Secret societies, the Illuminati, the Masons; hidden cabals of the rich and powerful have long been an obsession of cranks, weirdoes and conspiracy theorists, but recently the veil is being tugged back and the discreet relationships between those occupying high positions in society – both elected and unelected – is being dragged into the public eye like never before. A rash of exposés featuring government ministers and shady Russian business types, often taking place on yachts in exotic locations, have granted a glimpse into a world the likes of which us mere mortals can only dream of.
Channel 4 have latched onto the general zeitgeist of disillusionment with our leaders and have created a new website that explores some the network of relationships between these powerful, yet secretive, individuals and our politicians called ‘Who Knows Who?’. The website forms part of a larger idea that taps into the latest Internet buzzword: crowdsourcing. This hideous portmanteau (since when was an Internet-related portmanteau anything else but hideous?) means that a crowd of people on the Internet come together to achieve a common goal set by a 3rd party. The Guardian put this to very good use during this summer’s expenses furore, putting around 30,000 volunteer editors, recruited from the ranks of Guardian readers, to task sifting through the hundreds of thousands of pages of MPs’ expense claims, in order to find such gems as duck houses and cable TV pornography.
This time, Channel 4 are asking their viewers to contribute any information that they might have about the relationships between politicians, businessmen and women, media figures and religious types, and any other members of the great and the good.
The site is built using Flash, a rich media web technology, which most people will have installed on their browsers, so it has a potentially very large audience. The interface is very snazzy; each figure features in the centre of a large web of links which you can click around, find out how deep the rabbit hole goes (to drop briefly into conspiracy-speak).
I think this site is a very interesting and bold idea that combines contemporary relevance with an exciting and fresh approach to engaging with a new audience. It’s certainly very different from a lot of Channel 4′s recent youth-oriented websites. It’s also fascinating to see the popularity of websites like 38degrees, TheyWorkForYou and UnlockDemocracy, whose aim it is to help us keep tabs on our elected rulers. The Internet as a tool to empower grassroots activism appears to be really coming of age.
Great stuff – I think I am going to tape an X to my window tonight to see what happens!
facebook, social network, twitter
Anti-social networking
In Comment, Technology, Web on October 13, 2010 at 11:07 amImagine if 10 years ago you sent a text message from your mobile phone to 300 people you knew, with varying degrees of intimacy, saying that you were eating a sandwich, or had just had a particularly satisfying bowel movement, or you’d had a row with your partner and were now single, or to deny that you were having an affair.
I would imagine that you would get some rather confused responses and that possibly when you next saw some of the recipients, you may get a few quizzical looks as if to say ‘why are you sharing this frankly utterly uninteresting information with me’.
Yet, here we are in 2010 with Facebook and Twitter together having over 600 million accounts, where each day the electronic ether is chock full with over 120 million tweets and status updates, each a single meaningless brainfart, lost in a thick miasma of narcissism, self-regard and banality, detailing the lives of its many, many, many inhabitants.That’s not the worst of it though: from the endless, badly shot photos of people’s holidays that you feel obliged to wade through, each click on the mouse another blast of the pounding refrain ‘Oh, look at my life. Isn’t it interesting? Don’t I just visit the most interesting places?’ to the cooing and clucking over grainy, dark videos of your vague acquaintances’ dribbling progeny. And what about the bitter and twisted passive aggressive ones who pop up to let the world know that ‘why can’t people (you know who you are, SALLY) just stop being such fat bitches?’, which segues neatly into the passive-aggressives’ maudlin cousins, the ones who spout self-pitying nonsense, telling all and sundry that ‘they’re having a weally, weally bad day’, instead of stoically facing up to the trials and tribulations that life throws at you. JUST GROW A PAIR, PLEASE!
What is the attraction of social networking? Why do we insist of letting our lives be examined in such microscopic detail by people that 10 years ago we would have shuddered at the prospect of sharing a lift with, let alone allowing them to look at pictures of us in our swimming costumes on a beach somewhere? Perhaps it’s the opportunity to live one’s life vicariously through other people, or to fill a hole right in the middle of our empty, consumerist lives.
However, I think it’s a deeper urge for closer ties with fellow fellow human beings, but one that has been subverted and twisted by the big companies who run our social networks, and the brands that pay their advertising rates, into a pure money printing machine that exposes its user’s most intimate details for a price. It’s not all hopeless though, as there are some social networks, such as Diaspora, that purport to help satisfy this urge for human contact in a web context, but more ethically; giving users total control over privacy and not selling data to other companies. How they hope to make money is another matter entirely.
Some social networks, however, such as Twitter might have changed things for the better: much was made of Twitter’s involvement in reporting events from the ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran and how thethe media blackout that existed in the country at the time was circumnavigated. Are then social networks replacing traditional activism? Big-haired boffin, Malcom Gladwell, recently spoke out against this idea, stating that the bonds formed online were many times weaker, even between like-minded people, than those formed in the heat of protest or in traditional activist groups. One only has to look at the popularity of cause-related Facebook groups in relation to actual activism to see the disconnect between the two. I guess that clicking on a button to say that you ‘Like’ a campaign against AIDS is not quite the same as giving money, time or effort to the cause.
Like it or not, online social networks are to stay and will only integrate themselves more and more into our lives. The question is, what effect will they have on our lives in the long run?