I’ve referred in the past to the wonderful websites They Work For You and Write To Them. Built by a group of volunteers, these sites provide search tools for Hansard (the British parliamentary record) that allow users to keep track of the activities of members of parliament, monitor the occurrence of topics in parliament, share comments on sections of the transcript, and then contact any of their elected representatives (at local, national, or european level) to initiate or continue discussions with them.

For the past few weeks I’ve been beginning to consider the possibility of similar tools for the United States. There are plenty of people working on tools to increase political engagement, and to begin to transform politics into a more participatory process. Particpatory Politics are a prime example, and so is the fantastic GovTrack. There are new tools such as Civic Space that are building tools for organising and managing campaigns (whether electoral or issue-based), and many 527s provide ways for their supporters to contact representatives. But so far as I can find, there isn’t anything that matches the facilities of the UK sites, or that places the tools in the hands of the general populace.

This post should be considered a call for participants. I’m beginning to pull together ideas on what might be involved in developing that US equivalent on this wiki. Ideas, feedback, participants, they’re all welcome…

Tags: participation | govtrack | theyworkforyou | writetothem

When it comes to vibrant social discourse and a search for innovative ideas of how participatory politics might progress, the global South is usually ahead of the more apathetic North. That was evidenced in The Take which I blogged about a couple of months ago, as well as being well documented in many other places.

Lately, I’ve been really enjoying Nick’s observations about life in Bolivia, particularly the context he’s been providing on the disturbances that have greeted Bolivia’s new taxes on foreign gas companies. It is easy to observe that international trade regulations are of more immediate concern for those in the world’s poorest countries, but given how important they are to the lives of all of us, the level of awareness in South America puts many of us in richer lands to shame.

On last night’s edition of The World (an hour-long news programme co-produced by the BBC and NPR), Brian Byrnes brought a report from the world’s first Museum of Foreign Debt, located in Argentina. You can get audio here and see photos here. (The museum has actually been open for a while and Christian Science Monitor ran this piece back in July 2003).

Shortly after writing my previous entry on consumerism, I began reading Jedediah Purdy’s “For Common Things” and was reminded of an aspect of ‘our logo’ thinking that I had neglected to cover.

Purdy discusses the idea of the “Free Agent” (the wealthy individual able to entirely construct their own identity) extolled by Fast Company and Tom Peters’ corollary idea of “Brand You.” The concept of personal branding in the self-promotional sense has been around throughout history but, as Purdy highlights, its contemporary articulation involves building the fiction of the ‘autonomous’ individual, one whose pursuit of success trumps any concern for the public sphere.

Such a concept is a curious outworking of a form of consumerism that, in providing definition through consumption, loses track of the necessity of production. Jean Baudrillard made much of the fact that referring symbols have become detached from that to which they refer, and similarly in this “Free Agent” consumerism those things that we buy are neither results of a production process, or referent of anything outside of the individual purchaser’s intended message. When a Free Agent buys a pair of shoes, the question of whether they are mass-made in a sweatshop or a custom made in a fashion house has little relevance. What becomes important is the perceived symbolic value of those shoes within a particular self-contained network.

That is not the sense that I got from the original blog posts on Our Logo, nor that which I sought to convey. In order to be a successful surpasser of consumerism, the “our logo” concept needs to collapse some of the chasm between producer and consumer. In Jyri’s original post there was a sense of this being achieved through an extension of the production process. An acknowledgement that the items we buy aren’t finished items — the ways we customize or employ them will be part of their “production,” and when we buy it is with the intention of further building on that item.

We may hope that collapsing that chasm will begin to increase awareness of the parts of the production process before a product reaches us. If we’re involved in the production process, we are likely to scrutinise the products in more detail, and that may cast light on their existence before they reached us. There’s the potential for more solidarity (a somewhat outmoded word, but a concept we need to cling to) if we can escape the self-absorption that is an ever-present trouble.

Tags: consumerism | our logo | free agent

I’ve been really enjoying watching the use of the web around the UK General Election. From what media coverage I’ve been able to glean, it’s not seemed so heated as the blogging-focussed US election furore, but instead a number of sites have appeared that focus not so much on expressing opinions as to provide a space for conversation.

Much conversation, particularly political discussion, is a fleeting thing. With a few exceptions, the news media and ‘the public consciousness’ have short attention spans. While many of us would like to find ways to use new technology to support a deepening of public debate that will necessarily require a lengthening of such debate, some things that are only of short-term interest deserve to be captured and there’s a possibility that by doing that we’ll learn more of how to engage those longer-term discussions.

The two sites that have been most impressive in this regard are the mysociety and lazygov sites notapathetic (which allows those who are choosing not to vote to explain why) and ivotedforyoubecause (which allows people to leave messages for their new MPs about why they voted as they did). The personal stories, and the comments on them, have been quite fascinating and will hopefully help plug visitors into the longer-term related sites.

The emergence of such sites is encouraging simply because it shows that tools have developed to the stage where it is possible to quickly deploy applications of this sort. It’ll be interesting to see where they take us.

