Trumping Trump

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As the Donald Trump “candidacy” for the presidency unfolded, most people in the UK must have been astonished that such a buffoon could be taken seriously. Part of the reason is that an idiotic proposition on the scale of a Trump presidential bid would never have survived the unruly British media. But American journalism is either irredeemably partisan (e.g. Fox News and talk radio) or obsessed with strange notions of ‘impartiality’ that allow absurdities to flourish. (The old “balance as bias” problem.)

Anyway, after a bad few weeks in which one watched with incredulity as Trump raised the ‘birther’ fantasy to new heights, it was just lovely to see Obama, for a change, take the idiocy on. And what made it really delicious was that Trump was in the audience, as a guest of the Washington Post, no less. Which makes one wonder what the hell an allegedly serious newspaper is doing having him as a guest. It’s a strange come-down for a paper that once brought down a crooked president.

No “British Spring” here. Over 50 political accounts deleted in Facebook purge

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Interesting development.

There appears to be a purge of political Facebook groups taking place. Profiles are being deleted without warning or explanation. In the last 12 hours, Facebook has deleted around 50 sites. The UCL Occupation account is still up for the moment, but for how long we don’t know. It may well be that these groups are technically in violation of Facebook’s terms of agreement, but the timing – on the royal wedding and May day weekend – is deeply suspicious. We don’t know for certain, but this purge of online organising groups could be linked to the wider crackdown on protest by authorities in Britain. Either way, it is a scandalous abuse of power by Facebook to arbitrarily destroy online communities built up over many months and years. Ultimately, the anti-cuts movement in the UK will need to start organising through self-hosted, open source platforms to avoid reliance upon the very corporate power structures we are aiming to challenge.

The post goes on to list the Facebook accounts that have been deleted.

Just as I was reading it, an email arrived from a friend which reported that a local kid

was arrested last night in his home for ‘pre-crime’ i.e. intending to take a loudhailer to London today, and taken to the Police station in Cambridge. He’s now been transferred to the Met, . His video message (Love Police) is silly and at points barking, but must surely be filed under ‘haven’t we got more important / dangerous people whose liberty we should withdraw’.

What’s happening now

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From Jay Rosen’s talk at South By Southwest.

One: A collapsing economic model, as print and broadcast dollars are exchanged for digital dimes.

Two: New competition (the loss of monopoly) as a disruptive technology, the Internet, does its thing.

Three. A shift in power. The tools of the modern media have been distributed to the people formerly known as the audience.

Four: A new pattern of information flow, in which “stuff” moves horizontally, peer to peer, as effectively as it moves vertically, from producer to consumer. ‘Audience atomization overcome’, I call it.

Five. The erosion of trust (which started a long time ago but accelerated after 2002) and the loss of authority.

What Jay Rosen knows

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Next month Jay Rosen, a blogger I admire, will have taught journalism at New York University for 25 years. The impending anniversary has prompted a thoughtful blog post on the subject of “What I Think I Know About Journalism”.

It comes down to these four ideas.

1. The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be.

2. The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere.

3. The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people.

4. Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us.

He goes on to expound on these in detail.

Well worth reading in full.

Why the BBC has to call time on the Andrew Marr show

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I was about to write a post about Andrew Marr’s expressions of regret about resorting to a dubious legal method of gagging the media, but found that Charlie Beckett has expressed it better.

Like any citizen Marr had a perfect right to defend his privacy. But as a journalist he must have realised his legal actions would reduce his credibility as someone who can interrogate the powerful and famous about their personalities as well as their policies and actions.

It’s not his fault that the judges (or rather one judge in particular) has decided to extend the power of the the super-injuction to a point where corporations as well as celebs can avoid exposure. But it is his fault that he took advantage of it. (Of course, the Internet has made even the most super of injunctions a fallible tool for suppression but they still keep the facts out of the general public’s gaze – perhaps that’s why Marr was so rude about bloggers.)

