Matthew's RSA blog

Come on(line) everybody!

In a world that is increasingly digitally enhanced, how do we ensure that people can be included in the conversations that are happening on the internet – or even at a more basic level can take advantage of cheaper car insurance (which seem to be available through internet only deals)?

This is true not only for society as a whole, but closer to home, as part of this society.

Roughly a third of Britons are considered ‘digitally excluded’. I’m chairing a conference on this tomorrow which will be looking at how we can reach this final third. No doubt I’ll be sharing my thoughts on this later in the week. But it made me think about what we’re trying to do here with the RSA Networks.

Tonight there will be an RSA Networks Exchange event here at JAS. The event is designed to mirror the experience Fellows have at our growing (and under construction) online platform. They can propose, discuss and support innovative projects. In essence it’s the physical manifestation of the virtual experience.

The idea is that not all the projects discussed tonight will be taken forward, indeed, not all the projects should be taken forward.

In our society we have an aversion to failure. This makes a lot of sense, failing makes us feel bad. But one of the capacities we need to be promoting is that of resilience. The ability to say ‘ok, this idea wasn’t so great, but I’m glad I put it out there, now I can move on and do something else.’

The other point of putting your ideas out there is that you can link to other people who are interested in similar things, and then together you can have even better ideas.

The beauty of the internet is that it creates a place for iterative project development. To borrow from recent speaker, Jonathan Zittrain, it’s a generative process. Together we can create something that is better than any of our individual ideas.

As I’ve said many times, our Networks project is about bringing together Fellows, so that they  can work together on projects which will support social change. But it occurs to me that not all our fellows are part of the ‘digitally included’. Of course with this blog I’m preaching to the converted, but it’s worth thinking about. How do we engage more Fellows in the online debate?

Have a look at this from Clay Shirky, who seeks to answer the question non-digital people always ask which is ‘Where do you find the time’.

Rowland's Links: Web things

Above is the progress report on Viewfinder, a project to "flickerise" GoogleMaps. Thanks to Ewan for the tip.

Bit of an absence recently. Here a few short links to keep you going:

- Motionbox, a video editing suite type thing. Also Animoto.

- Information Architects, who do future trends better than anyone and have a nice map to prove it.

- Visuwords, which turns the thesaurus into a diagram.

- An article by Robert Kagan in TNR about the end of history: why the twenty-first century will look like the nineteenth.

- And a link-fest, in Conde Nast Portfolio's Brilliant Issue. A pretty bullish title, but one they might actually have lived up to.

R

Rowland’s Links: Numbers and pictures

The clip above is from infosthetics – a website devoted to data visualisation. This a big trend at the moment, out there in geek-land. As is interactive computer stuff – check out Jeff Han’s TED talk for a glimpse of the future.

Hans Rosling’s amazing TED talk has some incredible number-pictures. His company is Gapminder, but I actually find Many Eyes a more useful site. Here, you can upload your own datasets – is there an RSA Network in that?

In the UK, the Social and Spatial Inequalities Research Unit does some interesting academic work on this. Swivel are also good – and again, they have a user research programme.

Of course, like everything else in the world, data visualisation has been turned to the service of the US Presidential Elections. The Christian Science Monitor has a patchwork map of the nation; the New York Times has a visual of candidate schedules. Strangely addictive, actually.

Rowland's Links: Blogs and the internet

So many articles, lectures etc about how the internet has changed our lives forever it’s impossible to know where to start. This article on Wikipedia (from the NYRB) is pretty fun. Also, two pieces on the book trade and the internet – Boyd Tonkin, brilliant as ever.

Some blogs I like: Stumbling and Mumbling; Comment Central; ReHeated; lots of ones listed in this piece on the best academic blogs you’ve never heard of.

Finally, in a break from tradition, three useful links: to netvibes, a blogreader; to Newseum, which displays every front page in the world; and to popurl, the ultimate in “best of the web”.

