Friday, 11 June 2010

Local citizen-based websites

Alan Stanton, a Labour councillor who contributes occasionally to Harringay Online, speaking of the attitude of politicians to local websites:

"We shouldn't try to harness it. We can be part of it, contribute to it and listen to it but shouldn't try and colonise it."

This comes from a BBC News article by Jane Wakefield this morning, which also refers to Brockley Central and East Dulwich Forum, quotes Andy Williamson from the Hansard Society, and even has a few words from Hugh Flouch and meself. All part of the growing interest.

11 Jun 2010 15:43:01 | Citizenship and democracy, Information and communication, networked neighbourhoods

1 Comment

There's another local website for Acton

Posted by: Acton | Thursday, 23 June 2011 at 13:36

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Online communication in neighbourhoods: not just people we know The latest Pew Internet Project report has just been published, on the topic of 'neighbors online'. It covers the role of face-to-face, telephone and digital technologies in relations between neighbours. I've posted some thoughts about it on the Networked Neighbourhoods site here, including this suggestion: Last year's Pew Internet Survey asked a question designed to ascertain whether the internet had affected people’s understanding of the word ‘discuss’ in relation to ‘important matters’ and ‘significant ties’. (The researchers did not find that it has). If they can do that, maybe they can work on the question of whether the internet may be affecting our understanding of the word 'know' in relation to 'neighbours'. And perhaps more importantly, we can start looking at how local online resources allow us to connect with people we don't know.
PREVIOUS POST
The peculiar persistence of racist hatred Many years ago I was giving a lecture at a university in Brasil, through an interpreter, and I told a fictional story involving an Irish man and assumptions of violent intent (it was an information science lecture, the point of the story was not political but about available information and the ways in which it can be interpreted). My interpreter, an academic who had spent time in the UK, prattled on a little and people laughed, until I looked over at him quizzically. He said, 'I was explaining, we have the same attitude here towards Polish people.' I had to retrace the story to explain that I did not imply a racist slur against Irish people, which is what he had anticipated. He then backtracked with the students to retract the anti-Polish slur. And we moved on. A few years ago I was in Kyrgyzstan with a British study group. We spent one night in the mountains camped in yurts, hosted by an Uzbek woman. We taken aback by an instance of nasty, overt racism from a small exuberant group of Kyrgyz, and our hostess was clearly shaken. Through our interpeter and our behaviour, we offered as best we could what I would describe now as a form of civilised comfort. Now, with this news from that country I am saddened by the way racist attitudes, against people who happen to be of slightly different stock, escalates to collective wild aggression. Hard to explain, this apparently universal phenomenon of persistent tribal hatred acted out in uncontrolled violence. Of all the sources I've read that touch on this theme, the most memorable was a curious and absorbing ethnographic study by Mattijs van de Port, trying to understand the 'eruptive character of violence' among the gypsies and the settled people of Serbia during the Balkan war. It makes me think that those of us who try to pronounce on racism simply from a position of civilised comfort, seem to do so with pitifully inadequate appreciation of the thirst for sensation, the seduction of chaos, the persistence of the primitive, what van de Port calls 'the choice of irrationality,' the comforting adoption of the barbaric, the suspension of civilisation, 'an affinity with some pre-cultural state,' the impermanence of our own truths and values. Having worked recently on a bibliography of racial inequalities, I'm surprised at the reluctance of commentators to go deeper. But it is folly to proceed as if these forces do not need to be explored and understood.

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments