New Year Resolutions?

2012 — the year the world ends? I sincerely hope not; there’s work to be done, and I wish anyone reading this all good faith, hope and love in the coming year.

Among many cards and messages recently, a fair few friends have asked after this blog. After four heavy years, December has been my month off blogging, aided by three realities — an extended educational development trip to India, the need to do a bit more work elsewhere, and curiosity about taking a break. That and the Day job.

Any result? This is how things are shaping up, at the start of a new year of Grace...

• Over the autumn I have put more time into Facebook, as a more interactive space in which it has been possible to explore some in depth conversations.

• I've certainly decided that having a very open policy on responding to friend requests on FB is an excellent wheeze, and much of the goof-about stuff I had been using this blog for as a kind of commonplace book, is probably better done through FaceBook. Friend me, and I will friend you, er, friend.

• I have finally disconnected from Fleet Street. When the Times paywall came in, I subscribed, mainly because someone’s got to pay for journalism and it could have been a fruitful way to go. I've let the sub go now, mainly because it was adding little value to my life. The upside was occasional pieces of themost superb journalism — Simon Barnes, I will miss you, sir. The downside was a tedious sense of being trapped at a fundamentally narrow andsuperficial party, surrounded by low grade right wing bores, stories spun up in a hurry, often lifted from the internet or agencies anyway, a dreadfully sparse and low standard of scientific, historical, educational and religious reporting. By December I noticed I could only be bothered to download the Times once a fortnight, out of a sense of duty. Why? I wondered. So I stopped. Mr Murdoch, I sucked it and saw. Now I’m out of here.

• Twitter has been my space of choice for immediate news, keeping up with events and opinions, and reportage. 

• The odd meeting or event, anything with potential news value, has proved to be well worth tweeting, and I have been using Twitter to trawl reactions and opinions all over the place. 

• If I worked at a desktop rather than being out and about so much, I might use Twitter even more, but certainly it remains my best immediate reaction and comment source, to listen as much as to talk. I use Echofon to thread conversations on iPad and iPhone.

• What is best done on this blog, however, are short comment pieces with the opportunity for follow-up conversations. As to frequency, I had been writing a piece then seeing through conversations arising from it until they dried up then sticking another on.

And in the meanwhile I'm also experimenting with a far cleaner simpler design. Some have been telling me they find the old one took ages to load, and had even produced the odd malware warning. I'd love to know reactions, especially if anyone misses any of the elements I've eliminated in the interest of de-cluttering.

That seems to me the way to go. Twice a week? Let’s see...

New Model Titan: Geek and Supergeek

Facebook has led the social media revolution of our age. It began with four undergraduate friends six years ago and today boasts over 500 million members, who spend more than 700 Billion minutes using it every month. A new movie, The Social Network, tells the not-so-heroic story of its inception. It’s largely about Harvard Undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg who, understandably, was not script consultant to this biopic or the book, The Accidental Billionaires, upon which it was based.

This filmic Mr Zuckerberg, however, drives a surprisingly compelling tale. A geek, twenty hours a day in front of the computer, with low social skills but a bright idea whose time has come, accidentally inherits the earth. This is no simple story of genius come good. Any heroism is deeply flawed and almost entirely veiled by social gaucheness.

The race goeth not to the swift, like Ty and Cameron Winklevoss, Ivy League twins so privileged, self-assured and naturally entitled that there must be times they wonder which was which. No, the only race that counts goes to Zuckerberg, spotty nocturnalist whose coding skill, determination and almost autistic inability to focus on human beings triumphs over every darn thing.

Given its subject, David Fincher’s film is masterful, absorbing, sharp and skilful. It lacks a strong emotional core but this seems inevitable because so do all its principal characters, and their lack of emotional groundedness doesn’t stop them getting cross or upset, just achieving undestanding or maturity. It’s a fearfully authentic portrayal, we fear. What the real Mark Zuckerberg makes of it all we do not know, and probably does not matter. The instinct that powered the Rockefellers is alive and well, and residing in a Harvard dorm. Perhaps it always was. Nowadays, however, what took JD thirty years to build by the sweat of his brow can just happen in six months. That’s the difference.

At the centre of this great film is a paradox — we use social media because we basically like other people and instinctively want to connect, but the means we use to achieve this are entirely impersonal. You don’t have to a computer geek, or indeed have any interest in the contemporary media revolution, to follow the story.