Peace out,

RLM

Rowland's Links: Liberal internationalism

I’ve been reading reviews of Jacob Heilbrum’s They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons recently: in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and Washington Post. I won’t be buying it, though.

The first great American liberal internationalist was Woodrow Wilson, Pankaj Mishra reminded us this week in the LRB. Wilson’s vision of a moral crusade is still the driving force behind US foreign policy, according to David Reiff, motivating everyone from Barack Hussein Obama to Richard Bruce Cheney. Speaking of Dick – check this out. So watchful, he doesn’t even blink.

When the USA invaded, The New Republic called George W. Bush “the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself”. John McCain, of course, would be even more so. But TNR don't like him (they wanted Mitt). Turns out the Straight Talker is more the New Yorker's cup of tea. "Tied up at the time": what a hero.

Rowland's Links: Conservatism

About ten years ago, John Gray and David Willets wrote a book on the death of conservatism. The modern world changes so rapidly, they said, that true conservatism is impossible. Instead, we get “anti-Islamist intellectual” Michael Gove.

Now, though – in large part thanks to the rise of environmentalism – conservatism seems to be making a comeback. David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan have both read Oakeshott, the essential modern conservative. Check out the great man’s “Rationalism in Politics” – genius.

The spokesman for this new movement? Barack Obama, of course. Prospect call him a Burkean Tory. For Michael Tomasky (in the NYRB), he’s a “civic republican”. No-one really knows, of course. Ryan Lizza sees Obama as “an anti-politician, prizing truthtelling above calculation”. RealClearPolitics for all the latest.

Finally, for my fellow pseuds, here’s an article on Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynical Reason". Because I can.

Rowland’s Links: Probability

I’ve been reading The Black Swan recently; a rambling demolition of modern ideas of risk and probability. I might even give it back to the library soon. Nassim Taleb spoke here recently, as did numbers men Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot.

A strange thought, but our age is unique in being probabilistic. Ian Hacking’s brilliant study The Taming of Chance shows how the notion of statistical normality displaced ideas of human nature. Peter L. Bernstein’s Against the Gods is a market-focused exploration of the same concept.

Over the last ten years or so, the big debate on risk has between Ulrich Beck’s bunch and Mary Douglas’s gang. Sociologists take on cultural theorists. You don’t want to be there when that kicks off.

Finally, seeing as we’re talking about statistics, here’s a useful web tool: the double-decker bus calculator. Want to convert a length into football pitches? An area into areas the size of Wales? Your worries are at an end.

Rowland's links: social capital

The pro-social ideal draws strongly on thoughts about social capital. Wonky types have been talking about this for a while: here are useful government papers from 2001 and 2002 (pdfs).

Social capital guru Robert Putnam has been talking about immigration recently. Apparently, ethnic diversity does reduce trust and social solidarity. I find other trends more worrying. In 2003 the average British commute was 35 minutes. Today, it is one hour five minutes. Nick Paumgarten considers the implications in the New Yorker.

And in the week Prospect hailed Charles Taylor as our most important living philosopher, it seems appropriate to end with an essay by the great man. On courage and culture death: sheer genius.

Rowland’s links: happiness

The RSA has been carefully following the upsurge in political interest in happiness. David Willets and Paul Ormerod debated Happiness, Economics and Public Policy last year. Richard Layard is a regular visitor.

Psychologists looking at happiness consistently pin the blame on consumer culture. Too much choice is bad for us, according to Psychology Today. For Tim Kasser (who also spoke here recently), materialism is the problem. It’s not clear that this metric explains national and regional differences in happiness levels, though. Or sudden shifts in national mood.

It remains an open question whether we can legislate for happiness. Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy is a tidy polemic, although the Economist review wasn’t too favourable. Maybe the philosopher Peter Singer has it right: we can’t outlaw unhappiness, but we can prevent depression.

None of this is new, of course. Of contemporary thinkers, only Daniel Gilbert has really taken on board J. S. Mill’s autobiographical paradox: "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so." Darrin McMahon’s Happiness: A History is a useful corrective to the present-mindedness of this debate.