The pleasure of the period-piece detective

Posted on January 12, 2010 by Joe

I think my interest in what might be called ‘period piece detectives’ started many years ago, when I watched the big screen version of ‘Death on the Nile’ featuring the wonderful Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. I stunned my wife (and myself) by actually solving the murder pretty early on. Since then, I’ve been rather a sucker for TV series such as Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple, Inspector Alleyn – those wonderful amateur sleuths (OK…Alleyn was a policeman but very much one of this crowd!) who seemed to outfox what Holmes would call ‘the official constabulary’ whilst inhabiting their particular period of history.

And that’s where part of the attraction lies for me – the settings as much as the detection work. If we leave Holmes out for this article – after all, the fellow is such a phenomenon that he deserves his own blog item at the very least – these detectives all work in the late 20s through to the early 50s. In his excellent essay ‘Boy’s Weeklies’, in which he discussed the popular boy’s comics of his day, George Orwell wrote about the atmosphere used for some of the ‘School Stories’ in these magazines:

“…There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound….Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere.”

And that’s how it often feels to me in the worlds of Marple, Poirot and Alleyn. Murder most foul may be committed, but there’s almost always the return to status quo pro-ante– the situation that we started with. Poirot, supported by Hastings, will use his little grey cells to apprehend the killer and deliver him in to the arms of Inspector Japp. Miss Marple will intuit her way around the crime; Alleyn and Fox rely on good old fashioned detective work. Murders have motives – no matter how strange they may appear to be. Even in Poirot’s ‘The ABC Murders’ or ‘Curtain’, where it appears that there is a random serial killer on the loose, the murders are not what they seem. Apart from the victims meeting their grisly end, violence is not common. There’s no soul-searching, alcoholic detectives with deep emotional crises that will impede the investigation, very few shoot-outs. The denouement delivers the criminal in to the arms of justice, and justice, not law, is seen to be served.

It’s hard to believe that there are wars and depressions happening, fascism is on the rise, then the onset of the cold war at the end of this period. But that’s fine – I’m after a detective story to keep me engaged for an hour or two. I have the real world with all these issues to come back to, after all!

In TV detective series that are set more recently, the closest is probably the popular ‘Midsommer Murders’, followed by ‘Inspector Morse’, although these both feature professional detectives rather than the gentleman (or lady) amateur. But the ‘feel’ is the same – and long may these series continue to take me away from the modern, day-to-day world.

Over-reaction or Appropriate Response?

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Joe

The recent arrest of 2 men on an Emirates Airlines flight for making a verbal bomb threat and for being drunk and disorderly is really nothing new; it’s happened a few times since 9/11. Up until about 1999, I was one of those smart alecs who would make the witty comment about being careful with my bag because I had an atom-bomb in it, but around the end of the last century (even before 9/11) everyone was getting jumpy so I just started being sensible.

Obviously, after the Christmas Day bomb attempt people are naturally ‘twitchy’, but is it really that difficult to tell the difference between a bunch of drunks and a genuine bomber? Bombers tend not to joke about their bombs. Bombers tend to wait until the plane is in the air. Bombers do not tend to be middle aged white men in Western clothes – especially DRUNKEN middle aged white men. This doesn’t detract from the absolute feckin’ stupidity of the individuals concerned – after all, they could have easily been shot by the security services. However, it did set me thinking as to whether this case, and our whole reaction to the threat of suicide bombers on our air routes, has been met by over-reaction or appropriate response by the authorities.

I think in this particular case, given the proximity of the Christmas Day attack, I’d go on the side of slightly hysterical appropriate response. Over-reaction would have involved the men being shot and killed on the spot rather than arrested. However, the wider picture is much more worrying. Let’s take a step back and look at the situation.

Profiling – we’re told that our intelligence service profile travellers and put bombers on watch lists. The Christmas Day bomber got on to such a list and still managed to get on the place. these fellows would never have been on such a list. So…profiling is ignored in the Heathrow case – these men didn’t fit the profile but were still treated as bombers – and the result of accurate intelligence profiling and listing was ignored due to error on Christmas Day. Perhaps we need to be told just how many bombers profiling / no flight lists have prevented boarding with explosives?