And, damn it all all, these things happened only six years ago. If that fact in itself isn’t enough to convince you of the pace of change and the dramatic way it augments some aspects of human personality whilst squishing others, you might just have a glimmer of the crazy killer-geek instinct necessary to hatch the next big idea that will enable you to take over your own particular universe some day.

Revealed — the Facebook Disease!

Since its first diagnosis in 1530, fear has fuelled all kinds of theories about Syphilis. Italians and Germans called it the “French disease.” The French called it the “Italian disease.” The Dutch called it the “Spanish disease,” the Russians called it the “Polish disease,” the Turks called it the “Christian disease” and Tahitians the “British disease.”

Fleet Street can now reveal (h/t Ben Goldacre) that Syphilis is, in fact, the “Facebook Disease.” This hypothesis also accounts for the failure of our Tudor ancestors to be able to place it accurately. Stories in the Daily Telegraph, Mail, and Star all proclaim the great discovery. A public health scientist in Teeside warned of the rise of incidence in his region. This was stuck up against another survey suggesting use of social networking sites is high in the North East and, hey presto!

Those who find this suggestion risible may care to try another from this February, also in the Mail — that Facebook causes Cancer.

How does this tosh make the printed page, and why should anyone pay for it? Now there’s a real mystery. Others will remember from Monty Python that sheeps’ bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes. This new learning amazes me...

Reading for (Digital) Revolutionaries

Colleagues have been asking me about books to help them understand the communications revolution engulfing us.
Everyone is having to ascend a steep learning curve, steepest and most treacherous, perhaps, for those most accustomed to pre-digital communications. Many colleagues don’t have time to explore extensively online, but they are thoughftul people who realise that things are changing fundamentally, and would like to get their laughing gear round contemporary communication technology and its implications for their own work as pastors or Christian leaders.

How far should one get into this stuff, and how?
It rather depends on your learning style. Some assemble flat-pack furniture by getting it out and having a go: This learning style has a lot to commend it, for contemporary media. Other IKEA customers prefer to read the instructions first, to construct a framework within which they can understand what they are trying to achieve. Christian leaders will, rightly, be anxious about the risks of getting something very wrong whilst experimenting. There is value for all in including conventional reading in a journey of discovery.

There is an incredible variety and number of titles out there — this in itself adds confusion. Colleagues may have a particular interests, and I’d gather my top 17 titles around five frequent lines of inquiry. If you’re reading this, by definition, you’ve made it online, and are probably far more expert in these matters than I. Therefore I’d love to know what you think of my immediate suggestions...

(1) What is going on? How is our cultural context changing?

Begin, I would say with Clay Shirkey: Here comes everybody — How change happens when people come together. Alongside a general line of approach, people over 50 wonder how people under 30 habitually communicate and what kind of culture are they developing. For this, I’d turn to Don Tapscott: Grown Up Digital (following up an earlier survey of the net ge eration called Growing up Digital). To assist contemplation about the implications for institutions, I’d still recommend Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom: The Starfish and the Spider — the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations.

(2) What is modern communications technology doing to the ways we get things done, our business practices and attitudes?

The classic strategic overview is Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics — How mass collaboration changes everthing. At a strategic level, leaders in any institution will need to take serious account of the map provided by Gary Hamel: The Future of Management. For a closer and more recent picture of the operational possibilties, I recommend Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr & Mary Ellen Jassotakis: Social Media at Work: How networking tools propel organisational performance. I have been asked about books dealing specifically with Facebook, like Clara Shih: The Facebook Eras. If interested in the operational feld within which Facebook operates, you could do a lot worse than Lon Safko & David K. Brake: The Social Media Bible.

(3) What are the implications of all this for the Church as a communications outfit?

Shane Hipps: The Hidden Power of Electronic media: How media shapes Faith, the Gospel and Church starts with concepts first formulated by Marshall MacLuhan, drawing acutely from them challenges and benefits for the Church. The same pastor and theologian’s Flickering Pixels aks the $64K question “How far is this technology our servant, and how far our master?” Good for sermons...

(4) How do you put yourself or your product over in this environment: What’s it doing to Marketing?

