Daily Archives: May 3, 2010

Inexorable decline…

Posted on by

… in the percentage of the vote going to the two big parties.

The TV debates aren’t responsible for the Hung Parliament that will follow Thursday’s election as surely as night follows day. A quarter of a century of decline in the combined Labour and Conservative share of the vote means that the two party stranglehold over UK politics is on its way out and Clegg’s TV performance was just a tipping point.

One of the wonderful things about the web is the accessibility of data. The Guardian has published all of the Guardian/ICM polling data since 1984. At Election 10 we took the combined Labour and Conservative share for every poll and created the graph above. In 1990 the two parties were claiming almost 90% of the vote between them this has shrunk to a little over 60% and it has been a steady consistent decline. A continuation of this would mean a government taking power that was opposed by around 65% of the population. Even our bizarre electoral system can’t sustain this.

Hmmm… I’m not sure about that optimistic conclusion. The British system can support a good many constitutional absurdities. But isn’t it interesting what a good long run of data can show, eh?

[Source.]

Danah Boyd on how privacy on Facebook is eroding

Posted on by

danah boyd is one of the sanest and best-informed observers of social networking. This is a good (but too brief) Technology Review interview with her on the subject. Sample:

Danah Boyd: People started out with a sense that this is just for you and people in your college. Since then, it’s become just for you and all your friends. It slowly opened up and in the process people lost a lot of awareness of what was happening with their data. This is one of the things that frightens me. I started asking all of these nontechnological people about their Facebook privacy settings, and consistently found that their mental model of their privacy settings and what they saw in their data did not match.

TR: What’s been driving these changes for Facebook?

DB: When you think about Facebook, the market has very specific incentives: Encourage people to be public, increase ad revenue. All sorts of other things will happen from there. The technology makes it very easy to make people be as visible and searchable as possible. Technology is very, very aligned with the market.

TR: Some people dismiss concerns about this sort of situation by saying that privacy is dead.

DB: Facebook is saying, “Ah, the social norms have changed. We don’t have to pay attention to people’s privacy concerns, that’s just old fuddy-duddies.” Part of that is strategic. Law follows social norms.

TR: What do you think is actually happening to the social norms?

DB: I think the social norms have not changed. I think they’re being battered by the way the market forces are operating at this point. I think the market is pushing people in a direction that has huge consequences, especially for those who are marginalized.