Michael Henley

…or why it’s difficult to please everyone.

I am spending my Sunday morning catching up with the news and hearing about the Tottenham riots of last night. Some reports say that things are still going on; the general feeling is that it reflects a much deeper lack of trust in the Police in some communities.

Reading the BBC News article there were quotes from No. 10 and Theresa May that said that the rioting was “unacceptable” and “would not be tolerated”. My first reading on this was that I was unsure that the authoritarian tone was wise. I felt it read like a school teacher chastising a child, not a government addressing citizens.

On my second reading though I realise that statements such as this are more likely for the benefit of the police. Officers that have been placed in danger ostensibly because colleagues of theirs did their job, a job that ended tragically in a gun-fight.

I do not know what tone I would put more importance on. Do you fully support the police with a hard-line statement but risk further alienating the people involved, or try to condemn without authoritarianism which may demoralise police that are facing difficult circumstances and need support?

As I said at the open: difficult to please everybody.

Have a good Sunday all.

I don’t know how I feel about the whole super injunction thing. I have no interest in a sports player’s personal life, but I also hear and understand the arguments about it being the top of a slippery slope. I would like to trust the judgement of the the judiciary; on the whole I do although cases like Trafigura make me question. I have a feeling that a lot of the bile that has been spouted about the celebrities that are allegedly covered by these injunctions has relatively little to do with moral values or setting an example. It comes from jealousy and anger. Anger at ridiculous levels of pay; anger at things like corruption.

I don’t see these as valid reasons to drag the names, lives and loves of those involved through the mud. Anyone knows that no man is an island and the naming of these people will have consequences. Be they for their kids in the playground, their wives in the workplace, there will be consequences. Do these innocent parties deserve that, on top of the personal and emotional pain that they are exposed to by learning that their husband or father has been unfaithful? In my opinion, no.

Should companies that hawk their product on the back of a celebrity’s name demand to be informed contractually if one of these has been issued? I think that would be a good start in taking some of the legitimacy out of these revelations. If someone uses their name to profit and then does something that will damage that name then they should suffer for it. Legal protections such as these exist to protect people; Not to protect their incomes. A system allowing a distinction to be made would be a vast improvement.

In recent days there has been a new round of injunction breaking. Even if it were legal to I wouldn’t link to it given what has been revealed. I think David Aaronovitch summed it up perfectly on twitter:

I hope some people, having seen the details of injunctions posted on Twitter, now understand why they were granted. I am ashamed of us.

If you do decide to go hunting for what has been published you will easily find it. I hope it makes you as uneasy as it makes me.

In the mean time, those publishing on twitter or any other medium are breaking English and Welsh law and should be treated accordingly. If you decide to take it as far as it has gone without taking some basic precautions like using a VPN then I have little sympathy for you.

I can’t help but empathise with those involved; Those that are innocent but for their association and relation to someone with a talent that has granted them a god-like status amongst the tabloids. Anyone demanding that this kind of thing be published ‘in the public interest’ needs to start considering the people involved. I would hope that starts to add some shades of grey to your opinion.

At the beginning of this post I said that I didn’t know how I felt about injunctions, but I think in the course of writing it I have gained a better idea. I want to be sure that it can’t be abused, but I fully believe that their purpose is an important one.

I’m not sure what it is about Last.fm but I love what it allows me to do with music. So much so in fact that I am often out and about and I hear some music and think to myself ‘I wish I could scrobble this’

This afternoon has been one such day. I emailed Muller about it (he often has the misfortune of being on the receiving end of my random emails), but figured I would blog it anyway. Good excuse to blow the dust off the old gal. Below is the text of the email to Alex:

Just had a thought. So I am sat here doing some work and the playlist in this cafe fucking rocks. I want to scrobble it but I can’t. It’s on the speakers. But. What if they were scrobbling it and I could somehow say that I am here and so the same plays scrobble for me. Wouldnt that be awesome! Same premise if you’re at a party.

So dear reader – yes, all three of you – is this the kind of thing that would be remotely doable? I keep finding myself liking things like foursquare and gowalla but I want to see more geolocation integration with all my services. I am not tied to my desk but that introduces new situations that I want my social networks to be influenced by.

Right, back to the reading about tumour formation. Ta-Rah.

I was talking with my Dad and brother this evening about the Times move to charging £1 per day. I don’t think moving from free to charged-for content will work for them because as far as we can see there is no new value added. It is simply charging where before it was free.

The analogy I came up with was, as usual, inspired by the glass next to me: “Imagine there are four glasses of wine here and at the moment you can pick up any and drink from them as you choose. Now think that one of them now costs you £1 to drink from, but the other three are still free. Which are you going to drink from?” He didn’t respond but then I decided to expand it because I realised my analogy was insufficient. The table in fact needs thousands of glasses, and whilst only a few of those wines will be ‘appellation contrôlée’, the choice and range that is available it almost boundless. Yes some will taste like vinegar, some won’t be to your taste, and some your parents wouldn’t approve of, but there will be some hidden gems in there from the New World that will fill the gap for insult, controversy and gossip that John Humprys seeks as well as doing what this little out-pouring fails to do in providing well written and considered ‘journalism’.

