Report on Netroots UK Conference

I've just returned from attending this conference that was held yesterday in London. It was held at the headquarters of the British Trades Union Congress, the umbrella body here for all the major trades unions. The day featured a couple of plenary sessions and some workshops and was highlighted as an occasion to bring together  "progressive activists" working on the web. As I will indicate by going through my impressions of the day, it was an event that, whilst full of promise, also highlighted some predictably depressing truths about the state of British politics.


The event itself was well attended and it took a little time to register for it. Participants were generally smartly dressed and professional looking. The head of the TUC, Brendan Barber, gave a short address welcoming everyone to the event and was succeeded by a video message from Markos Zuniga, from Daily Kos, one of the points of the second being to emphasize the connection of this event with similar ones in the US. One of the providers of funding for the event was also Blue State Digital.


After these opening salvoes the first plenary session opened and was chaired by Sunny Hundal from the blog Liberal Conspiracy who, despite posting his own speech in advance on his blog, decided not to give it. Speeches were, however, given by Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society, Nigel Stanley from the TUC, the Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee and, most impressively, from Clifford Singer of the excellent site False Economy. Singer made clear the basic strategy of the Coalition government here which is to cut the national deficit over 4 years by a programme which is comprised of 80% cuts and 20% tax increases (with the latter including the recent highly regressive increase in purchase tax, known here as "value added tax" or VAT).


Singer made the point that the basic problem with opposing the government concerned getting across the idea that "growing the economy" would resolve the lion's share of the problem and enable revelation of the real size of the "structural" debt. However, whilst there is this problem, there are clear pressure points on the government in relation to fairness and electoral legitimacy given that neither of the parties to the current coalition indicated prior to the election that they would embark on a programme of the type that they have adopted. There are also alternatives in terms of revenue raising that are not even being considered including the Robin Hood tax and tackling tax avoidance on the part of the super-rich. The former tax has a specific campaign which was one of the sponsors of the conference although , somewhat oddly, I saw no sign of them at the event. The focus on general tax avoidance on the part of the super-rich has been the province of the mass civil disobedience campaign, UK Uncut.


The general strategy of the TUC, as made clear in the plenary speeches, is to aim for a big demonstration on March 26th of this year with the implicit threat of a "spring of discontent" following. It is also being suggested that whilst a third of the population support the government and a third are seriously opposed that a further third are capable of being won round. There are now over 150 separate campaigns listed on the False Economy site and the number continues to grow.


In relation to this struggle activity on the internet has a key role to play as a number of elements of the day demonstrated well. Paul Mason, the editor of Newsnight, one of the top BBC political comment shows, was quoted as stating that social networks have the potential to contest and overturn dominant views of politics and evidence was presented of how the websites of mainstream news outlets such as Mail Online have been influenced in how they present stories by reporting on social network sites and blogs.


After the opening plenary the next part of the day was given over to workshops, about nine of which ran concurrently and featured an array of topics including a "beginner's guide" to blogging, investigative journalism for bloggers, sessions on raising funds for campaign actions and how to plan campaigns. I attended the session on turning online activity into offline activity, not least because it was being addressed by Jessica Riches, better known to her Twitter followers as littlemisswilde and who was head of Twitter communication during the occupation at University College London during December, an occupation that ran for 16 days.


This session was chaired by a guy from the Labour Party who had apparently played a role in the campaign to get Ed Miliband elected its leader. The other speaker at the section was Teddy Goff, from Blue State Digital, who talked about ways in which the campaign to get Obama elected President of the US had been run. Of the two speakers, Riches was decidedly the better despite being less experienced. She made clear how Twitter had helped to "widen the room" when the occupation at UCL was ongoing since it enabled members of different occupations to keep in touch with each other and also to connect to both other students not occupying at the time and to a wider support base. She also furthered the case made earlier by Singer of the ability of social networks to present a clear "alternative narrative" to that being put out by mainstream media, something I can confirm since keeping pace with events in December was definitely possible by means of Twitter whilst mainstream media frequently mis-reported and almost always under-reported actions. Riches also argued that Twitter successfully lowered the bar for entry into actions enabling participation of a wider range of people than would otherwise tend to occur. The discussion was somewhat wide-ranging and a video of Ed Miliband's campaign for leadership was shown, a somewhat slick affair that was far from winning general enthusiasm in the audience. It also opened out the problem, voiced by someone who intervened from the floor at the plenary session, of the relationship of the anti-cuts and protest movements to the Labour Party, something that continued to be a bone of contention throughout the day.