Here I remain very impressed by the wisdom contained in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff: Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. This is particularly helpful on how feedback can be set up and maintained in a complex and crowded environment. Many hundreds of books on the groaning shelves address marketing issues, but I like the people-focused treatment in Juliette Powell: 33 million people in the room. Eric Qualman is an interesting marketing writer, whose recently published Socialnomics assesses, on the basis of research, the impact of new media on marketing. If you get a taste for this stuff and want to strategise in the light of the above, I’d recommend Larry Weber: Marketing to the Social Web — although it’s a couple of years old, it proposes a clear iterative strategic approach which is easily transferable to many contexts.

(5) Should I start a blog, and if I do how do I write material for electronic media?

This is probably an area where it really is best just to click around the various blogs out there, but a very good overview of some excellent and innovative pratitioners of the medium can be found in Michael A. Banks: Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s top Bloggers. Getting down to brass tacks, how am I supposed to write material suitable for web communications? In a space full of words really good writing remains precious. Janice Redish: Letting go of the Words, deals with some stylistic particularities of new media, but I don’t think it’s worth worrying too much about these. What makes good writing interesting remains surprisingly constant. I wish I had read a good book like Angela Phillips: Good Writing for Journalists years ago, but if people don’t have time for that, I recommend George Orwell’s Essay “Politics and the English Language.” If really pushed for time, T. S. Eliot’s poem “Whispers of Immortality” says pretty much everything that needs to be said about writing style. I suspect the areas of communications in which clergy need most training is effective use of presentation software. Some the dreariest uses of PowerPoint to deliver design abortions that are merely the script reduced to headings make me want to stick my head in a gas oven... But that’s another tale.

Well that’s a preliminary list> What have I missed? What is now obsolete?

Church new media futures....

But what kind of future? And how do we access the goodies, whilst dodging those lightning bolts? New communications media are available, with implications as radical as the invention of the printing press.
This is not primarily about technology or hobbyism. It’s about people communicating It’s big, and it affects everyone. Even the Church?

Back in the 1950’s we would have set up a “C of E Social Media Council” so that a party selection of senior bishops, retired colonels and ladies in funny hats could mull over the creative possibilities and then tell everyone else what to do.
These days we have to be a bit more experimental and post-modern. We have to work out for ourselves what to do. I’ve been trying to brainstorm some needs and possibilities, including, as an hoary old adult educator, learning requirements.

So here goes: five possible areas of work for the Church arising from the New Media revolution:

1. Basic Training.
   Best learnt for self rather than trained in, but there are skills and dimensions to be acquired. For some this will involve gaining the confidence in empathetic surroundings, to have a go for themselves.
   But, of course, there’s far more to it than that. My Lord Bishop of Barchester may, indeed, abominate the Internet and all its works and stick to the Olympian heights, but when he pops down to Barchester Cathedral to sock it to them like Cosmo Gordon Lang on heat, there’s a danger that at least half the people in the congregation, their culture formed in the new media space, will think the poor old goat is mad... So even if he’s not interested in any of this stuff for himself, the Bishop of Barchester needs to acquire some working concept, at the very least, about how the majority of his fellow human beings receive and give information. You’d think.
   
   
2. Masterclasses for practitioners of the Dark Arts.
   There is what some would find a surprising number of great communicators in Church, but not all of them know it yet, and all of them could reflect and improve. Skills can be acquired and honed, among other things, by sharing experience and learning with other practitioners of the Dark Arts. Why not facilitate (residential?) masterclasses, to help us raise our games, of the people, by the people, and for the people?
   
   
3. Flying Circus
   There’s an amazing amount of expertise and breadth and thought in Church. Some remember fondly the General Synod Nuclear debate for the unusual experience it offered of well informed people actually listening to each other in the round, and so contributing to public debate. As the conventional newsprint media are going down the tubes, public debate is disintermediating. Some will think this terrible, and some a great liberation. But could a network of people at the sharp end of various issues and interfaces be persuaded to blog together on an occasional basis to bring their disintermediated perceptions and experiences into the new public square?
   
   
4. Strategic Mapping
   New media are emerging all the time. For example, Facebook became massive in about two years. Just on the back of an envelope, I can think of about 15 different types of new and social media, each with their own challenges and possibilities. New communications space needs to be mapped in terms we can all understand, sufficiently well for people to decide whether to have a go and share the experience. On a similar theme, media change is inducing a whole raft of changes in the ways everybody understands themselves. Without some kind of map of what’s going on, we’re all morons.
   