Acceptable Risk – if you want to avoid any risk of bombers downing an aircraft, easy. Don’t fly. If you want to fly, then everybody goes on board in paper pyjamas and is strapped in to their seat – or maybe anaesthetised for the fight? And your baggage is either flown in unmanned drones or separate cargo aircraft. Daft, isn’t it? But by introducing new measures all the time whilst existing measures are either not being followed through or are being ignored, this sort of daftness is becoming more likely.

Privacy – forget it if you wish to fly. You will now be scanned at a level of intrusion that have raised fears of images of children being regarded as child pornography by some legislation. Your travelling history is already reviewed. You may be interviewed based on your race, creed, religious beliefs, the book you’re reading.

Basically, the reaction to the authorities to the threats of terrorist bombers on civilian airliners increasingly seems to lack common sense and ‘follow through’ of existing policies and procedures, with repeated attempts to improve security after any incident by a combination of technological fix (Gigahertz Scanners, for example) and sociological / procedural changes (no hand baggage, profiling, etc.) Whilst any deaths from terrorism are unacceptable, just what price do we intend to pay within our society to try and meet the unreachable target of zero risk?

Because it’s unlikely that there will ever be zero risk when you fly on a plane that it won’t be downed by terrorism. It’s a dangerous world, and we need to realise that, and ascertain what are reasonable risks that we can deal with against increasingly intrusive and authoritarian powers invoked by the State to try and meet the nonsensical target of ‘zero risk’.

In his ‘Art of War’, Sun Tzu states : “Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” Our Governments spend a lot of time, effort and money and very little judgement and common sense on trying to win every battle, and are effectively doing the work of the terrorists for them by reducing the freedom of citizens inch by inch.

Online Exhibitionists affect privacy for us all…

Posted on January 10, 2010 by Joe

I came up with the title for this piece after reading this article on the BBC Website about people who the authors of a paper called ‘online exhibitionists. The idea is that much privacy legislation is based around the idea of what levels of privacy someone can reasonably expect to have when out and about in public. So, if we live in a world where people are relatively circumspect, photography and publication in public places is rare, then we can expect to have some right to privacy based on a reasonable expectation that you won’t be photographed. If you’re a celebrity, then your expectation can be less because you might reasonably expect to have people taking pictures and hassling you because the nature of your work has put you in the public eye. Right or wrong, that’s the way it’s tended to run over recent years.

Of course, with the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, everyone has effectively become a ZZ List Celebrity within their own group of friends or the town in which they live in. In fact, it might be said that by the very act of registering an account with something like Facebook, we’re actually turning our backs on our right to privacy – and that’s wrong. I recently covered this sort of ground in my post ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’.

In my original plan for this piece, I was going to elaborate on this issue – but then a Tweet made me aware of a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook – “The Age of Privacy is Over”. Here it is. He states that were Facebook being set up now he’d default all our privacy settings to Public. Now, I quite like Facebook and have taken my privacy settings to a level with which I’m happy – but I can see Facebook losing users if they start regarding our lives as ‘entertainment feed’ for the real time Web.

Well, given that Zukerberg’s company rely on us letting go of a bit of privacy to communicate with each other, I can see that, in the words of Christine Keeler, ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’

But what has scared the bejabers out of me this morning is to see comments from some digital media folks along the lines that they feel it might be rewarding for us to ‘hide less’. I’m sorry? I can only imagine that those who say such things have never been on the receiving end of online stalking, have never been harassed for their sexuality expressed online, have never suffered a rock through their window from thugs because of their politics or race.

It may appear to be ‘hiding less’ for people in the business but it can be a matter of staying alive for some. Even when these people do not have online profiles, their privacy can be breached accidentally or deliberately by others who do.

Maybe the world of Big Brother has come 25 years late and is being self-inflicted. Just how many people out there right now are echoing in their attitudes the final chilling words of ‘1984’:

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Web 2.0 Jumps the Shark

Posted on January 9, 2010 by Joe

tagcloud - from Wikipaedia There is a wonderful phrase in film and TV script writing – ‘to jump the shark’. It’s that point in the history of a TV series where the scripts veer off in to the surreal or when characters suddenly change their behaviour. It’s reputedly named after an episode of the popular 1970s sitcom ‘Happy Days’ when the hero ‘The Fonz’ ends up jumping over a shark on water skies. Plausible, huh?