After consumption of a lunch provided by the organisers it was time for the lunchtime fringe sessions which were all successfully run and again concerned a wide range of topics from the influence of the blogosphere on the Swedish election of 2010, to a special session for disabled activists and a non-technical guide to internet security. I attended the session on the student fightback which was led by Guy Aitchison from Open Democracy and Aaron Peters who has been such a successful front for UK UnCut that he has been subjected to a specific attack in Mail Online.


Peters referred as part of his contribution to the theory he has developed of how there is always a kind of "cognitive sharing" occurring in struggles since everyone is capable of having good ideas of how to take actions forward and that this is one of the reasons why the general protest movement has structured its actions in such a way that it tries to avoid reproducing leadership structures. It may be doubted, however, whether this is entirely successful! One of the tensions within the student movement has concerned its relationship to the formal national union, the National Union of Students, not least because of unhappiness with its leadership. Some discussion was had about this but it was rather inconclusive. The shadow of the Labour Party's relation to the movement again lurked but was not seriously tackled.


Afternoon sessions now began, again focusing on a wide range of areas, from local campaigns against the cuts to how women can be engaged on-line to a specific session on how to use satire on-line. I chose to attend the session on blogging in 2011 which was subtitled "how to build an infrastructure for the left". I misunderstood this title since I had assumed that by "the left" what was meant was the general protest movement but, in fact, what turned out to meant by this sub-title was the Labour Party.


Speakers at this session included Mark Ferguson from Labour List, Donnacha Delong from the National Union of Journalists, Laurence Durnan from Political Scrapbook, Sue Macmillan who was until recently the head of new media for the Labour Party and Tim Montgomerie from Conservative Home. With the exception of Delong this was a set-up for the political establishment. It was put into an oddly small room and there was, to be truthful, very little real discussion of blogging. Macmillan made the stern early point that whatever campaigners thought they were doing that political parties had only one real point which was to get elected. Ferguson and Durnan congratulated each other on running great sites and Delong advised bloggers to join the NUJ as bloggers are regarded by the NUJ as journalists just as much as print writers are. Montgomerie gave much the most interesting of the talks in this session pointing out that the really interesting thing when it comes to blogging is not the raw numbers of followers but the nature of them so that the aim should be to get influential followers. He also indicated that the blog did not only reflect his views but also things taken seriously by his readers.


Montgomerie also spoke to a brief of the opportunities and problems for the left in the current period indicating that the opportunities lay in exploiting the cuts, running local campaigns and exploiting the migration of talent from government to campaigns. He also, rather more controversially, indicated the real "problem" for the movement which consisted, in his view, on "infiltration" from extremists, something that led to protests from the floor and from Delong despite Sunny Hundal trying to close this down. As Delong pointed out the recent actions were not led by "extremist infiltrators" but by genuinely very angry demonstrators and, as was added from the floor, it is in any case somewhat offensive to be given such advice by someone who supports the current government and compares the "far left" to racists and fascists!


The disappointing session on blogging was followed by a final plenary that both cemented the disappointment and also confirmed its source. Ari Rabin-Havt from Media Matters gave a narrowly focused but very fine talk on the baleful influence of Fox News in the US and urged all present to do everything they could to prevent Rupert Murdoch consolidating his hold on media in this country. He was then followed by the scarcely believable Labour MP Stella Creasy who gave a very long and boring speech saying precisely nothing. Creasy talked at great length about how good it was to campaign though she only gave two examples of anything she had campaigned for, namely, returning puppies to their owners and against loan sharks. She also reacted in a contemptuous and condescending manner to questions from the floor which grew increasingly hostile. After this appalling performance, a reminder of everything bad about the Labour Party, campaigners were summoned to the mic for plugs of different action groups but were given only a very brief time each at the mic, something, after the awful speech by Creasy, that was pretty offensive.