   
5. Theology
   The fact is every media innovation, like the advent of printed books or cheap newprint, has fundamentally affected theology — both the content and the way it’s done. Some people may find the whole notion pretentious (“pretentious? Moi?”) but whoever’s mapping this stuff, however, surely the Church has to be among them...

One thing’s for sure. This isn’t just going to go away. I’m not laying down company policy, just sketching on the back of an envelope. Please react.
What/ Who have I missed? How badly have I misunderstood the situation? What else could and should we be doing? How?

Dumb versus Intelligent Conservatism

I used to take the Daily Telegraph seriously. It was sometimes over to the right of the gentleman on the left, but it was good for sport and contained an extensive compendium of what was going on around the place. In a slightly contrarian way, I have always valued Conservative insights as food for thought, even, no especially, if I didn’t entirely agree with their starting points. Neil Davies’ Flat Earth News said significant things about the decline and fall of Fleet Street as a serious source of comment, and this week I noticed one story, nothing to do with religion, that really says a lot about the kinds of dogs to which the Telegraph is presently going.

Screamed the Telegraph story, and I smelt a rat. Is this our old friend “Rape is really the Victim’s fault?” I wondered. When I worked in a prison, I noticed it was the story rapists used to tell themselves, anyway. I never did believe it, myself.

Said the Leicester University press release. Notice, and ponder, the difference. Now you know how the subs at the Telegraph view this subject.

But what of the story itself? As explained by Dr Ben Goldacre, this is what happened. Sophia Shaw, MSc student, conducted some research for a dissertation. The point of making trainee scientists write such things is to learn how to turn tentative preliminary research into disciplined scientific conclusions. She hasn’t yet done this for her, as yet unfinished, dissertation. Turned into a press release, à la Flat Earth News, her work became the germ of the Telegraph story. Not surprisingly, she objects to her work being manipulated and turned into rubbish by the Telegraph for its own idiotic purposes.

Looking at hot button issues, let’s turn to the grand-daddy of them all, the gay issue in Church. I turned not to the Telegraph, but to Cranmer, for a genuinely perceptive, intelligent Conservative take:

...dear readers and communicants, homosexuality is not an issue worthy of schism: it is simply not of the order of the sort of debate that used to divide the Church: the divinity of Christ, for example, or the nature of his humanity – the great controversy at the Council of Nicea in AD325 – or even over liturgy or the transforming nature of infant baptism. The issue of homosexuality affects only a tiny minority of its adherents: it is of distinctly secondary, even peripheral, scriptural importance.

The role of the Bible in addressing the modern question of the place of the homosexual in the church is complex, not least because where it is mentioned in Scripture, the authors give little sustained consideration of the issue as it manifests in the modern world. The nature of a biblical perspective will invariably be affected by the questions posed of the Bible, by the particular hermeneutic employed, and by the unavoidable perspective which each scholar brings to his or her reading of the Bible. While some may have an instant negative reaction, others seek to understand the debate in the different and changing circumstances in which we now live. Still others, who may identify themselves as homosexual Christians, struggle to express either their feelings or their thoughts on the issue. They are themselves divided into those who acknowledge that homosexuality is a sin and therefore a call to celibacy, and those who assert that they also are made in God’s image and therefore seek to express their sexual desires in an intimate, monogamous relationship.

That God established an objective, moral order in creation, and continues a work of re-creation through Jesus, is a source and standard of all that it beautiful, good and true. If such a moral order means anything, there may be no via media on the issue of homosexuality. Accepting theological diversity is not the same as tolerating all beliefs and practices, because ultimately the Church is called to be holy because God is holy (Lev. 19:2; Mt. 5:48). We cannot as Christians just give way to ‘you believe this, I believe that’ approach to being together, or moving apart, in the Church. Nor even can we be content with the rather cheap model of ‘reconciled diversity’, meaning benign tolerance, which many Christians find an easier option to the costlier pursuit of real, ‘visible’ unity. We need to continue to struggle together for the truth, to find the right and godly balance between the call to solidarity and the recognition of difference. Presently, nowhere is this more important – especially in the Anglican Communion – than in the area of sexuality.

