Alex White » video

Social media and political news reporting

Alex — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:35:43 +0000

If you haven’t heard about Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet, chances are you weren’t on Twitter during the Iowa GOP Candidates Debate on 10 December and the days following.

Mitt’s bet is a good example of how social media is changing political news reporting. Since the dawn of time, political reports have listened hard for good (“gotcha”) quotes and sound bites that sum up a debate, announcement or interview. Now, social media is changing the way journalists pick their sound bites, by amplifying certain quotes and giving journalists a real-time gauge of public sentiment.

Tweet via @blakehounshell - managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Within minutes of the fated bet, Twitter started buzzing. While analysts mostly ignored it, the social media response was strong. The Twitter hashtag #What10kbuys was added alongside a lot of the #IowaDebate and #GOPDebate posts. Eventually, it started trending in its own right.

Social media amplifies

The Mitt Romney #What10kbuys debacle shows that social media can amplify your message to all corners. A few years ago, Romney’s comment would have gone reported in a nfew newspapers, for a single day. The social media reaction to Romney has shown that what you say as a candidate will get widely promoted — and most of it is outside your control.

The amplification is not what you say about your campaign, it’s what everyone else is saying. It allows an undercurrent of sentiment to become mainstream — like the strong response that was appalled by the cavalier way that Romeny made a $10,000 bet as though it were a dollar-bet.

Another good example is the video of Rick Perry appearing to be drunk at while giving a speech. This video went viral, although the speech and event itself was fairly minor and uninteresting.

Social media scrutinises

After the debate, the Democrats tweeted:

DNC: We want to know #what10Kbuys for you and your family. #IowaDebate

This helped not only to spread Romney’s comments further, but helped ensure that even people who weren’t watching the debate or following the GOP primaries have heard of it. What’s more, Romney’s defenders on Twitter have kept the hashtag going by trying to use it to attack Obama and the Democrats — leaving confused people days later to try to find out what it is all about.

It is vitally important not to make connections

Alex — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 01:24:55 +0000

I came across Bill McKibben’s opinion piece in the Washington Post and an associated video of the piece, narrated by Stephen Thomson that are well worth looking at.

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. (Photo from: http://pollutions.asia/)

McKibben (of 350.org fame) takes on the current reluctance of climate activists and action advocates to link specific extreme weather events (floods in QLD, Pakistan and the US, fires in Victoria and Texas, droughts in the US, Europe and elsewhere) to climate change.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years. No, better to focus on the immediate casualties, watch the videotape from the store cameras as the shelves are blown over. Look at the news anchorman standing in his waders in the rising river as the water approaches his chest.

Bill McKibben is right to challenge this. While no individual event is directly caused by global warming, they are made more frequent and more intense. The systemic problem that McKibben talks of is that global warming is the cause of the record breaking extreme weather events – two “hundred year” droughts in the Amazon happening within five years.

Actually, rather than read McKibben’s op-ed, watch the video created by Stephen Thomson which narrates the opinion piece and adds powerful images to it.

It is preaching to the converted, but after the failures of Cophenhagen, defeat of climate action in the US Congress, Australia and elsewhere, and the rise of climate deniers funded by extremists like the Koch Brothers, it’s important to remind “true believers” that we still need to do something.

(Thanks to Grist for highlighting the op-ed and video.)

Spontaneous social action organised on Twitter to oppose cuts in UK

Alex — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 06:50:18 +0000

Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes. The protesters shut down the shops and offices of the companies that have most aggressively ripped off the country. The swelling movement is made up of everyone from teenagers to pensioners. They surround branches of the banks that caused this crash and force them to close, with banners saying, You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay.

This is exactly what is happening in the UK – where the UK Uncut movement started by targeting prominent and egregious corporate tax-evaders.

On October 27th 2010, just one week after Tory Chancellor George Osborne announced the deepest cuts to public services since the 1920s, around 70 people ran along Oxford Street, entered Vodafone’s flagship store and sat down.