Tags: participation | web applications | notapathetic | ivotedforyoubecause

A few posts in the past few months have touched on the dilemma of those seeking a post-consumerist way of living. In response to a piece Ed referenced I explored a little of the difficulty of breaking free of consumerism’s more insidious traits without simply slipping into an identity simply defined by a different set of consumerist choices, and in response to Thomas Hine’s book “I Want That”, I talked of how a phenomenon he warned could similarly be a more minimalist consumerism might also be an example of a more conscious way of living.

Consumerism can be a very easy target but escaping it is one of the hardest tasks of modern western existence. In reality, those of us who dislike much of what consumerism compels in us are probably best off not trying to escape it in a pure sense, but would be better to look at how to both surpass and subvert it. That’s something Adbusters has blazed a trail in. Following in the wake of pop-art, their use of consumer culture’s own symbols to undermine many of its presuppositions has been an inspiration to many. Much of the work they profile openly acknowledges the debt it owes to the brandmakers and marketers, it is steeped in their language, but it strains at the rules that normally define that language. I’ve always liked the term ‘culture jamming.’

As profiled in this piece on Pat Kane’s The Play Ethic blog, that aesthetic is increasingly broadly felt: the theme of O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference a couple of months back was Remix Culture; mashups are undeniably on the rise; and (thanks to a tip-off from the Creative Commons blog) I’ve just had the chance to download a fan-made Star Wars film that Slate indicates is better than the official prequels.

Pat Kane drew his inspiration from this post by Finnish blogger Jyri which sets out to define the concept of “Own Logo” as the next step from Naomi Klein’s blistering critique “No Logo.” Rather than accept the branding imposed by a given corporation, “consumers” are increasingly customising the products they have purchased, and The Long Tail is coming into play as new technology allows more and more of us to seek out minority providers and mix-and-match our own ‘brand.’

In a sense, this has always been the way of things. Most of us have at one time or another ‘personalised’ purchased items, and very few of us purchase exclusively high-profile brands from high-profile retailers throughout our lives. Simply choosing which two big-brand items of clothing to combine is, in a sense, a form of ‘own logo.’ But at the same time, it does seem something new is emerging. Mashups, for example, are both a natural progression from the use of samples in hip-hop, but also far more explicit in their use of their predecessors. It’s a mirror of the Alternative Worship approach of remixing past church aesthetics with modern concepts in a highly self-conscious manner.

As the article Ed linked to indicates, it would be very easy to slip from such a customisation culture into a ‘cottage industry consumerism.’ For many of us that would be preferable, since individually those cottage industries have less power over advertising and retailing and diversity is not under so much threat as from their multinational alternatives, but it seems that while an analysis of ‘remix culture’, ‘the long tail’, and such concepts is an important step in finding “what’s next,” they open nearly as many questions as they answer.

What local community, so important for both environmental sustainability and personal contact, looks like in a world where cottage industry is delocalised, is a perennial question. Beyond that, how do we juggle these ideas with already busy lifestyles and the dizzying array of choices we will be offered? How do we ensure that this does not simply become another rich/poor divide (whether the wealth is in time or resources)? And when so much discussion of these concepts is about ‘individual’ branding and identity, what does a post-consumerist conception of group identity look like?

Tags: Consumerism | Long Tail | Remix Culture | Own Logo

A few months ago, I stumbled across consultationprocess.org, a site exploring the potential of blogging tools to open up public documents for discussion. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Gavin Bell and asked if I’d like to be involved in such a project to present the proposed European Union Constitution as a blog/wiki for ease of commenting and annotation.

Today, Talk Euro is live. I’m not sure that any contributions from me are in this launch version, but I’m hoping to contribute more as we extend the platform to handle further documents and to scale for longer term use. Regardless, it’s a great resource. Gavin has an announcement.

Tags: EU | TalkEuro

What seems like positive news about the future of 28th Street emerged in yesterday’s Grand Rapids Press. According to the report, the City Commission have been revising their ‘master plan’ for the first time in a decade. Parts of the plan share intentions to make 28th Street more pedestrian friendly, giving the suburb of Kentwood more of a sense of place, improve transport links, and potentially make ‘land-use modifications’ which could imply changes to the zoning laws that currently maintain large portions of 28th Street as ‘commercial property only’ and result in a street that is effectively one big strip-mall.

It’s difficult to know quite what to make of these suggestions, and any analysis must note that these are currently draft plans. 28th Street is, to my way of thinking, a pretty unpleasant place to be, filled with box stores separated by parking spaces and an always-crowded road. If the majority of the city’s retail life continues to take place out there, it needs to be a more pleasant place.

There remain the box stores. Both an eyesore and a leach on the local economy, there’s good reason to oppose their presence, but there’s little chance of them moving away, and it would be sad if precious planning money were invested in increasing their turnover at the expense of the local businesses that are still trying to maintain some semblance of downtown, and neighbourhood life. In improving transport links the city would do well to look very carefully at how they could best utilise the space around their new central bus station. While Kentwood could certainly do with a lift to its “sense of place”, it’s to be hoped that the center of Grand Rapids isn’t forgotten.

