Overview: Politics

“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…

In our new office space, we’ve created the Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe, open six days a week to bloggers, students and senior citizens as well as public and elected officials. Ordinary citizens stop by our offices nearly every day and share their news with us, sometimes over a cup of coffee in the cafe... Here we have a gallery, a cafe with cof…

Society consists of a web of interconnected communities. A large body of research and practice exists on how to make communities work. Still, the intersection and interaction of multiple communities – the development and use of their inter-communal commons – is ill-understood. Social innovation is the process in which relevant stakeholders jointly…

imagine instead if news were a service whose aim is to help people improve their lives and communities by connecting them not only to information, but also to each other, with a commercial model built on value over volume... select communities that identify themselves as communities (that is: not fake, demographic labels like “millennials”) and th…

The candidate for the far-right Freedom Party in Austria lost the country’s cliffhanger presidential election on Monday by the slimmest of margins. Still, it was an example of the electoral gains made by right-wing parties in a growing number of European countries

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month.

“Trump leveraged a perfect storm... social media (big following), brand (celebrity figure), creativity (pithy tweets), speed/timeliness (dominating news cycles)"... Combining modern-day fame and an age-old demagogy, he bypassed the ossified gatekeepers and appealed directly to voters through a constant Twitter stream that seemed interrupted only b…

we provide an overview of concerns that have dominated the public information policy discourse, and review the main insights from empirical research We conclude ... there is no empirical evidence that warrants any strong worries about filter bubbles. Nevertheless, the debate about filter bubbles is important. Personalisation on news sites is stil…

The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump... thin-skinned authoritarians ... do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their powe…

His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger... he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy".. Successful fascis…

Facebook’s reputation for neutrality took a major hit...not all of the examples cited by the employee indicate journalistic malpractice. Curators were told to not “trend” a story if only Newsmax or Breitbart... reported it. This is just good editorial guidance: Breitbart and Newsmax have a reputation for playing fast and loose with xenophobia and …

When it comes to a wide variety of issues ... many of us have opinions that are based on fear or ideology, rather than on what the science says... we even vote (or ask our representatives to vote) on not just policy but on the science ... voting on science is completely antithetical to the entire enterprise ... debate in science isn’t about achiev…

Trump staged a rally in which three girls–called “The Freedom Kids”–lip-synched a pop song praising the brutality of their incumbent leader. “... Deal from strength or get crushed every time!” they sang... Many Americans found it baffling. For those familiar with the decadent patriotism of Central Asian national performances... it was disconcertin…

the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither... But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades... views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending... There…

People don’t just consume news today. They participate in it... an opportunity for news publishers strained by shrinking resources and growing competition: Now more than ever, journalists can engage their audiences as contributors, advisors, advocates, collaborators and partners. This study describes in detail how newsrooms and independent journal…

journalists can engage their audiences as contributors, advisors, advocates, collaborators and partners. This study describes in detail how newsrooms and independent journalists can grow their readership, boost their relevance and find new sources of revenue by listening to and learning from their audiences.... This is about how journalists can ge…

Technology is superior when humanity is woven into its DNA. I’m newly fond of saying, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” Jelly sprung from the question, “What would search look like if it were created today?” We knew mobility and good old, human experience would be defining factors.... Enter your quest…

'The Voice’ for Conferences - a quick response post on Medium on making co-created conferences age, colour & gender blind.

BART started talking back. The tweets weren't bland or automatically generated. They were super real, and sometimes super dark... a tactical move to both acknowledge the deplorable state of San Francisco's underfunded subway system and prove to residents that their government was aware of the issue and doing everything in its power to fix it.... T…

EurActiv.com is opening one of its media innovations to other media interested in increasing competitiveness through translated syndication. (Update, 31/3/16: this project was covered, among many other things, in an interview with professional EU interpreter Alexander Drechsel in his podcast Demos ex machina? Multilingual communication with Mathew…

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

As our online behavior becomes more complex, I’ve found the term “online community” to be an inadequate and limiting way to describe the pockets of activity that I was seeing. I started playing around with different frameworks ... decided to concentrate on the two elements that were consistently the most useful: Engagement Length and Intimacy Leve…