The magazine Private Eye reported that one company alone—Vodafone, one of Britain’s leading cellphone firms—owed an outstanding bill of £6 billion to the British taxpayers. According to Private Eye, Vodaphone had been refusing to pay for years, claiming that a crucial part of its business ran through a post office box in ultra-low-tax Luxembourg. The last Labour government, for all its many flaws, had insisted it pay up.

But when the Conservatives came to power, David Hartnett, head of the British equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, apologized to rich people for being “too black and white about the law.” Soon after, Vodafone’s bill was reported to be largely canceled, with just over £1 billion paid in the end. Days later George Osborne, the finance minister, was urging people to invest in Vodafone by taking representatives of the company with him on a taxpayer-funded trip to India—a country where that company is also being pursued for unpaid taxes. Vodafone and Hartnett deny this account, claiming it was simply a longstanding “dispute” over fees that ended with the company paying the correct amount. The government has been forced under pressure to order the independent National Audit Office to investigate the affair and to pore over every detail of the corporation’s tax deal.

“It was clear to us that if this one company had been made to pay its taxes, almost all these people could have been kept from being forced out of their homes,” says Sam Greene, another of the protesters. “We keep being told there’s no alternative to cutting services. This just showed it was rubbish. So we decided we had to do something.”

The message of UK Uncut is simple: if corporate tax dodgers pay the tax they owe, then the massive cuts to welfare, education and hospitals won’t be needed.

A sign of the partial success of UK Uncut already is the smear attempts by conservative news outlets and commentators, particularly the Murdoch tabloid The Sun. The UK Uncut movement was derided as anarchists and Christmas-spoilers. However it is notable that most conservatives in the UK kept silent or grudgingly admitted that something should be done about tax dodging.

Originally UK Uncut existed solely as a Twitter hashtag – #ukuncut – dreamed up the night before the protest. It tapped into something, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the Tories felt by many people in Britain. As it grew, it was organised entirely on Twitter. A Twitter account was established (@UKuncut), as was a website. Votes were taken on Twitter as to potential next targets.

The UK Uncut website give advice on how to organise actions; it’s opening gambit points to the nature of the movement:

UK Uncut is your movement. There are no centrally planned actions. If you have an idea for an action, or want one on your high street, it’s up to you to make it happen.

A key to the campaign was that it was spontaneous. There is no activist organisation resourcing the campaign or coordinating protesters. No one controls it, and it isn’t made up of “the usual suspects”. In fact, people joined the protests by staging their own local ones. Many of the people involved in the protests had never done so before.

As one UK Uncut participant, Becky Anadeche, explains, “So many campaigns rely on the premise that the less you ask somebody to do, the more likely they are to do it. This campaign has proved the opposite. People who have never even been on a protest before have been organizing them.”

For countries that have felt the brunt of the Global Financial Crisis, it could be easy to slide towards the Tea Party-style populist conservatism, with astro-turf campaigns bankrolled by billionaire Republicans (like the Koch Brothers have in Wisconsin). The voodoo economists of the World Bank and other right-wing economic institutions have proscribed “austerity” as the cure for Europe and America’s economic woes; using the crisis as an opportunity to dismantle the welfare state.

That’s why the UK Uncut movement is so intriguing. It has broken through the complacent (or complicit) media and is causing waves in the UK. It is starting to hold the Liberal Democrats (partners of the Tories) to account. It’s broken the frame that protests have typically used – a march down the main street organised by a left-wing group or two, followed by speeches and a slow dribble back home.

I’ll watch the UK Uncut movement a bit more closely in future. As the UK Uncut website says: Vodafone’s own slogan is “Power to You.” It couldn’t be more appropriate.

HTC Desire Unboxing and Start Up Video

Alex — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 05:18:22 +0000

Today my brand new HTC Desire arrived in the post, after much delay, from the UK. Given that I’ve watched a few of the unboxing videos on Youtube and elsewhere, I thought I’d do my own.

I plan on doing a review of the HTC Desire in a week or so, after I’ve gotten used to it – and will look at how political and union campaigns could use Android phones. After playing with it today at lunch, I can say that it is really smooth, exceptionally fast, and the touch screen is amazing. Smart phones are an experience above and beyond normal phones, and can be a bit overwhelming. The integration with Google, Facebook and Twitter is seamless, and all of the built-in apps work perfectly. HTC Sense (the software “skin”) looks beautiful and is very snappy.

