Posted: September 17th, 2009 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Britain, Politics | Tags: Fast Talk Express, Labour, UK elections | No Comments »
I’m a guest blogger today at one of my favorite sites, Brit political blog Fast Talk Express. The occasion is the one year anniversary and 100th post. (Full disclosure: the Fast Talker is a good friend). In my post I offer up some advice for Labour as it navigates, and looks beyond, the upcoming 2010 elections.
“The conventional wisdom on the failure of Blairite Labour is that, in trying to attract centrists on the old political spectrum, it alienated its traditional base and split the party into sectarian feuds. I believe the failure is better seen along the new political spectrum—Blair positioned Labour in the middle of this new axis, trying to retain the old coalition of economic statists and social progresives, while courting simultaneously defense hawks and free-marketeers. The result was just incoherence.
Instead, Labour should wear its roots proudly as the party of institutions, making the offensive, not the defensive economic and social case for big government as well as big defense when needed. It should not abandon social progressives but it should outshine Cameron in his own professed quest to leave the culture wars be. Instead, Labour should fold social issues under the mantle of government institutions, making the economic arguments in favor of expanding rights, for example, and accepting that conservative social institutions–including big business–sometimes have meaningful contributions to make.”
Read the rest of the post here.
Posted: May 31st, 2009 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Culture, Journalism, Politics | Tags: David Cameron, Fast Talk Express, Google, individualism, institutionalism, Jeff Jarvis, media wars, New York Times | No Comments »
I am feeling very smug about my predictive track record when it comes to the “revolution in culture” that is this blog’s subtitle.
Exhibit A: After recommending that news organizations negotiate an ad-share with Google, I was thrilled to discover that the New York Times was exploring it, and amused to find, yesterday, that Jeff Jarvis is now touting the idea as though he came up with it AND apparently without knowledge that the Times is already doing it. Since I have many bones to pick with Jarvis, this pleases me.
Exhibit B: After cautioning against the takeover of politics, media, etc by individualists over institutionalists, I am overjoyed to see the Fast Talker–a citizen-media enthusiast and individualist liberal-tarian at times–taking my side. What woke him up? A glimpse at the individualist Right in David Cameron, and the damage the Tory bashing of MP’s expenses has done to his party–Labour–in the lead-up to this week’s local elections. Here is the thing: To turn the tide for Labour, British lefties have to develop a defense of institutions, and that includes many institutions that the individualist Left likes to rail against. Liberal-tarians whining about corporate bonuses sets up a conservative critique of big government. Both kinds of whining need to be given up, but the cultural tide towards individualism in both left- and right- leaning circles makes that unlikely.
Another option, it seems to me, is for institutionalists of both left- and right- flavors to band together against both kinds of individualism. The question for the Fast Talker is whether he is willing to defend the corporation and the Church to protect the National Health System. If he’s not, I think he should prepare for bad news in Thursday’s polls.
Posted: January 15th, 2009 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Business, Politics, Technology | Tags: branding, Fast Company, Fast Talk Express, Obama | No Comments »
In an oft quoted passage of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith once wrote “The propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another is a necessary consequence of the faculty of reason and of speech.” In other words, every nation is a nation of shopkeepers and we are all innate consumers.
That would explain why those who aren’t asking for money so often adopt the language of commerce to make their case, and why biological analogies to evolution are so key to economic and social models.
Example: political blog FastTalkExpress lays out the five techniques that are prerequisite for building a digital persona, or a political brand: they are “Be A Character,” “Start with a Bang,” “Have a User-Friendly Website,” “Attract Traffic” and “Watch for Threats.” Translation: key principles are speed, access, personalization, simplicity, and interactivity. Google search those buzzwords and you turn up business stories and company websites, not political campaigns. I plugged similar themes myself in a series of articles aimed at business leaders in 2007.
It works both ways: business leaders can take lessons from other types of “sales pitches” to influence their decision making. Barack Obama’s campaign tactics have become case studies in B-school classes and story starting points for countless business journalists. The best dissection, however, is still Fast Company’s story on Obama-as-brand from last spring. That’s my pre-inauguration recommended reading.
Posted: October 27th, 2008 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Journalism, Technology | Tags: Fast Talk Express, Jeff Jarvis, media models, media wars, postmodernism | 4 Comments »
I consider myself something of a Web 2.0 moderate. Though I’m bullish about the prospects for technology to expand the reach of news to those who might not otherwise join in public discourse, I don’t believe that populist outcome makes bloggers and tweeters as individuals inherently superior to their New Yorker foes. I find the moralistic tone of netroots commentators decrying the “establishment” pretty repulsive, just as I find the conspiratorial fears among print journos about the insurgent techies to be silly and exaggerated.
Yes, people are tired of a he-said-she-said model of media that often involves going back and forth between talking heads of various ideological poles and winding up with no answers at all. But bloggers are swinging in two equally dangerous directions.
Some, like Jeff Jarvis, have gone postmodern on us: forget answers, they say. Jarvis foresees a digital echo chamber where there aren’t any narratives or accounts or collections of data. Instead, there will just be the “web” in its entirety, with any one blog post having value solely in its connections to every single item out there on the web on a given topic. I’m a big believer in the importance of links, and I see those as one of the web’s main assets, but I see links as helping to deepen a reader’s understanding on any one article or blog post. Just as I have never bought the litcrit argument that it’s impossible to hold and analyze one aspect of a text when it’s the “process of making meaning that matters”, I don’t really buy Jarvis’ argument that Web 2.0 readers will be so wrapped up in the process of following the links that they will no longer want some conclusions about their world. Narrative–and thus some single unit like a story or a blog post–will still matter.
Other techevangelists, like Larry Smith, think the web is going to get more more fractured, more opinionated, with people embracing the spin of the single subset of definitive answers they choose to read, caring as much about the identity of the journalists as they do about the news. As people embrace what Larry calls the “Fifth Estate,” the old media will become irrelevant and slip away. I don’t buy this picture either: just as people still want to walk away from their daily media digest with some coherent narrative, they also still want that narrative to tell some facts. The human impulse for information is as real and enduring as the impulse for interpretation.
People have been predicting since the the 1840s that technologies which allow for the blurring of fact, fiction and opinion would somehow debase the public’s ability to differentiate between these categories. 19th century public intellectuals angsted that readers would be so committed to factual objectivity that they would no longer value worldviews and social institutions. 19th century sociologists worried that readers would be so entranced with the fictional subjectivity of serialized novels that they would cease to care about real events–elections, wars, urban crime on their own street corners. Neither prediction came through; it turned out people wanted both information and interpretation, and the same print technology had to meet these two needs in separate ways. Newspapers, novels and magazine essays each found their place.
Similarly, the narrative/story–with its interpretative value–, the blog post–with its ability to make bias transparent, and the article–with its emphasis on data and figures all have a role in the 21st century. Web journalists will add the narrative and the article to their arsenal of forms, while print writers and analog broadcasters will learn from the web how to be more transparent about bias in their opinion-driven work. Overtime, as every journalist learns the skills of each platform, this dichotomy of established vs. netroots journo communities will evaporate, but not (as Jarvis says) by eliminating the differences between the content and purpose of these various media forms.
In other words, calm down. There will be change, but the sky is not falling.