It struck me the yesterday, after seeing a site that had been bought to my attention via Twitter, that Web 2.0 may very well be at the point of jumping the e-shark.

Now, Web 2.0 has revolutionised the way we put web applications together. Before we go much further, Web 2.0 is like pornography; we know what it is when we see it but we’d be hard pressed to formally define it. So, here’s what I mean by Web 2.0. It’s a piece of jargon that is used to loosely define web sites and technologies that facilitate interactivity, inter-operability between web sites, sharing of user information and user driven content, whether text, image or multimedia content like video and animation. Web 2.0 sites are typically those where the content displayed to you and other site users can be easily modified and configured by the user. Facebook is a Web 2.0 ‘poster boy’; my Internet Banking site is good old fashioned ‘Web 1.0’.

A lot of the technology that has been developed to make Web 2.0 possible has found it’s way in to all sorts of Web sites – things like Google Apps, for example, are a perfect example of the serious application of Web 2.0 technologies.

But for all the value, have we finally hit a point where many sites and applications being delivered as part of the Web 2.0 revolution are trivial, absurd and effectively worthless to the vast majority of Web users, effectively showing themselves to be ‘portfolios’ for developers or sites of interest only to the digerati being passed off as the next ‘big thing’?

Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these directions, provided that we appreciate it and that we don’t get ourselves so tied up in having the joy of having a Web 2.0 site that we miss the point of what the site is supposed to be doing.

And so on to http://omegle.com/ . To save you the job of visiting, it’s a chat site that allows you to talk to….total strangers anonymously. Yes, a technology that trumpets the fact that it facilitates communications between individuals the world over now allows stranger to speak unto stranger. Maybe I’m a bit hard on this site, but to me it encapsulates so much of what is wrong with some of the more over-hyped Web 2.0 applications. It’s no doubt regarded as ‘cool’ and ‘clever’ by some; it’s essentially pointless, does little that can’t be done elsewhere. It’s almost ‘out of character’ for the original aim of Web 2.0 – to facilitate communication and interactivity. After all, anonymous communications are not that useful for most things. And you have to admit that talking to randomly selected anonymous people is pretty surreal. Assuming that the people on the other end are real people and not just ‘bot’ programs….

So…are we heading for Web 2.0 shark jumping in 2010? And why is it important?

Well, shark jumping almost always precedes the demise of the TV show. And it would be a shame if the good stuff that the interactive web has bought us were to be drowned under a wave of over-hyped nonsense.

Can we handle the ‘cold snap’ more effectively?

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Joe

As the UK proves once again that it can’t handle bad weather, there was an infuriating ‘talking head’ on the TV news the other day reminding all workers, everywhere, that if they can’t get in to work, they will lose pay or have to work the time up later. This fits in with this story, where the federation of Small Businesses was berating schools for closing and hence forcing parents to – gasp!! – take time off work to look after their kids.

This sort of thing angers me for a number of reasons, my anger being directed at large education authorities, employers, employer organisations and central Government in reasonably equal proportions. So, let me take today’s ‘Joe’s Jotting’ to vent my spleen at these organisations!

Surely it should be possible for Education Authorities or Local Authorities to simply state that the schools in an area are closed or open, without leaving it to the individual schools to make the decisions and also communicate the fact to the parents of children at the school? This would at least remove the anomalous situation of a family with children attending two different schools in the same area being asked to send one to school and keep the other at home.

