Cultural agoraphobia

John Naughton’s Observer piece this morning is a good one: The cultural agoraphobia from which most of us suffer leads us always to overemphasise the downsides of openness and lack of central control, and to overvalue the virtues of order and authority. And that is what is rendering us incapable of harnessing the potential benefits … Keep reading

It isn’t just government…

…that is struggling with some of this stuff. Take a look at Phil Bradley’s marvellous post, railing against the attitudes of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals): The next section really did make my jaw drop. “In terms of “official” activity, cyber life is just like real like (sic) – if it … Keep reading

Simon Wakeman: Local gov shoudn’t be on Facebook

Simon Wakeman has a thought-provoking post on whether Councils should maintain corporate presences in social networking sites like Facebook at all: People using social networks befriend (or fan, whatever the appropriate phrase is) organisations, movements, clubs etc on Facebook and other social networks because they have an emotional bond of some description with that entity. … Keep reading

Friendless council

A tweet from the Public Sector Forums Twitter feed alerted me to this story of Stockport Council’s Facebook presence, which, at the time the article was written, wasn’t particularly popular: A LOCAL authority which reached out to the Facebook generation has suffered an embarrassing snub. Stockport council set up a page on the social networking … Keep reading