But Cranmer is persuaded that the whole issue may really be a non-issue because the wrong question is being asked. His Grace posited a few days ago that the modern era is sex-obsessed: we live in a consumer society, and there is little that is marketed without a glance, a wink, a flirt, a breast, or allusions to sexual intercourse, because ‘sex sells’. If one were to judge by the media (which is more frequently a mirror to society than a catalyst for change), the fascination with people’s sex lives is now more important than politics, religion, philosophy or even Mammon. Jesus may have had to address the latter as the dominating idol of his era; his judgement was that one may not serve both God and Mammon (Mt. 6:24). But he did not enter into discussion on the fiscal minutiae of cash, credit, bonds, shares, loans or interest; a macro-warning not to be obsessed with Mammon was sufficient. If one were to apply the same principle to the modern idol – ‘Eros’ – it is doubtful that Jesus would address its sub-divisions (gay, bi, straight, oral, anal, tantric); he would most likely directly challenge society’s obsessive fixation with Eros, and by so doing confront both those who prioritise issues of sexuality and those in the church who presume to judge them.

By devoting so much time and effort to the ‘gay issue’, instead of challenging society by deconstructing the question or focusing on poverty and wealth (for example), the church is simply showing itself to share the same obsessions as the world. Paul allowed no compromise on the restriction of sexual activity to heterosexual, monogamous marriage. But such an ethic seems almost utopian to our sex-besotted age, in which it appears at times that one’s identity is made to reside in one’s sexual organs and their untrammeled exercise. The issue for the Church of England is that this debate has been blown out of all proportion; it is neither a battle for the soul of the church, nor an issue worthy of schism. It is a question utterly peculiar to this era, and those on both sides of the divide – both politicians and theologians – might consider toning down the rhetoric and the apologetics, and instead preaching a message that, contrary to society’s thinking, sexual expression is neither a necessary line of inquiry in every human interaction, nor an essential component in human fulfilment.

If, as is suggested here, we do indeed live in a society which has a basically gormless, obsessional, and corrupt over-sexualised self-image, playing along with its assumptions about how these things work is less than the best we can do. Church has to position itself somewhere other than as the thrower of custard pies from the midst of the fray, whether from right to left or left to right. Rather it exists to bear witness to the Scriptures and our tradition — a deeper, richer, more ancient and meaningful wisdom. We offer it as a resource to our society, which it may care to take more seriously when it has had enough of its current obsessions and becomes seriously interested in human beings — a truer, more humane vision of what we could be than simply whizzing down the slide, as Philip Larkin used to say “like free bloody birds.”

I have also been chortling over the Archbishop’s recent run in with Facebook, who took a dim view of His Grace’s ecclesiastical title, whilst simultaneously allowing that old scoundrel Cardinal Wolsey to keep his. After a surreal correspondence with various cheery FB Sockpuppets, in the best traditions of cussed Englishness, His Grace refused to take the sleight lying down and set himself up with a new account in the magnificent name of “Ayatollah Cranmer.” Right wing, but fun. Inexplicably, he was allowed his new moniker. Draw your own concusions...

Join Facebook, Get Raptured

Something very weird is going on. Yesterday Dave Walker put on his blog some interesting figures about people and interests on Facebook, establishing

18,623,700 people live in the United Kingdom and are on Facebook. 4,123,460 say they are 'single', 3,722,720 'in a relationship', 873,780 'engaged' and 3,228,320 'married'. Of 8,442,940 men, 3,566,820 say they are 'interested in women', 106,400 say they are 'interested in men'. Of 9,422,220 women, 3,200,880 say they are are 'interested in men', 281,800 say they are 'interested in women'.

