

The most vulnerable part of the whole process is that single file made available for public download.

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Well… today was last day of term for two @smiths courses: Beyond All Reason and Culture, Globalisation and Power.

I’ve just finished uploading all my Beyond All Reason mindmaps… use with caution…. Click on for some links…

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I’ve invested a lot of time in researching and testing tools to support my studies. i wanted to to break away from so-called ‘productivity tools’, as in all my years of using software like Visio, Word, Outlook, I’ve never really been productive: too much of my time and effort has been wasted in taming the application, or repeated manually generating my desired formatting - perhaps counter-productivity tools would be more accurate.

I’m in my third year of studying for a BA. I’m researching my subjects and my ideas, reading lots, annotating my reading, working on assignments, editing and revising my work. I work in different locations and at different times and I want access to my work where and whenever I am. As such, a piece of hardware, a laptop or a pda is not the whole answer to these needs, I need software to support my study too.
bring on the tools.
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