Not having lots of folks trying to get their kids to school in bad conditions would at least reduce the load on the road system during the extended morning and afternoon peak traffic periods that result from bad weather. Also, perhaps employers themselves should start planning for these occasions by looking at whether all jobs actually require the member of staff to be at their desk. I’d argue that many higher clerical and administrative / management jobs don’t require this at all; it’s just tradition and distrust that means that an employer likes to have their staff present all the time. Perhaps employers need to start looking at what aspects of the job CAN be done remotely, and then start utilising technology to facilitate this. After all, most homes these days have a fast(ish) Internet connection which would allow them to access their office PC remotely, and it’s not beyond the ability of man to redirect office phones to the home number for a few days. Of course, this requires planning, but as we’re likely to have more of this sort of weather then this planning should be done. Of course, some jobs do require people there – retail, manufacturing and logistics, for example.

We also have the ludicrous situation of employer’s organisations and large companies publicly announcing how staff will lose pay if they don’t turn in, when at the same time motoring organisations and the Police are saying ‘Only travel if absolutely necessary’. I would argue that few jobs are necessary except in order to earn a wage or a profit, and whilst those are VERY important reasons to work or run a business ( 🙂 ) it is perhaps time for joined up thinking. Why not have the Government in a position of announcing ‘Snow days’ based on advice from Police, etc. for particular areas. Once announced, that’s it. We actively encourage people to stay out of their cars, to NOT walk 10 miles to spend 2 hours pushing paper around a desk, to not send their kids to school (ahhh…they’d also be closed!) and generally encourage a state of affairs where people are at home or in their immediate communities, the roads are clearer for vital traffic, etc.

Of course – this would involve either loss of wages to the worker or loss of profits to the company concerned – this would encourage companies to really look at what could be done ‘off site’, but would almost certainly need some degree of financial support from the Government. However, if these costs were offset against savings made in the ‘on costs’ incurred when people are trying to get to work in these conditions, it might not be too excessive.

Certainly not more than bailing out the odd bank or two….

And then we get to personal planning…how ridiculous it is that people buy 15 loaves of bread when it looks like being snowy for a day or two. But that’s another story!

Too soon for Social Media Experts?

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Joe

The Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi; we have consultants. A recent comment on Twitter suggested that the Apocalypse would be heralded by everyone on Twitter being a ‘Social Media Expert’ – sometimes this is how Twitter feels, with everyone who starts following me appearing to be the online equivalent of those guys who clean your car windows when you stop at junctions…

It set me thinking – is the whole Social Media field (that part of the media / Internet that deals with interactive and group based applications and developments, like Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, etc.) too young to have real experts?

Years ago I worked with a guy who hated the word ‘expert’. His take was that an ‘ex’ was a has been and a ‘spurt’ was a drip under pressure. Which sort of summed it up… A more widely heard belief in IT is that an expert is someone who’s read 3 pages further in the manual than you have….

Whilst I wouldn’t go that far, I think that at this stage in the social media game it’s too soon to tell what is true expertise and what isn’t. It’s similar to the many people who thought they were successful property developers during the UK housing boom; the market added value; they did nothing, and when the market slipped the dilettantes got whacked.

At this stage in the game I believe the best policy to be to encourage the client to adopt the generally stated ‘best practice’. This may be a conservative approach, but it allows the client to develop their social media expertise organically and as part of their normal marketing strategy. Having said that, a recent discussion with a practitioner in the field suggested that we may not yet even have the maturity needed for ‘best practice’ to have evolved, so that approach may not yet be of value.

So, what is the answer? Perhaps it’s time to stop going on about Social media as a separate discipline and start looking at the technologies and techniques it encapsulates as being just different aspects of existing business practices. For example, a company may use Facebook to establish brand awareness and communicate with customers. OK – that’s a new approach for both Marketing and Customer Care to learn. Someone else may be using a blog; that Public Relations / the Press Office. Twittering to announce special offers? Sales, anyone?

The technology is new, and there will be a steep learning curve, but the business processes being supported are the same as we have seen in businesses for the last 60 years. Any technology or technique applied to a business must surely have one objective; to ultimately increases the value of the company or organisation to it’s stakeholders. We’re just using new methods, which means that we’re going to have to learn them. Most of these technologies are so cheap to implement (and are usually pretty straight forward to set up in the first instance) that perhaps we just need to try a few different approaches out and take note of what works for us, and then implement what works, rather than expect ‘expert’ guidance to solve all our problems.

