#Trafigura, toxic waste scandals, gagging orders and social media

October 18, 2009news, RSA Arts & EcologyAlan Rusbridger, Ecology, Free Speech, Gag, Genie, Guardian, Ivory Coast, No Doubt, Parliament, Parliamentary Reporting, RSA Arts & Ecology, Scandals, Social Media, Spectator, Toxic Waste, Trafigura, Tweet, Tweeters, Victory

Anyone who is sceptical about the power of social media should compare this fromÂ The Guardian this morning â€œGuardian gagged from reporting parliamentâ€ with the twitter stream forÂ #Trafigura. Trafigura, you will remember, are the company responsible for dumping lethal toxic waste in Ivory Coast. The overwhelming sharing of information about the attempt to gag a newspaper from parliamentary reporting is nowÂ online here thanks to The Spectator who no doubt feel empowered by the fact that the genie is already out of the bottle on Twitter.

EDIT: At 1.00pm came this tweet from Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian:

Thanks to all tweeters for fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech.#trafigura

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Did #pm2un Tweet make Gordon to go to Copenhagen?

September 24, 2009news, RSA Arts & EcologyCampaigns, Climate, Climate Change, Climate Conference, Copenhagen, Couple Of Days, Deliberative Democracy, Ecology, Gordon Brown, Government Support, Green Tv, Home Insulation, Labour Party, Last Moment, Momentum, Nays, Pledge, Prime Minster, RSA Arts & Ecology, Rubbish, S Poll, Suggestion, Tweet, World Climate, World Leaders, Yeas

I was bloggingÂ last week in response to green.tvâ€™s suggestion that there were too many climate campaigns. My view was that it wasnâ€™t that there were too many, but that maybe they werenâ€™t reaching the right people.

Last week the websiteÂ BeThatChange.com were pushing hard on a campaign on Twitter,#pm2un, trying to persuade Gordon Brown to commit to go to the COP15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen. At the time this seemed like a great example of a well-targeted campaign.

Though itâ€™s not that unusual for leaders not to commit to attending this sort of conference until the last moment, BeThatChange had cleverly spotted an opportunity there. It looks rubbish for Brown to be claiming to be leading the agenda at Copenhagen when heâ€™s not even committed to going himself. A couple of days after BeThatChange cranked up the heat with their #pm2un campaign,Â @EdMilibandMP tweeted aÂ survey on his Edâ€™s Pledge site, asking visitors what their priorities for Copenhagen were. Miliband offered the following options to chose from:

1) the Prime Minister attending Copenhagen to help deliver a deal

2) doing more to provide home insulation in the UK

3) more government support to create green jobs

Whatever you think about the yeas and nays ofÂ deliberative democracy, when I looked on Friday, â€œthe Prime Minster attending Copenhagen to help deliver a dealâ€ had received 93% of the vote. How much of that was due to the BeThatChange.com campaign is hard to calculate, but I suspect that the question was even on Milibandâ€™s poll suggests that the original #pm2un campaign was bang on.

If anything, I suppose itâ€™s possible the Labour Party saw how potentially embarrassing such a campaign could be if it gained much more momentum, and instead turned it to their advantage. Either way the news came through late last night, less than 48 hours before BeThatChangeâ€™s next #pm2un twitterstorm:

Gordon Brown urges world leaders to attend climate change talk

Whatever did happen behind closed doors, it was nice work all round, really.

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Technology, culture, Rodney King, Ian Tomlinson and Damien McBride

April 15, 2009news, RSA Arts & EcologyAmateur Phone, Civil Rights Activism, Democratic Republic Of Congo, Digital Culture, Digital Representations, Disinformation, G20, Gordon Brown, La Riots, Labour Party, Maelstrom, Omnipresence, Police Assault, Protestors, Republic Of Congo, Rodney King, Safer Place, Surveillance Culture, Technology Culture, Tweet

Two very modern stories, and one slightly older one:

1) Attempting to grasp the new digital culture, the UKâ€™s Labour party falls foul of it instead when Gordon Brownâ€™s protege Damien McBride is caught plotting to feed bloggers malevolent disinformation.

2) Protestors, long warning of the evils of surveillance culture, suddenly find that surveillance has its uses when horrendous footage of the beating of Ian Tomlinson emerges, to be followed yesterday by more amateur phone video of another police assault on a G20 protestor.

The socio-technological earthquake continues to alter the way our culture unfolds in surprising ways. The omnipresence of continually updated digital representations of our world is altering our relationship to it in ways that are both dangerous and liberating.

Blogger Tomorrow Museum suggested something like this recently, kicking off with Momusâ€™s idea of the 1:1 ratio of experience to writing. For the slightly Eeyore-ish artist/musician Momus, the suggestion that we now turn every act into content – a blog, a Tweet- is something of a worry. For Tomorrow Museum, though, this world in which everyone becomes a witness is a safer place. He cites the filmed beating of Rodney King – the assault that started the LA Riots – as a starting point of this info earthquake.

The paradox is that while Damien McBrideâ€™s actions are now witnessed and scrutinised, weâ€™ve also lived through a decade in which around seven million have been killed or died in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia with barely any witness at all.

And having met Rodney King a couple of times while I was working in South Central Los Angeles, I wouldnâ€™t envy anyone who becomes part of the info-maelstrom. The film of Rodney Kingâ€™s beating became a focal point for civil rights activism, but King himself was not a man who ever asked for the attention, who felt tragically responsible for the deaths that happened in the ensuing riots, and who appeared to be just as much a victim of the all attention he had as of that original police assault.

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