After all, what is journalism and why does it have to be something that is expensive to do well? The Internet might have choked how investigative journalism used to be done, but it has also opened up a wealth of information that used to cost large amounts to get hold of. Anyone can now easily be contacted, attribution found, and things investigated. In the UK, one of the biggest political scandals of the past decade has been that of MPs expenses. Amongst others, Heather Brooke was the main driving force behind this. She is a freelancer. This exemplified investigative journalism at its very best, and yet there was no backing behind it. Indeed, we see with initiatives such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that there are third parties stepping in to fill this gap that is forming as newspapers shrink. We are told that investigative journalism will go away if newspapers do and yet the BIJ is showing that that will not be the case. The newspapers and the old dogs of the news world tell us that the only way for our democracy to survive is to continue with the model we have. If humanity had agreed with that principle we would never have moved from foraging to agriculture, from horse to car, or from land to air.

So far I have heralded the end of dead tree as the inevitable, something to be embraced and to welcome despite the pain that will come with it in the short term. I have based this belief on the fact that what they provide – opinionated essays, investigative studies etc – are being, and will be, provided elsewhere in what is a natural evolution. There is however one traditional organisation whom I believe should stay for a while at least. That is the BBC. We are constantly bombarded with complaints from the aforementioned dead tree crowd that the BBC makes their lives difficult, that it does too much and exploits its position as a state-funded provider. I actually disagree with this but even if it were accepted there is one aspect of the BBC that I couldn’t live without; their news. It is, like Wikipedia, theoretically non-partisan and so presents nothing but the fact with minimum opinion. If there is one thing that I will agree with John Humprys is crucial to our democracy it is this. Easy, reliable access to the facts. Yes we have twitter opening up a vast wealth of raw information but this is also a weakness. It is raw, unfiltered, the noise can drown out the crucial point. When I hear of a development the first place I hit is news.bbc.co.uk and Wikipedia for an outline, followed by twitter to keep abreast as things happen. The first two will have basics but need sources on the ground etc so what they say is most likely reliable but, at t=2 hours, is limited. Over the next few years I expect Wikipedia will take over this space for me and others to be the non-partisan provider of information but I don’t feel that has matured yet. It is getting there, but isn’t quite my first port of call.

This post was never meant to turn into the small essay that it inevitably has done, and indeed as the title reveals was probably meant to be a bit of a Murdoch-bashing despite this being the first time he has been mentioned. The writing is on the wall for newspapers. Some will move to media such as the iPad and other rich media tablets, some will move purely online and embrace the culture of free and open, and some, like the dinosaurs that survived the asteroid impact who lasted a few more years picking up the scraps of what used to support them plentifully, will eventually perish and in their place the small mammals of new media will flourish.

P.S. Dear Mr Humprys: This piece is opinion and it is provided to you for cheaper in real terms than any newspaper in history. It is admittedly probably not very rude, maybe not that offensive or disrespectful, but it is pretty bloody-minded. I actually do care who I upset, but that’s a personal thing and my name emblazoned beneath ‘The Sun’ wouldn’t change that. If you want gossip may I suggest you look no further than @eyespymp, for an iconoclast I point you to Guido Fawkes, and Heather Brooke seems to tick the troublemaker field. Those are just some political examples. So here is something that you would never see in a ‘posh’ newspaper – an opinion piece from a middle-class Oxbridge technophile. Please point me to the last piece of print from the Millwall terraces or saloon bar in a newspaper. Yours, Michael Henley

Found this through Guido Fawkes.

The latest Direct.gov initiative for informing kids and parents about how to use the internet safely can be found here. For a short while it was called ‘Buster’s World’. I would encourage anyone reading this to head over to everyone’s favourite evil-less search engine and enter that term in. See the first hit. Yup. Gay fetish site.

The question I have to ask is why is the first line of any organisation’s naming strategy not “Upon thinking up idea, Google it. Is it in use elsewhere? If so, what for?”? Seems like something that might be worth adding…

You’ve got to laugh.

P.S. The site is so so so full of flash. The HTML only version is horrible. My relatively decent MBP started to stutter under the strain of it all. Oh dear Direct.gov. Not really your day.

Found via syntheticpubes

yesand:

The second class, the vast majority of Americans, are people who cannot think for themselves. I call these people “idea consumers” — metaphorically speaking, they wander around in a gigantic open-air mall of facts and ideas. The content of their experience is provided by television, the Internet and other shallow data pools. These people believe collecting images and facts makes them educated and competent, and all their experiences reinforce this belief. The central, organizing principle of this class is that ideas come from somewhere else, from magical persons, geniuses, “them.”

Aren’t we all at least part-time members of this Second Class? I know I am guilty, and as much as it stings to admit it, I think I’d blush harder if I tried to absolve myself of such. In fact, what happened to the cynical conclusion that originality is dead, that it is impossible to have a purely original thought? I think that those magical persons described above are simply the ones who combine or rehash the most esoteric material. Perhaps geniuses are simply those who excel at recalling ideas that have briefly slipped away from the collective consciousness.

ps: Of course, yesand is first to admit it, but what are most tumblogs beyond blatant collections of external images and facts?

I’m back at Magdalen now and I definitely feel this applies to me a fair amount of the time and that is depressing. Although there is something of an irony in perpetuating the idea that all most of us do is perpetuate ideas.