I had to leave at this point and missed the final speech by Will Straw of Left Foot Forward. My impressions on closing were very mixed. On the one hand, there is still tremendous energy in the campaigns that came together at the end of last year and determination to take on the coalition government. However there is a great risk of this being dissipated and the relationship of the protest movement to the Labour Party emerges as a serious problem. The official line of the Labour Party, repeated as a clear refrain at the event by all its official representatives, is that the campaign against the government is a long-haul thing that will take the length of a whole session of parliament. Effectively they see campaigns as simply facilitating, as Sue Macmillan put it, the task of winning an election. They do not see the point of the campaigns being to force the government to collapse and to do so quickly.


Unfortunately this Labour perspective seems to be shared also by many in the wider movement as was evidenced by Sunny Hundal's talk of being in this for a "long-haul" and by statements made by some in the student session that if some want to lobby parliament and others do other protests that this is fine also. There was lots of talk in this latter vein of "pluralism" but this appears to be a watchword for keeping campaigners away from pressuring the Labour Party and trying to drive it into a more radical posture. Whilst Labour remains committed to the idea that this government will serve a full term and it is allowed by campaigners to persist in this line then there is serious danger that the energy of the movement will dissipate as the agenda of the coalition becomes entrenched in the wider society. Unless the movement takes the wider perspective that it is imperative to have an early and decisive action to close down this government's chance of governing then it is only too likely that the movement will simply go down to defeat. I hope I am wrong about this and I hope the movement adopts a more urgent posture but the evidence from this event was, despite everything at it that was of interest, unfortunately discouraging.

Related articles

• Hacktivists of the world unite (newstatesman.com)
• Left has a difficult job to create an alternative but is winning the argument (leftfootforward.org)
• Anti-cuts campaigners meet to debate next move (guardian.co.uk)
• Online anti-cuts campaign set up (mirror.co.uk)
• Netroots UK: activists discuss next stage of protests against cuts and fees (guardian.co.uk)
• Britain's Netroots must turn online activity into offline protest in 2011 (leftfootforward.org)

Moral Disagreement

I've been having a conversation on Twitter over the last couple of days with some other philosophers about the topic of vegetarianism which emerged partly as a problem concerning whether moral disagreements are susceptible of rational resolution. I generally am of the view that they are so susceptible and couldn't subscribe to a Kantian model of practical reason unless I was. However, I am aware of certain disputes, including the one concerning vegetarianism, that are particularly intractable. Roughly, the intractable disputes seem to me to involve a problem concerning what or who should be included as a full participant in the moral realm. We can see this from the work of Peter Singer, for example. Singer's arguments in favour of vegetarianism, whilst broadly utilitarian in character, are also based largely on a claim that non-human animals are correctly understood, in terms of moral concern, as equivalent to human beings and therefore should be regarded as "persons". Not to so regard them is to be guilty of "speciesism" which treats being a member of a particular species as what is most morally significant, something as arbitrary on this view as "sexism" or "racism" (or, indeed, though this is more rarely mentioned in this context, heterosexism).


I'm not here going to examine either the arguments Singer gives for his view or look in more detail right now at the dispute concerning vegetarianism. What I would suggest, though, is that the dispute concerning it is akin to that which exists with regard to abortion. Those who proclaim the moral impermissibility of abortion allege that the foetus should be treated as a "person" in the sense that termination of its existence is equivalent to murder. This argument turns on the claim that the foetus is sufficiently akin to persons of other sorts as to merit treatment that would be correct for the latter.


In both the cases of vegetarianism and abortion there are central disagreements concerning where the area of moral concern correctly gets drawn and what is at stake in addressing something as equivalent to a "person". In a basic sense the disputants are divided over this question and thus draw the boundaries of the moral terrain differently. Because this is so there is something intractable about the debate. This doesn't entail that people are incapable of changing their view in either case. In both examples I have given we do find changes of view take place though it is also true, in both cases, that this is often due to emotive appeals having an effect rather than because practical reason has come to have a newly described and more apt shape.


The point of elaborating that this is the type of disagreement in these cases is to try to defuse the sense of scepticism about morality that often arises from consideration of such hard cases. It is because dispute in these hard cases is difficult and often unproductive that many come to the view that morality is not susceptible of rational argument at all and that such disputes are either matters of opinion (in much the way as is thought to be true of matters of taste) or that it is only by reference to emotional appeal that anything can be altered in a dispute.