Interests
1,220,280 of these people like 'sex', and an almost identical number like 'sleeping' (these were the single biggest numbers I could find for any interests, though there may be other very popular interests I haven't thought of!) 909,940 people like 'school' 663,580 people like 'pubs'

Religious interests
95,400 people like 'Christ'
90,860 people like 'the Bible'
77,020 people like 'Islam'
31,820 people like 'praying'
24,440 people like 'God'
15,740 people like 'prayers'
8,860 people like 'church'
6,560 people like 'Christianity'
3,740 people like 'confession'
1,820 people 'going to church'
440 people like 'Bible study'
240 people like 'Anglican Communion'

Church Mouse added figures for 'Jesus,' 108,240, and 35,500 'Jesus Christ'

Well, having an hur on a train this evening I thought I'd check the figures for myself. Today the whole population seems to be shrinking in a frightening and mysterious way:

(Yesterday) Today
Population (18,623,700) 15,514,660
Singles (4,123,460) 3,118,260
Relationship (3,722,720) 3,283,520
Engaged (873,780) 852,520
Married (3,228,320) 3,097,020

Men (8,442,940) 7,264,480
into women (3,566,820) 3,060,120
into men (106,400) 95,160

Women (8,442,940) 7,264,480
into men (3,566,820) 3,060,120
into women (106,400) 95,160

Get the idea? Something has happened to over 3 million, who are no longer among us. Even more disturbingly, only 6,834,220 claim to speak UK English. Even more unexpectedly, with only 4,620 Roman Catholics, 38,940 claim to be “Monks.”

Shome Mishtake?

LinkedIn: Octopus’s garden?

I’ve been receiving a few invitations from friends on LinkedIn and have been responding positively, because I’m a positive person. I’ll be interested to see what LI adds or doesn’t to my life. Networking with trusted friends and colleagues is a great idea, but I’m not so sure about the “walled garden” concept that LI seems to represent. It feels somehow inherently clunky and restrictive. FaceBook handles that side of my life already.

Of course LinkedIn protects you against a tsunami of spam and sales pitches flooding your inbox. I find, however, I can just say no or ignore those reasonably easily. The point of LI is to set up significant working relationships and, in my line of job, many of those are set up anyway, in contrast to, say, the work of an IT freelance. Anyway, I’m up for seeing what it does for me. Adopt adapt, improve. I’d be interested to hear stories about the uses and value of LinkedIn (email me at bishopbucks@oxford.anglican.org).

Many thanks to those who responded in various ways. Including Scott Gunn:

LinkedIn was useful in my tech life for finding folks. But that was before facebook took off. Now I think it's mostly useful just for biz types who are scared off by fb.

LinkedIn is a rather odd animal. For example, it has decided that everyone in High Wycombe or Aylesbury actually comes from Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, and won't allow you to say where you do come from. If it doesn’t matter where you are, why bother? If it does, why not allow people to put the correct location? Welcome to Clunk City, Arizona...



Octopus’ Garden quilt h/t Deb Richardson

Mushing our Brains on Facebook?

Is Facebook doing all our brains in? Susan Greenfield is the country’s most distinguished popular brain scientist, and has asked hard questions in the house of Lords about the harmful effects that hours spent on Facebook may be having on our childrens’ attention spans and social development.

The whole experience social media offer is

devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity

Woody Allen once said his Brain was his second favourite organ, so this is an urgent question. And, typical Anglican, my instant superficial response is to say I believe that, as reported, her words are both entirely correct and entirely wrong-headed.

Her concern is fundamentally right, because everything we experience has some impact on the brain as a complex self-organizing system. We learn by adaptation, and it is impossible to think that, however we fill our hours, this will have no impact on our personalities, expectations, skills and aptitudes.

That said, I believe her particular concern is probably entirely misplaced, in the grand Scientific tradition of Dr Dionysius Lardner’s dire predictions that trains would kill people if they went over 40 mph.

• I have learnt from Professor Greenfield, and others, that the brain is not a single entity. It's more accurate to think of it as a bundle of specialised centres, each developing its own competence by adapting to experience. This makes personality, the vital precondition of rich social interaction, an emergent reality. We have an amazing ability, especially during teenage neurological growth spurts, to develop superabundant multiple interrelated abilities, rather than simply manage static or limited capacity. The whole brain is fantastically adaptive and compensating.
  
  Therefore experience of hours on facebook is unlikely to skew the whole personality in the way suggested. Walking three miles to school every day for eight years doubtless strengthened my legs and their neurological controllers, and scored pathways at various loci in my brain. It certainly absorbed many hours of time I could have otherwise been reading. But to go from that self-evident truth to an assertion that adapting my neurophysiology to largely autonomic control processes could only be done by stunting my capacity to develop centres for higher non autonomic functions like reading, is nonsense. Those tradeoffs are neither necessary, nor desirable. I walked to school, and got into Cambridge. So did thousands of others.
  
