Overview: Politics

Quick response to Baekdael’s Are you under estimating prototyping?, over on Medium: "Your excellent post reminds me of a participation project a few years ago for a government organisation. Ostensibly, it was going to ‘open up’ EU decisionmaking to the public ..."

in 2016, the criticism from Hannity and a vocal faction of the conservative news media reached a fever pitch... full-blown, searing criticism. Even figures like Ryan and Cruz, considered by most to have iron-clad conservative credentials, were no longer safe... an incidental twist, considering how Republicans helped foster the growth of the conser…

a lot of media sources you don’t recognize ... a new and distinctive sort of operation ... political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook... engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the news feed... Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle... together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in med…

a research paper ... found depressing proof that the web is fuelling segregation.... matched the attitudes of those who did and did not have broadband with data on partisan hostility... Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would wor…

In response to "The Tyranny of Agile"... Don’t get me wrong — in theory it sounds great to release half-checked, bug-ridden websites for your users to check in the name of agile... But websites delivering actual governmental services really badly IRL can ruin people’s lives...

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

While our experience with political Facebook posts suggests, anecdotally, that the thrust of the story is correct, we cannot confirm the authenticity of the study... Our efforts to reach Rantic before publication were unsuccessful, and Wired has since retracted its story.

Trump’s ability to avoid the political immolation that usually follows overt displays of racism, sexism, pathological dishonesty, or gross incompetence from a presidential candidate has led to a common refrain among political types: “Nothing matters.”... I’ve always found this reply to be a bit silly and overstated... a few political truths that …

A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

47% of Clinton supporters and 31% of Trump supporters say they have zero close friends who support the opposing candidate... The most segregated groups (those with the highest responses of “no friends supporting the opponent”) were young and black people.. Fewer than half the country has even had a conversation with someone from the opposing side’…

Cognitive ease is the concept of which when you hear something repeatedly, your brain starts to form connections around it, thus making it easier for you to process later. And since we prefer things to be simple and easy, things that are easy to think about generally makes us feel happier... for newspapers it’s part of the problem that we all face…

You may not care about social media now, but if you read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV, then it’s shaping your world already... The real game is hardening your own support in ways dramatic enough to be picked up by the mass media ... the easiest way of doing that is to pick a rollicking fight... Lacking an established political mac…

The majority of people reading this article on Medium probably haven’t felt the pains that Obama described, so they’re confused, like me, about the popularity of Trump... It takes more than graphs and psychological theory to explain this, but I’m going to try.

The permanent banning of uber-troll Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter was probably long overdue. It's time for non-trolls to stop complaining and start defending civility in our social spaces, or simply decamp to build better ones.

Slack, already an indispensable tool within newsrooms, is becoming a surprisingly effective community tool for publishers as well... quickly become a source of stories, with members providing inspiration or even direct contributions.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

These centrists were the ruling class of an unrecognised state – call it Remainia – whose people were divided between the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems; like a tribe whose homeland has been partitioned by some insouciant Victorian cartographer... Cameron ... and George Osborne believed... “It will be about jobs and the economy and it won’t e…

Executive leaders are involved more than ever before in using online communities to solve important business issues ... But budgets are not keeping up with demand, and measuring value isn't getting much help from platform vendors... The majority of organizations have now deployed some form of community platform to help workers, typically in the f…

Should we give the audience what they want?ORShould we give the audience what they need?...two flawed assumptions: 1. that newsrooms already know what audiences want and 2. that newsrooms can and should determine what their audience needs. The framing of these questions doesn’t leave room for members of the audience to actually speak for themselve…

an organization dedicated to "ever closer union" has never faced a setback as profound as the looming departure from the UK, and it’s natural to wonder if this doesn’t mark the beginning of a larger unraveling.... Rather than a prediction or a hot take, here’s a way to think through the different alternatives.

thank you for raising the awareness of my half of the population on the extra challenges women face in business presentation contexts... co-created conferences may offer a partial solution... I may suggest ensuring Personal Profiles do not include photos or any gender information

In 2007 I tangled with the UK’s Eurosceptic movement when it was nothing more than a lunatic fringe. Post-Brexit, Welcome to the New Normal.

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

One of the main arguments of British eurosceptics is that the EU’s trade policy is not serving United Kingdom trade interests properly, and if Britain went it alone it could trade more with other countries and negotiate its own free trade agreements. For anyone who is familiar with actual contemporary trade and trade policy... In this context it …

it's fair to question whether the average Brexit supporter is grounded in reality.... This mass separation from reality also represents a parallel to what is going on with our strange, sad election in the United States... Trump... has ridden a wave of distaste for the more buttoned-up masters of the universe... the leave campaign has painted the…

The Clinton-Sanders race wasn’t just about two candidates; instead, it underscored a series of deep and growing fissures among Democrats, along a wide range of complex fault lines—from age and race to gender and ideology. And these disagreements won’t fade... we turned to 23 leading historians, political scientists, pollsters, artists, and activis…

Voters can either vote directly on issues, or they can delegate their voting power to delegates (i.e. representatives) who vote on their behalf. Delegation can be domain specific, which means that voters can delegate their voting power to different experts in different domains... If trust is broken ... the voter can simply revoke the delegation ..…

began depicting entire categories of overwhelmingly peaceful people as a physical threat... Authoritarians are unusually fearful of disorder and favor simple, brutal methods of quashing it... by fanning popular fears of chaos, especially violent chaos, Trump wins yet more votes

Mr. Trump’s campaign has engendered impassioned debate about the nature of his appeal and warnings from critics on the left and the right about the potential rise of fascism in the United States... leaders like Vladimir V. Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan employ strongman tactics. In Austria, a nationalist candidate came within three-tenths of a pe…

There will never be an ‘EU superstate’ as long as the national presses of 28 countries are presenting 28 different visions of the European dream... there is no real union if members can’t watch together, read together, instinctively think and bind together. No news means no common purpose... A continent of many languages has no means of building b…