To adopt the view that morality is, as taste is said to be, something particular and subjective, is to give up on practical reason just as surely as adoption of an emotivist view entails doing. But both ignore the wide range of moral agreement that exists. There is little dispute concerning the wrongness of murder even if there are border-line arguments concerning the applicability of the category (as we saw with the case of abortion). This indicates that, when it comes to the central issues of ethics, there is a general agreement, which we could follow theorists of the 19th and 20th century and refer to as "common sense morality". This "common sense morality" is something that requires to be related to grounds of justification precisely because of the temptations of moral scepticism and it is these grounds of justification, grounds that we can term "meta-ethical" that form the subject matter of much ethics. Whilst those engaged in "applied" or "practical" ethics look at the areas of actual wide disagreement and try to work through its basis the "meta-ethical" focus on the justification of the generally agreed core of morality is just as significant and is the true ground of resistance to moral scepticism.

Leiter Reports A "Derrida Manuscript"

In what must surely count as a low-point in blogging Brian Leiter reported yesterday on Leiter Reports a "discovered" manuscript of Derrida's on Paul De Man which he apparently had forwarded to him by Professor Edward Engelmann of Merrimack College. Now I don't know the work of Professor Engelmann or have any idea what his general view is of Derrida's work but to pass off this idiotic paragraph as a "fragment" of Derrida's is worse than dishonest. The fact that Leiter saw fit to publish it on his blog as a "discovery" led others yesterday to forward it on Twitter as a "genuine" article. Leiter and Engelmann should be ashamed of themselves for this "joke" and perhaps, at a time when humanities generally is under threat, they could find better ways of spending their time.

Inter Kant is a year old!

This blog has now been running for a whole year (and they said I'd never make it!). Happy birthday to the blog and thanks to all readers for reading and an especial thanks to all who comment on the postings. Postings can now be easily shared on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms should you find the posts interesting enough to send on to your friends.

Free Speech and Twitter

There has been a successful criminal prosecution in the UK for a tweet. The case in question concerns Paul Chambers, who, when stuck in an airport in January during snowfalls tweeted that the airport had a week to get everything together or he would be "blowing the airport sky high". After the airport became aware of the tweet he was arrested on suspicion of making a bomb hoax but eventually prosecuted under a law making it an offence to send "indecent, obscene or menacing" messages over a public electronic communications network.


Mr Chambers' conviction raises questions about free speech. Tweets are public in a similar way to blog postings. When a tweet is sent out you have no control over who will read it or what interpretation will be placed on what you have written. This is true for blogs unless you explicitly set them up to be private networks. Given Mr Chambers' conviction I wouldn't like to make statements of annoyance concerning inconvenience on a blog posting since these could clearly be misconstrued and lead to prosecution!


More seriously the line between speech and action is here interestingly brought into question. Clearly some forms of speech and written comment are classed as effectively being equivalent to actions whilst others are not and there is some leeway here. Writing: "I am going to run into a theatre and shout 'fire'!" is not commonly regarded as equivalent to actually going to the theatre and performing said action and nor even can the act of writing the said comment be taken necessarily to entail that the said action will follow. Similarly, it would seem curious to interpret Mr Chambers' tweet as a real statement of intent.


Nonetheless other types of statement that are made either in speech or writing are effectively equivalent to actions. So racially offensive speech and writing tends to be viewed as provocative in the sense that it expresses an intention to degrade someone in such a way that there is, in some sense, "violence" in the speech act itself. The core problem with this concerns which types of speech act fit within the said definition. So pornography has been the source of heated debates, for example, though, it has to be said, that this mainly concerns heterosexual pornography aimed at heterosexual men. Such pornography, it is suggested, demeans women in much the way racially offensive speech degrades minority racial groups. The resistance to this does not merely centre on problems concerning art works and the distinction between erotica and porn.