  
• Screentime may be damaging eyesight, obesity levels, the ways people connect stories and spirituality; or not. Research is always welcome. But the autism thing is surely nonsense. How can babies, for example, have been corrupted by hours on Facebook, of all things? Autism seems to be a parking lot for anything we don't like and don’t get — it fulfils the social function witchcraft did in Salem, MA. Witness recent hysteria over MMR jabs.
  
  
• Finally, and this is the thing people my age never get at first, the whole point of social media is not the screen, but the human beings with whom you communicate using the screen. My kids don’t MSN because they love MSN technology. They do it to be with their mates. Offering a rich palette of ways of interacting, mediated by screen, actually enriches their interactions. All I could do at their age was talk for hours on the phone with my girlfriends. They can share videos, etc.
  
  The effect of the whole is not to make them want to stay at home, but to develop an even more voracious appetite for social interaction, including face-to-face. Having more material from which to construct narratives doesn’t prevent you doing so, any more than living in a forest would prevent you having log fires. Au Contraire.
  

Therefore, above all, I beg to differ because the vast majority of young people I meet are intensely socialised and socialisable, very aware of others, and far less geeky and withdrawn than many of my compadres were thirty years ago. My generation’s geekiness resulted from hours reading books on our own, when we should have been socialising with small talk down the pub.

If you really push me to source attitudes that are “infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity,” I’d head right for Fleet Street. Since nobody much under 30 reads a newspaper any more, I’d say the human race’s social future is pretty secure...

& North Korean Civil Liberties for all

Team Huddle. Diary Room. The Government, concerned about the waning popularity of Big Brother, is bringing the experience into all our homes. It’s proposing a new super database, to enable it to read all our emails, phone calls, and internet searches. And for added fun and expense, it’s proposing to farm out the job to some private company. That way, when the disks are left in a briefcase on the train, it’s somebody else’s fault. Only £12Bn, and Big Brother really will be tagging all our private conversations and outings on the internet. It’s all about terrorism, see? If the terrorists won, they’d take away our civil liberties, and we’d have a government that spied on us all the time...

But hang on,

1. It’s not easy for crimefighters to process and use the information they have now. Can you imagine how misleading and useless the proposed mass of unfocussed information could possibly be? Right now, the authorities need warrants, and, more importantly, some sense of direction, when they rifle our digital dustbins. It’s quality information, not sheer quantity, that aids detection. Beyond a certain point, excessive useless information actually misleads. Fascinating trails can lead nowhere, but be followed anyway. That’s how false convictions happen. And, take it from me, the real crooks will soon find ways to play this thing like a violin.
   
2. Collecting this mass of 99·999% useless information will be hell. So will sorting it, storing it, accessing it, and interpreting it. But all those activities can be guaranteed to be a Sunday School outing, compared to the joy of straightening out the mess when misperceptions occur. You can bet your bottom dollar that this activity will be solidly exempted from any data protection legislation. When the billions of cockups we can anticipate start piling up and impinging on our private lives, don’t think it’ll be easy to do anything about it.
3. Pub Licensing hours came in during the first world war to hasten the downfall of Kaiser Bill. Within four years, Kaiser Bill went and done an Untergang. Eighty years on, all we had was Kaiser Chiefs. But we still had our World War 1 licensing laws.
   Funny, isn’t it, how panic measures for one purpose stick around and find others?

I’m struggling with this whole hare-brained thang. But tell you what, we can all try this out for a day. There’s a group on Facebook called “cc all your private emails to Jacqui Smith Day.” Let’s all share our private information with the Home Secretary by blind copying everything to public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk. The Facebook group will say which day to do it, because we mustn’t overwhelm out poor hardworking Home Secretary with useless titbits, spam, and garbage. That would be a terrible waste of time, wouldn’t it? We can then measure how much Crime, War and International Terrorism fell that day, and, armed with that hard knowledge, we can all calculate whether this obvious erosion of our basic human rights is worth the candle. If we decide not to go ahead, anyone missing the scheme can move to North Korea, where nobody would bat an eyelid at this police method, and there’s a constant stream of Norman Wisdom movies on TV to keep them cheerful.