Marr now admits that his actions were hypocritical, but I think it’s worse than that and that’s why he shouldn’t really be doing political interviews anymore. He is a very clever man who has written the best ‘straight’ history of British journalism we have. I hope he continues to broadcast as a presenter of programmes like Start The Week and those popular histories of Britain. But he has now lost any pretence to membership of the Pugilist Tribe.

We need people like Ian Hislop and Private Eye who are prepared to be wrong sometimes in their efforts to get to the truth. Yes, the Pugilists may act out of shallow and malicious motives. They may over-personalise attacks and get their facts wrong or out of perspective. But they are more likely to ruffle the feathers of the mighty. And critically, the best of them don’t see themselves as part of authority.

Yep. Apart from anything else, Marr has been critically weakened by this. He’s a talented and thoughtful man but there’s no way he can credibly take on slippery and evasive public figures from now on. The BBC has to drop the AM show on Sunday mornings. Or find someone with untarnished credibility to do it.

AV explained!

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I’m going to vote for AV not just because I think it’ll be marginally better than the current system, but also because if it wins it will tear the Tories apart, and I’m missing the spectacle of internecine warfare on the Right.

Don’t give your data to cloud providers. Just lend it to them.

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Interesting NYT column by Richard Thaler.

Here is a guiding principle: If a business collects data on consumers electronically, it should provide them with a version of that data that is easy to download and export to another Web site. Think of it this way: you have lent the company your data, and you’d like a copy for your own use.

This month in Britain, the government announced an initiative along these lines called “mydata.” (I was an adviser on this project.) Although British law already requires companies to provide consumers with usage information, this program is aimed at providing the data in a computer-friendly way. The government is working with several leading banks, credit card issuers, mobile calling providers and retailers to get things started.

To see how such a policy might improve the way markets work, consider how you might shop for a new cellphone service plan. Two studies have found that consumers could save more than $300 a year by switching to the right plan. But to pick the best plan, you need to be able to estimate how much you use services like texting, social media, music streaming and sending photos.

You may not know how to answer or be able to express it in megabytes, but your service provider can. Although some of this information is available online, it’s generally not readily exportable — you can’t easily cut and paste it into a third-party Web site that compares prices — and it is not put together in a way that makes it easy to calculate which plan is best for you.

Under my proposed rule, your cellphone provider would give you access to a file that includes all the information it has collected on you since you owned the phone, as well as the current fees for each kind of service you use. The data would be in a format that is usable by app designers, so new services could be created to provide practical advice to consumers. (Think Expedia for calling plans.) And this virtuous cycle would create jobs for the people who dream up and run these new Web sites.

Life in the technology jungle: the salutary tale of the Flip

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This morning’s Observer column.

The Flip was a delicious example of clean, functional design and it sold like hot cakes. From the first day it appeared on Amazon it was the site's bestselling camcorder, and eventually captured 35% of the camcorder market. I bought one as soon as it appeared in the UK, and soon found that my friends and colleagues were eyeing it enviously. One – a keen tennis player – bought one along with an ingenious bendy tripod called a Gorillapod and mounted it on the fence at the court where he was having lessons with his coach. (The coach was not impressed.) Another friend, this time a golfer, bought one and used it to analyse his swing when practising at the driving range. Thousands of YouTube videos were produced using Flips. It was what technology pundits call a “game changer”.

In March 2009 the giant networking company Cisco astonished the world by buying Pure Digital Technologies, the developer of the Flip, for $590m. This seemed weird because Cisco doesn’t do retail: it’s the company that provides the digital plumbing for the internet. It deals only with businesses. It was as if BP had suddenly announced that it was going into the perfume business. But, hey, we thought: maybe Cisco is getting cool in its old age.

How wrong can you be? Just over a week ago, Cisco announced that it was shutting down its Flip video camera division and making 550 people redundant. Just like that…