What both these examples, in any case, bring into view is that the boundary between speech (interpreted in the wide sense to include writing and even pictorial representation) and action is not clearly fixed. So does Mr Chambers' tweet really cross this line? It doesn't strike me that it does since the context of the tweet in question is clearly expressed within it. This would provide one boundary line for protection of tweets in certain circumstances. However, such a boundary might well not be easy to draw and what does emerge from this is the peculiarity of media that are open to mass contributions. Previous forms of media, such as newspapers and television, were based only on selective contributions from people specially employed to make them. As such, contributors to these media were trained in, amongst other things, libel law and laws that, for various reasons, regulated free speech. With the advent of mass media that are open in terms of contribution a new situation arises. I am sure Mr Chambers had no desire to cause problems and that he had no notion of controlling his expression in relation to potential consequences concerning its interpretation. I am equally sure he will not tweet again so innocently. What the case does suggest is that the arrival of such new media has created a whole new set of problems concerning the regulation of speech and that this should lead to the need for wide public discussion and consultation concerning what really can and cannot be said on them and how the boundary concerning this should be drawn. Unless there is some such move then the depredations of the Digital Economy Bill are likely to be visited widely across the world with untold casualties. 

Academia and New Technology (I)

I've been prompted to think about the question of how teaching in the university today can be, and is, connected to the rise of the Internet and new media outlets by a couple of things. On the one hand, there is my own practice, which has begun to engage with the rise of such new outlets. Evidently I write this blog. I also run a website which has a number of links to further resources additional to those distributed during the course and which presents pieces of mine that have not been published elsewhere. All of this material is open access. Similarly I Twitter. The combination of these three elements surely indicates an engagement with new technology, an engagement intended both to ensure that there is further material available for my students and to enable greater engagement with a community beyond my university and its students.


Additionally, however, I am aware both that my standard activity as a lecturer remains stubbornly locked in the past in a manner well parodied by Michael Wesch. More importantly, however, I have been awakened to the need to think through these questions by a series of postings from David Campbell, including this one and the article form of it he has made available as a link to a more recent posting. There are so many questions that emerge from these postings of Campbell's that it will take at least a couple of postings to respond.


One of the key components of Campbell's analysis of the impact of the new information technologies is that they have ensured a break between information and distribution. In relation to the general mass media this is fairly easy to see since there is no need for one specific form of distribution of information any longer. Newspapers, TV, radio, cinema, all, as specific mediums, have clear limitations and the rise of networks of information that can go through and beyond them has inspired widespread talk of a "crisis of journalism" and campaigns by Rupert Murdoch, in particular, for the re-introduction of firewalls around information, effectively imposing a tariff on its circulation. Campbell is, not surprisingly, both sceptical as to the potential success of this attempted re-imposition of tariff walls and, furthermore, committed to the importance of open source information, not least because it ensures that each part of information circulated can, thereby, attract commentary, potentially in the process enabling contributions that can enrich the original.


The discussion of the old forms of media and how they are impacted by the rise of new networks of information is one thing, and something that will certainly keep the contributors to such media busy. However, it is quite a different thing to try and assess the impact of these new media on the activities of academia. There are two specific areas that Campbell addresses and which are worthy of further discussion and analysis. On the one hand, and this was also the point of the contribution of Wesch, there is the impact on teaching and learning. On the other, there is the impact on research and production of new academic content. In this posting I'll concentrate initially just on teaching, leaving the impact on research for the next posting.


In the area of teaching and learning the break between distribution and information that Campbell is speaking about is very evident. Lectures, as a form, are increasingly threatened. Jeff Jarvis points out that, for example, there are now many excellent lectures available free on-line in relation to a whole host of subjects. Some are distributed on YouTube, others freely available on the web-sites of the universities where the lecturer is employed. In this situation, Jarvis suggests, perhaps it would be better simply to allow students to access this material and then try to add value on top of it. The availability of lectures on-line is not the only problem. There are also reference works, of very differing quality out there. In the area of philosophy there is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and, as we are all well aware, Wikipedia. Along with such services there is an epic increase in plagiarism since, if information is what is required from the students, there is every incentive for them simply to find sources that already possess it and simply reproduce it.


What this disconnect between information and distribution at the academic level of teaching and learning suggests is two things. On the part of the learner, something needs to be given to them that is different from what they can just pick up elsewhere without the lecturer or university having really contributed anything. They need somehow to be engaged with a process that is specific to their encounter with the university and the lecturer, something that they cannot find just "out there". On the part of the lecturer, there needs to be developed some kind of strategy of engagement with the students. It isn't simply a problem with the students if they don't engage. There must also be, in some sense, a problem with the lecturers and with the universities.


