dogma 054 may 2008 - page 1

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky. Like lots of these types of popular / academic books Here Comes Everybody relies on chapters themed with a human story and it also spins out a few good insights into at least 100 too many pages. Overall though it ’s good enough to forgive any understandable commercial compromises. The key idea that stays with me is the idea of the long tail - the rather obvious, but nonetheless very interesting idea that communities (which are increasingly replacing traditional ‘organisations’) consist of a small number of very active individuals and very large number of people who contribute very little but are very important. In fact they are so important that because of the growth of ‘many-to-many’ communication tools over the internet they could transform the space in which the active people operate - allowing something approaching true democracy in these communities. A good example is one aspect of the successful development of Wikipedia - most articles are built by a few very active and knowledgeable people, but many others simply correct some punctuation or provide pairs of eyes in case of an attack of vandalism - but this is the crucial difference that being open and on the internet gives it - it just couldn ’t exist without this long tail. Contrast this with Howard Dean’s campaign to be the democrat candidate in 2004. He failed because although he managed to motivate a tight group of noisy and committed volunteers he didn ’t have mass of people who were ready to vote for him i.e. this community failed because it didn ’t have a long tail.

There’s other stuff, including how easy it seems to be to get most people to act pro-socially (the ultimatum game) and also how members of communities have much more power to direct it than those that ostensibly ‘own‘ it (see how users of digg rebelled). Listen to Clay Shirky speaking at the RSA tue 18 mar

sun 23 mar Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill: Give MPs a Free Vote. The argument goes that you should get a free vote because it’s ‘a moral issue’ surely all votes are ‘moral issues’ and all votes should be free?

mon 24 mar Ministers Back Radical Plan for Voting Reform “Electorate to name two choices while participation could be compulsory”. This could just be Brown’s big idea - and from what I can tell it seems like a really good one. While the

addition of a second preference vote might seem quite a small and simple change I believe it might (eventually) make a real difference. Voters will feel more able to cast their main vote for the party/candidate that they really believe in, then their second vote for their preference of the main candidates (often acting as an anti vote against their least favoured). The overall results of the first election under this system might not be very different, but the smaller parties would almost certainly get more support, in some constituencies they will eventually move into the position of one of the main candidates, and therefore worthy of a first and second preference. I predict that over time smaller parties and persistent independents with a more honest and consistent message will thrive with more appearing. Compulsory voting might also accelerate this process. Let’s just hope it actually happens.

tue 1 apr Fossil Fools Day. A whole varied set of actions across the country, but it was one of the softer, more humourous ones that stood out for me. Ev-eon is a perfectly pitched web based spoof of Eon’s faith in carbon capture and storage.

Celsius 7/7 by Michael Gove. Michael Gove MP is clearly intent on giving the West a loud wake-up call. His appeal to a common set of values, and an end to the prevaricating nature of some Western policies on terrorism make for a provocative examination of the West ’s position on Fundamentalist Islam. More, his prose avoids the temptations of rhetoric and hyperbole, which tend to be commonplace when considering the so-called war on terror; and in surveying the events surrounding the 2005 London bombings he brings with him a dose of common sense thinking which is sadly lacking in today ’s largely panic-oriented climate. read the rest of the review

tue 1 apr Science and the Media - Can we trust TV? Skeptics in the Pub. Simon Singh is a physicist and journalist who worked for many years making science documentaries for the BBC. Tonight he ‘fessed up’ to a couple of minor manipulations he used in the making of the Horizon doc Fermat’s Last Theorem (also a book by Singh) and compared them with an outright misrepresentation in the first programme of the BBC series Alternative Medicine: The Evidence. In doing so he illuminated how

difficult it is to get good science on screen and some of the tricks used. What is clear though is that although even the most ethical programme needs some manipulation and editing and the line is somewhat blurred, when examined with any care it ’s quite easy to see when it’s been crossed

wed 3 apr Culture in a Time of Waste, RSA, London. This discussion about consumerism essentially came down to a conversation about the value of ‘things’. Neil Boorman’s experiment to burn all his branded products made him think about how he thought about what he bought and what it meant to him. His main conclusion was that products are increasingly bought for how they make you feel, rather than what they actually do. My opinion is that it ’s not intrinsically bad for us to buy things that make us feel good or bolster and project our self image, but this tendency has been ruthlessly exploited by advertisers - why else would children change their mobile phone on average every 11 months - it ’s emotional consuming gone mad. Daniel Miller was keen to stress the benefits of consuming, both emotional and practical - he’s recently been working on the benefits of increasing mobile phone ownership in Jamaica - but this only reinforces Boorman ’s point that products do have practical benefits, but that emotional marketing takes us way beyond this - if the people of Jamaica were changing their phones every 11 months they would still get the same benefit, but at much greater cost to them and impact on the environment, and that ’s the difference between consuming and consumerism. Listen to audio of this event

tue 8 apr The Logic of Life RSA, London. Previously author of The Undercover Economist Tim Harford also writes an agony column (Dear Economist) and presents a Radio 4 programme about numbers (More or Less). He’s very glad to tell us that economists are finally getting round to testing their ideas and that experimental economics is gradually taking off. He gives a few interesting examples e.g. if people are offered the choice of fruit or chocolate now they mostly choose chocolate, but if offered it for a week ’s time they choose fruit, however when that time comes and they are offered a chance to change, many do. i.e. They plan to be healthy or ‘good’ in the future, but that future never comes. Harford is also very keen on using experimental methods in developing public policy using the kind of randomised control trials we use to prove the efficacy of new drugs to test policy ideas. He is also, unsurprisingly for an economist, a big fan of using price incentives to curb carbon emissions an approach he contrasts with the environmentalists who decide what they want to see and complain if the solution isn ’t what they want. His faith in the kind of imperfect markets is touching but naive. Listen to audio of this event