Thanks to @atosha for filming and editing the video.

Here’s the unboxing video, which also includes the start up sequence.

Yes – those are my pale hands in the video. Thankfully there’s not too many um’s and ah’s.

“Change”: the most vacuous political slogan of all

Alex — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:18:34 +0000

Tony Blair has a new election website for the British general election this year.

Tony Blair has a new election website: www.tonyblairoffice.org/

In a 10 minute video, he exposes the vacuous nature of the UK Tories campaign, and how, although they are advocating “change”, they haven’t spelled out what change actually means:

What happens after a long period of one party in Government, is this: the flipside of change being attractive, is that the public put a question mark over the Party seeking to be the change. It is not a cynical question mark. It is not loaded. It’s just a simple inquiry: what is it that I am getting?

Tony argues that it is this lack of depth that has helped the narrowing of the polls between Labour and Tory recently. He also points out that when Labour was first elected, they did so with a clearly defined manifesto on the important positions of the day. Their positions were clear and concrete, so although they were advocating change from the Major Tory government, there was substance to their campaign.

Watch the whole video.

The Robin Hood Tax

Alex — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 08:05:54 +0000

I’ve just been reading Bows against the Barons, by Geoffrey Trease, which has a pre-socialist Robin Hood leads the Merry Men and the townsfolk of Nottingham into a revolt against the lords of Britain.

Now, I’ve finally gotten around to looking up this Robin Hood tax idea that is gaining traction in the UK. Basically, the idea is to have a minute tax (around 0.001% tax) on transactions that don’t include members of the public (bonds, derivatives, currency speculation, etc). Apparently it’s got the potential to raise over £100 billion.

Check out this amazing video with Bill Nighy as a squirming banker.

No related posts.

Hybrid and electric cars

Alex — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:31:34 +0000

Video maker Peter Sinclair has produced a fantastic 9 minute YouTube clip on hybrid cars and renewable energy.

A feature of the video is the Chevy Volt, the new General Motors car that uses an electric battery that is re-charged from a socket, or from a petrol engine while driving. Genius.

It also goes over Better Place, the electric car battery company that is taking the renewable sector by storm (and new home of Evan Thornley). In my view, the best reason for Better Place’s success is solving the “storage problem”.

(Via FastCompany.)

Explaining cap and trade

Alex — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:21:33 +0000

An interesting little video from the creators of the Story of Stuff, this has an explanation of how “cap and trade” (emissions trading) works, and the major pitfalls with the system.

Unfortunately, the video is one of those preachy, moralising videos that is full of criticisms but no solutions. The closest it comes is proposing a “simple carbon tax”, without recognising that a carbon tax has as many policy hurdles as carbon trading (just look at tax avoidance and minimisation by big companies as it stands).

350.org and the Day of Climate Action

Alex — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:11:38 +0000

Joe Trippi has a great wrap of the decentralised nature of this global movement, and the massive organising effort that was mobilised to make Saturday 24 October such a success.

Quoth Trippi:

Issuing calls to action via text message, soliciting photo sharing of actions, and providing real-time updates to supporters, onlookers, and the media, the 350.org International Day of Climate Action exempelifies a new style of organizing.

Organizers and participants utilized the 350.org Facebook group and Twitter stream to provide updates and disseminate information. You can also find an impressive collection of photographs on the 350.org Flickr collections.

Act on CO2

Alex — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:37:33 +0000

The UK Government has released an excellent (and “controversial”) television ad aimed at parents, wit the goal to get them to reduce their energy, fuel and water consumption. The campaign – ACT ON CO2 – also has a great website.

Clean Energy Jobs and Climate Dinosaurs

Alex — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 04:36:32 +0000

Great video from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), as a part of the new ACTU Southern Cross Climate Coalition campaign, Clean Energy Jobs.

We need to get to less than 350ppm

Alex — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:29:25 +0000

A short video from 350.org, illustrating why we need urgent action on climate change.

350.org: Because the world needs to know from 350.org on Vimeo.