Addressing this situation is, naturally, much more difficult than diagnosing it. The attempt to resolve the problems by talking about, for example, distance or on-line learning, does very little. Partly because, as Campbell acutely points out, it tends to mean little more than re-designing the university web-site and even viewed in such a minimal light is typically less than effective. Engaging students with producing on-line material, as is sometimes suggested, is potentially better but still leaves them treating existent material in much the same way as traditional books and articles. Given these problems it is not that surprising that there are multiple cases of argument for what amounts to the abolition of the university both from the standpoint of business and from Marxists and even reached the pages of the New York Times. Whilst these positions are, unsurprisingly, very different in terms of the point of their criticisms of the university as it stands at present, there are some important points in common between them. There is, on the one hand, the clear view that the structured separation of teacher from learner is one that belongs, in some sense, to the past (as Jarvis puts it to the mass production era). Secondly, there is the sense of a crisis in disciplinarity (particularly marked in the NYT piece).


The reasons why there is a perceived "crisis" in the university model of teaching turn out to be very similar to the reasons why there is taken to be a "crisis" in journalism. There are, on the one hand, the effects of the circulation of information bypassing points of distribution (so the lecturer no longer possesses a privileged role in relation to the student). On the other, the ability to line up teaching and learning with the new technologies is effectively being by-passed in most institutions though, intriguingly, this is not so in the most prestigious ones which are quite happy to allow open access to lectures in the form of videos, mp3 files and iTunes U. Jarvis' argument that universities generally embrace the best material already extant and then add to it is one means by which this teaching and learning situation could be addressed. The other way is for lecturers generally to engage more widely in more diverse forms of distribution of information themselves rather than simply relying on the passive setting of lectures. This does, however, require two things from universities: firstly, time for training and engagement of lecturers in new means of communication and, secondly, reward structures that engage those prepared to do this. It would also be helpful to engage lecturers who are really involved in research and to take seriously the commitment of teachers to produce good research so that they are not simply adding to the material of others but producing good material of their own. That, however, would be the topic of a separate posting.

BHL and Kant

It would appear that Bernard-Henri Levy has been caught out in a very silly error since he has, in print, launched an attack on Kant by means of use of a fictional philosopher who he assumed was real. The full story is in today's copy of The Times and thanks to one of my students for sharing this with me on Twitter today. Levy seems to have believed that there exists a philosopher by the name of Jean-Baptiste Botuli founder of the school known as "Botulism" (what else?). Botuli is the fictive author of a book with the somewhat lovely title The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant though the page on him on Wikipedia states that he is a fake. 


There are clear comical sides to this whole episode, not least the idea of Levy thinking, even with impeccable sources, that he could seriously venture a view on Kant. However the real problem with the whole thing is that it simply reinforces the usual patronising attitude of Anglo-Americans to the French as can be seen in the comments on this business over at Nigel Warburton's blog and at Leiter Reports. It does, though, perhaps present some good reasons for thinking that if you are going to respond to a major philosopher like Kant that it might be a good idea to do so on the basis of their work rather than secondary texts with ludicrous titles.

Twitter and Triviality

In the latest issue of Times Higher Education there is an opinion piece that, in a way, is almost too silly to respond to. I'm going to do so in any case because it raises a general complaint concerning the trivialisation of public discourse in a way that strikes me as instructively wrong-headed. 


The piece is by Professor Kevin Sharpe of Queen Mary, University of London, someone who clearly knows a lot about the Renaissance but whose grip on the problems of contemporary public discourse is somewhat less sure. Professor Sharpe opens his opinion piece by noting that it is "widely accepted" that our public discourse has declined in quantity and quality. This opening observation doesn't refer to who accepts this comment or the grounds they accept it on. The relationship between "quality and quantity" would also bear some comment. Evidence concerning the opening assertion is subsequently provided in the second sentence. Now we are told that our documentaries (presumably the best form of presentation of evidence) are "sensationalised", a statement that itself is somewhat sensational. This point is followed by references to the fact that weekly news covers the winner of what must, we are told, be an ironically titled show, no other than Britain's Got Talent. On top of this clearly decisive piece of evidence we have next the point that water-cooler discussions revolve around I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here and that "review pages" (of what?) are dominated by the life story of Jordan.