In the classic comedy series, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ the only guidance offered to cultures that hadn’t yet mastered the new technology of fire was ‘Keep banging the rocks together’.

Good advice.

Get the habit!

Posted on January 6, 2010 by Joe

If you take a look at the section of this blog that lists posts by the month in which they appear, you’ll see that whilst recent months have been pretty regular, there have been some hiatuses in the past. Looking back over them I can identify the fact that at the beginning of the period of silence, something happened in the ‘day job’ or in life in general that broke me away from writing the blog post. And I stayed away from the blog for a while after that for the simple reason that I hadn’t really become habituated to blogging.

I remember reading somewhere that you have to repeat a course of action a few thousand times before your mind and body really begin to treat something as a truly ingrained habit. Well, I hope that’s not entirely correct because I’m working on making a daily blog post a positive habit in my life.

Here are some techniques that I’ve adapted from other places and that I’ll be using to get the blogging habit in 2010.

Publicise what you’re doing!

A friend of mine set up a Facebook group where we could publicise our New Year Resolutions to other group members and see whether we could keep them! It’s always good to have an audience of people waiting for you to drop the ball! 🙂 You’re making a promise now to others as well as yourself; many people find it harder to disappoint others even in small ways than let themselves down.

Set a time and a place

Stephen King, in his excellent book ‘On Writing’, suggests that any writer needs to make sure that they’re at their writing desk / writing place at teh same time every day. Excellent idea! It effectively makes an appointment with yourself to be in a place with all the conditions just right for writing.

Remove Distractions

Make that appointment with yourself in a place and at a time where it’s possible to remove distractions. This doesn’t mean working in Monastic silence in a plain white painted room, bare except for a desk, chair and laptop. It’s more a state of mind – whatever might give you cause to prevaricate – despatch it. Don’t schedule your writing time around the time that your cats need feeding, the postie arrives, or when you might expect to get phone calls. If you like to work to music, get your music on your computer so you don’t go grubbing around to find it. If you like a lot of tea or coffee whilst you blog, get a thermos if you need it.

Set a SMART target

I set a target of a minimum of one blog post of between 400 and 600 words a day. It’s a SMART target because it’s:

Sustainable – I reckon I can do this day in, day out.
Measurable– it’s easy to see if I’ve hit the target. 400-600 words.
Action-oriented – you gotta DO something, not talk about it! I will have at least one blog post to point at.
Relevant– the target you set yourself should be relevant to your ultimate goals. It’s relevant to my aim of generating a popular blog.
Timely – should have a timescale attached to it. It happens every day.

So – there you go! Join me in making good habits in 2010!

Crazy, obscene or good investment?

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Joe

Every now and again I come across something online that leaves me staggered, infuriated and thoughtful in reasonably equal measures. The other day I encountered this little gem – a chap has spent $330,000 on a ‘virtual space station’ in an online computer game. Yep, that’s right – a third of a million dollars on stuff in a video game.

I was actually quite surprised to read that back in January 2009 $600 million was invested in virtual worlds, and that in China ‘virtual currency’ is a $2 billion industry. Scary.

OK…I’ll walk you through my thought processes now. My first impression was ‘WTF? Is this man crazy?’ After all, I’m someone who thinks that spending thirty quid on a video game to be the height of extravagance. I already started worrying about how his email inbox was going to cope with all the letters from long lost Nigerian relatives wanting to share money with him – after all, they probably reckon that anyone who spends money like this must be easy pickings for a 419 scam. Next up came ‘This is truly obscene.’ Now this is obviously a personal judgement of mine – I do think spending $330,000 on a piece of game terrain is pretty dire when the world’s in the state it’s in, but it’s his money, he’s earned it, so that’s his judgement call.

Now, assuming he’s not crazy – and anyone who’s gathered together $330,000 in disposable income is unlikley to be totally barking, that leaves us with teh thought that at least he believed he’s got a good investment opportunity. And, putting my own moral and ethical scruples aside for this post, he may be on to something. The figures quoted above are pretty big numbers. The Swedish company who run teh Entropia game have obtained a ‘real world’ banking licence, allowing them to run a bank. Given that the in-game currency has a fixed conversion rate to the US Dollar, it’s a good move for the company. Second Life, whilst not having the hype it once benefited from, is still an environment in which people buy and sell virtual goods, and most large scale multi-player games have some means of making real money (even if they’re frowned upon by the game designers).

