Tablets Drive Deeper News Consumption

According to this report by Starcom MediaVest and the BBC, tablet users "consume" more news across more topics. This means that mobile internet is helping educate people about current affairs, supporting the adoption of Interactive Democracy in a number of ways:-

• Issues can be researched with ease. They can check the facts of others' arguments.
• Voters can choose to access a variety of news and information sites which aren't monopolised by large media organisations.
• Votes can be cast from a personal mobile device in a convenient and secure way, probably boosting "turnout".
• The device can be carried to a private and secure location providing better secrecy of votes cast.
• Voters can be prompted to vote, boosting "turnout".

The Men Who Made Us Fat

In the BBC programme The Men Who Made Us Fat, Jacques Perreti describes how some key policies in the USA led to a rise in the consumption of corn syrup.
What relevance does that have to democracy?
He describes how the economic power of the corn syrup suppliers dominated the science, leading politicians by the nose. It's a small insight into how money can corrupt politics.

The Wisdom of Crowds

This BBC Horizons programme, "Out of Control?", explores the role of the sub-conscious mind and concludes that it forms a bigger part of our mental activity than many may think. Interestingly it shows an experiment with a colony of ants finding a new home, introducing the phrase The Wisdom of Crowds (also a book by James Surowiecki). The ants found two suitable new nesting sites and together decided which was best. Perhaps this is a valid analogy for direct democracy, especially if our intuitions are more powerful than our rational minds would ever suppose.
In his book Surowiecki describes another experiment in which people are asked to guess the weight of something (I forget what). It was found that the average guess was far more accurate than any one guess. Perhaps this is also group intuition at work.... food for thought!


"In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future."

Random House

Lewd Leadership

The phone hacking scandal, a boil that has finally burst, runs the risk of missing a central point about how the media provides leadership for our country and our culture. In the case of News of the World, and several other newspapers, they realise that "sex sells" and celebrity sex sells more. So a good number of their stories "out" the private sexual exploits of the rich and famous, celebrities and politicians. They pander to base human instincts and debase our culture in the process: they provide lewd leadership.
Until now the political powers have been feeble in their response, despite the Human Rights Act, which states:

1. "the right to respect for private ... life"
2. "freedom from ... degrading treatment"
3. "the right to liberty"
4. "freedom of assembly and association"
5. "the right to peaceful enjoyment of your property" (including mobile phones?)
   
6. "the right not to be discriminated against in respect of these rights and freedoms" (celebrities v general public)
   

To increase the quality of the leadership that the media provide I think it is essential that we curtail their power to exploit and manipulate, while strengthening the sector as a whole. After all, investigative journalists do some good stuff, but enquiries are often expensive with uncertain rewards.
One way of limiting lewd leadership would be to use the Human Rights Act, perhaps as a class action. Another is to limit media monopolies.
To strengthen print news (including electronic print) perhaps we should be considering some sort of financial support from our taxes: despite not paying VAT, some papers run at a loss. Perhaps we should also curtail the BBCs involvement in web-print and focus their attentions on iPlayer services instead, so that newspapers can better compete on the Web and Kindle.
(This post from January comments on phone hacking.)