This opening paragraph apparently bemoaning a "fall in standards" is itself excellent evidence of one since all it does is juxtapose dislike of entertainment television with a knowing reference to the way tabloid newspapers flaunt stories of women who are apparently well-endowed with attributes presumed to appeal to heterosexual males. Such phenomena are themselves hardly new, nor is the disapproval of the middle aged for enthusiasms of "popular culture". However, our good Professor tells us that there was a time when self-education and improvement defined the activities of, who, no less than "the working class" in their friendly societies, unions, adult education and workers' reading groups. Such places had well-informed discussions apparently.


The prejudices displayed here are instructive in referring back to a period of at least 30 years ago and possibly longer, again with purely anecdotal evidence that can itself be replied to. What was it that went on in Working Men's Clubs after all, most of the time? Wasn't it playing billiards, snooker and pool whilst discussing Coronation Street and agreeing in solemn voices that all politicians were in it in order to "line their own pockets"? However, the real meat of the article's argument has yet to come when the good Professor turns his attention away from the working class and on to the "educated classes" around whom he feels, unlike the "working" classes, he has to put quote marks. Such classes apparently only inhabit the universities and it is to them that our man now turns.


The problem he poses is whether the universities have any real relation to the ideal of a place for "open-minded debate". This is a good question but again posed in nostalgic fashion with references back to the good old days back when Professor Sharpe first started teaching at which there were long coffees and lunches at which people discussed such esoteric and apparently now unheard of topics as "novels, exhibitions, travel and other cultures, news". Since it appears people still talk about all these things one wonders what is coming. Well, first of all the managerialised culture, the research assessment exercise, quality assurance and so on are melded together to form an image of a corporate undertaking being formed in universities. This part of Professor Sharpe's account is at least partially true and certainly these phenomena all pose risks and there are good reasons to tackle them. Apparently however they are all so bad, at least at Queen Mary, that it is only out of work time that one has any opportunity to talk about anything that doesn't fit this model. Perhaps there are no research seminars at Queen Mary? If so, perhaps Professor Sharpe could set one up!


Having begun on the university the real area of complaint finally emerges which is not with Professor Sharpe's colleagues but with his students. Students, like colleagues (at least at Queen Mary), don't want to talk and don't have the excuse of having to deal with the culture of public accountability. Again, back in the old days, students were radical but, of course, never participated in anything as large as the demonstrations against the war in Iraq, which, whatever one might have thought about them, did embrace a wider spectrum of political agitation amongst students than ever happened in Professor Sharpe's day. But this isn't the way the Professor sees it. Instead, there was then broad and lively debate and now there is instead only trivia.


What is the real basis of this trivialisation of the students? Apparently it is the way in which Facebook, Twitter, and, yes, I'm glad to see, blogs, fill many hours of the average student's week! This must, naturally, be the basis of the problem! What else, after all, could possibly have moved students away from the active involvement in the past that made them think about ideas? Of course, Professor Sharpe makes no reference to the enormous number of things that have changed since the heady days of the late sixties and early seventies when ideas were, apparently, the meat of every respectable student. 


Let's look at some of those things: a huge increase in the student base (undertaken since 1990); a corresponding shift in the nature of that base; the removal of state support for students forcing a large number to take paid employment that can take up a rather larger proportion of their week than they devote to any of the terrible pleasures that Professor Sharpe lists. In addition to these changes in the composition of the student body and its circumstances let's also look at the other changes that have occurred that might well shape student's lives and their means of responding to the university and society generally. 


Professor Sharpe's model of past student activism does belong to the same world as his idealised references to a working class concerned with apparently "informed" debate. It is the world, now completely past, of post-war social democracy, a world that met its savage Waterloo in 1979 and has never returned. It was a world that was destroyed by the political defeat of its model, a model that led to Britain being labelled "the sick man of Europe" as it lost more days in strikes than anywhere else, the "winter of discontent" in which bodies went unburied and the "social contract" in which government imposed wage constraint was universally rejected by the thinking leaders of the trade union movement. Somewhat amazingly, this phenomena is also related to large world changes, the ones we generally term "globalization", a process that has ensured that single nation solutions are long gone, something that the activists of the old student movement were in some way heralds of. It is also true as Professor Sharpe suggests that there have been profound changes in information technology, changes carefully analyzed long before Twitter was launched by Lyotard in The Post Modern Condition.