Tags: urban | redevelopment

Tags: urban redevelopment

The increasing reports of horse-trading between the EU and the US in recent days have made it look increasingly inevitable that Paul Wolfowitz would be approved as President of the World Bank. And so it has come to pass.

The suggestions are that the EU has been guaranteed a high-level representative within the World Bank and/or Paschal Lamy (current EU Trade Commissioner) as the next Director-General of the WTO. What doesn’t seem to have been discussed at any point in the proceedings is whether a man with such tragic, high-profile blunders in his recent past is right for the job.

Tags: Wolfowitz | World Bank | WTO

Tags: Wolfowitz World Bank WTO

For the past few years, and particularly during the US Presidential election last year, the media have been trying to set up an adversarial debate between blogging and journalism. The idea has propagated that blogging might be ‘the new journalism’ and once they’ve established such a concept, traditional media have then sought to undermine this strawman blogging. As many have commented, if current affairs blogging has an analogue in the traditional media it’s probably the comments page, not the headlines. Occasionally bloggers break a story, but the only real threat to the traditional journalist’s investigative role is the abject failure of many of them to exercise it.

Where blogging has had a particular strength is in providing media commentary. The latest post from Fred Clark at Slacktivist is another example of the essential critique that the world of blogs is at last giving voice to. With increasing consolidation of media ownership, a public forum for such critique was desperately needed. When communities form around such critique changes can start to happen.

This week has seen the launch of two new news services. Now Public asserts that “the news is now public” and provides a news pool for grassroots journalists and bloggers. It seems to be positioning itself as an open-source news agency. In that sense, it’s not dissimilar from this week’s other launch: ourmedia “the global home for grassroots media”. Ourmedia’s focus is less explicitly on “the news.” And of course WikiNews has been around for a while now. These sites demonstrate that for many, the critique that has dominated to date is not enough. From good critique, new concepts grow. And a new concept is definitely needed.

On the other side of the coin, we continue to see some media organisations moving towards more transparency. I’ve mentioned BBC NewsWatch here before, and the new Observer Blog is another good example of a site that gives us an insight into the personalities behind the reporting we receive. It’s not that objectivity has died, it was an elaborate fraud all along, and the sooner media organisations own up to that the better. I am hoping that the sites emerging at the moment serve as more than a wake-up call for mainstream media and really do revitalise investigative journalism.

Tags: nowpublic | ournews | journalism | wikinews | blogging

Tags: nowpublic ournews journalism wikinews blogging

I found Thomas Hine’s “I Want That” while browsing through the Friends of East Grand Rapids book sale with Brandon a few months back. When it comes to consumption, books are one of my greatest weaknesses. The book’s claim to be a cultural history of shopping was a little too much to resist for someone who, from time to time, finds himself fascinated by consumerism.

The opening gambit of the piece is that shopping/consumption is both the most potent tool we have for establishing our identity, and an activity inextricably tied in with societal changes over the past few centuries. Hine traces the development of shopping from the Athenian Agora, through medieval European markets, to the birth of department stores and on to modern North American malls. He does a good job of demonstrating the social and psychological thinking behind the changes, and whether intentionally or not shows the moral amiguity of many of the decisions.

In parallel, we see how shifts in shopping patterns in major European cities often coincided with shifts in prominence of royal courts, and the move from agrarian to industrial society. The increasing dispersal of ‘objects’ through the population came enmeshed with changing aspirations. It is easy for those of us deeply cynical about consumerist pressures to ignore the fact that those shifts in aspirations have played a role in the democratisation of our societies, even if they have since lost touch with that foundation.

Hine argues that shopping is the purest embodiment of the ‘right to choose’ that so many see as fundamental. It is in that right that one of the greatest dichotomies and the most difficult questions of consumerism arise; the extent to which we are conditioned and pressured can be extremely difficult to measure, and the ‘reality’ of the decisions we make is usually hard to ascertain. For that latter issue he uses the example of how the same brand of furniture can be sold in numerous stores in widely different contexts, resulting in consumers believing they have made significantly ‘individual’ choices when in fact they have simply bought the same product as all their neighbours.

It would have been good to see him digging deeper into the hidden costs that become more insidious as consumption is increasingly divorced from production. While he touches on the fact that personal interaction–particularly with producers–during the shopping process often leads to reduced levels of consumption, not much is made of the fact that our choices often come at the cost of others’ rights. For example in those cases where, in order to appeal to transnational corporations, governments undercut their own economies and sentence many of their citizens to sweatshop labour in tax-free zones.

Similarly overlooked are the environmental and societal costs of increased suburbanization and the move towards the shopping experience taking place entirely in privately owned and operated environments. While these issues are arguably secondary to the cultural history presented, they are useful corollaries when trying to assess the impact of that history on our present and future.

Of all the salient anecdotes in the book, it is that reinforcement of the fact that human interaction leads to reduced consumption that will probably linger with me longest (though the phrase “When we head off to Eden nowadays, we carry our own snakes” will stick around too). It is a useful reminder that supporting local businesses is not only an important way to bolster our local communities, but it is also likely to help us keep track of our consumption habits.

Tags: consumerism history shopping