None of this is referenced in Professor Sharpe's article which instead returns to the conversations he has overheard on buses and in cafes at which he finds no reference to politics but instead to Jedward and parties. Amazingly, back in the old days, no one referred to the Rolling Stones and parties, they just talked all the time about politics and did this particularly, back then, when on buses and sitting together having casual chats in cafes. Not only is the topic today bad but the language itself is hardly coherent as the youth of today (unlike that of Professor Sharpe) has, apparently, its own argot that make it difficult for him to see how anything serious can be said. How different it must have seemed to Professor Sharpe's parents generation who were, by contrast, constantly impressed by the articulate and mannered conversation of his generation and found them surprisingly well-informed, or, as we say today, NOT. 


With this reference to language Professor Sharpe reaches his key point which is that there is a vicious circle since the young, God help us, won't be so for long and will soon run serious political weeklies, TV current affairs programmes and the media generally. Clearly some are already doing so, producing documentaries that are so sensational that, on occasion, they even appeal to evidence that is not anecdotal, doesn't depend on referencing "conversations" as a serious claim and perhaps even says something serious using such tools as Twitter and blogs. Could this be?


No surely not and the reason why is that our educated elite is hostile to "intellectualism", a statement again not referenced by any evidence. The really fascinating thing about this jeremiad that Professor Sharpe has written is how uncontaminated it is by any appeal to anything other than general observations that can be sagely nodded to by those who already agree. In this respect his performance is well below those I remember in my youth and is itself a perfect model of what used to be the case in Working Men's Clubs back in the days before people could be informed should they so wish by 24 hour news, Twitter and Facebook.

Venezuela and "Media Crimes"

The government of Venezuela has decided to increase regulation of the media with the proposal of a new law that aims to define "media crimes". This proposed law was presented to the national assembly by Attorney General Luis Ortega Diaz on 30th July and is intended to strengthen the 2004 law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television. It comes amid a tightening of control on the expression of views deemed problematic by the government as, on 1st August, 34 radio and TV stations had licenses withdrawn for a series of apparently "administrative" measures that, whilst legislatively distinct from the proposed law, further ensured a narrowing of public debate in the country.

A further measure that has been imposed on media for some years is the fact that they have to broadcast entire speeches by the President. These speeches, termed "cadenas" are speeches of indeterminate length that all terrestial channels have to broadcast simultaneously and which cable TV channels are only exempt from if they can prove that 70% of their production is of foreign origin. In 2009 thus far 75 live speeches have been broadcast this way including one that lasted 7 hours and 34 minutes.

The proposed new law will increase the penalties that were initially imposed under the 2004 law. Under the law as it stands the "offenses" are punished by fines whilst the new law will increase the punishments to penal terms, ranging from six months to 4 years. The "crimes" include broadcasting "false", "manipulated" or "distorted" reports, reports that "harm the interests of the state", attack "public decency" or undermine "mental health". In addition it will be criminal to refuse to reveal sources of information, thus undermining the journalistic use of sources. Human Rights Watch has termed the new law "the most comprehensive assault on free speech in Venezuela" since the current President came to power. Despite this there have been some defenders of the law, such as VHeadline who echo the claims of the Attorney General that the law does not harm free speech despite giving no definition for actions that would harm the "mental health" of the country, damage "public morale" or harm "social peace".

The attack on the media has been furthered recently by statements from the President that users of Twitter are "traitors" after a Twitter campaign against the proposed law. There are also suggestions that all Internet be controlled by the state telecom network. Since a judgment of the Supreme Tribunal in 2000 ruled that NGOs with non-Venezuelan leaders or foreign government funding are not part of "civil society" and can bring no legal actions it is perhaps not surprising that Twitter and the Internet might well also be targets for suspicion.

The general notion of "media crimes" and the accusations against the media belong with the French Revolution's Crime of Suspects that claimed that being suspected was equivalent to being guilty and show that there is no effective Rule of Law in Venezuela (something further clear from the exorbitantly high murder rate in the country). The supporters of the supposedly "Bolivarian revolution" choose to be blind to the fact that control over free speech, blocking of independent media outlets and definition of opponents as people who damage the "mental health" of the nation, are indicative of a regime that is intrinsically authoritarian in nature. Without the "oxygen of publicity" there can be no basis for checking government action and without this no possible "civil society". Defense of the preconditions of such civil society should be the minimum for anyone who claims concern with liberty or lawful government.