In other words, there does indeed appear to be money made in them thar virtual environments. The owner of the Space Station is now in a position to try and make money from people who wish to run virtual businesses in his station, and will no doubt think of other means of leveraging his investment. Of course, the whole model depends upon people having Internet access, machines capable of running the games, disposable income to play the games and further disposable income to buy in to resources in the game – like rents for space on a virtual space station. I think I’d be happier with the investment opportunities offered by the online gaming world in a less recession-struck world.

But thinking on the positive side…to build a virtual city you don’t have to destroy a forest!!

Incompetent or Dishonest – the new TV Game Show for 2010

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Joe

Good Evening, and welcome to this week’s edition of ‘Incompetent or Dishonest’, the new game show where YOU get the chance to decide whether our elected representatives and civil servants are just a bunch of incompetent dorks or whether they’re actually criminally inclined thieving bastards! We have our usual prizes – a box of pre-completed P45s held here by the delectable Suzanne from HR, and a box of pre-completed Arrest Warrants held by our own boy in blue, Chief Inspector Plod of the Yard!

This week, our contestants are all Ministers and Civil Servants responsible for Immigration and Employment Policies, who’ve been chosen from the many eligible Government Departments to argue for their liberty and careers! The lucky winners get a P45 and freedom, the not so lucky losers get a stretch in Wandsworth Prison!

Let’s go to our research department to find out a little more about this weeks contestants….

There has been a depressing tendency in the last year or two for our dear Government (and their supporters across the nation) to find themselves in various embarrassing situations due to illegal immigrants being employed in various public sector jobs. It’s not a good record for HMG – let’s just take a look:

We don’t want to embarrass the Government too much, so let’s just look at the last couple of years… Starting off back in 2007 with illegal immigrants being able to get jobs in the Security industry. In September 2009 Baroness Scotland is found to have employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper…. In November 2009 we have illegal immigrants as NHS cleaners. And today we have stories of more illegal immigrants working for the Home Office and the NHS.

Oh dear…not a good record is it? Just how difficult can it be to check someone’s paperwork when they apply for jobs in the Public Sector? After all, when many people apply for work these days one of the first things that is requested is a copy of your passport or other papers proving you are entitled to work in the UK. Now…if you think that our brilliant civil servants aren’t checking the paperwork, or that the procedures are not being followed, you should text ‘Incompetent’ to our hotline. On the other hand, if you think backhanders are being taken, or people are deliberately letting folks through the screening process for some reason even if they’re not entitled to work in the UK – text ‘Dishonest’.

If some of our contestants look like winning an Arrest Warrant, they can choose to play their Joker, in which they can pass the blame on to some minimum wage minion and escape with their sorry necks. And in a new feature for this series of Incompetent or Dishonest we give you viewers the chance to text ‘Treason’ to our hotline; if a contestant gets enough ‘Treason’ votes they’re off to The Tower!

So…let’s play ‘Incompetent or Dishonest’ – and remember….ministerial P45s mean ‘New Government’!

The last freedom moped from nowhere city….

Posted on January 3, 2010 by Joe

Back in the 1980s there was a sit com on British TV called ‘The Young Ones’, which was based in a student house and followed the surreal adventures of the students who lived there. One of the characters was a rather pompous, arrogant, wannabe anarchist called ‘Rick’, who was constantly going on about revolution, and whose ratherfatuous comments about politics gave rise to the title of this piece…

As my life unfolded and I became involved in left-wing politics in teh 1980s, I encountered a fair number of ‘Ricks’ – folks who were full of talk about how we should pass a resolution condemning some organisation or country or other for their actions but who were surprisingly absent when it came to the grunt work of winning elections to put ourselves in a position where we could at least effect change.

And Ricks are still with us today, in the electronic world. I came across this piece from the Telegraph – ‘The fatal folly of the online revolutionaries’ and was reminded of the posturing of Rick and the other Ricks I have known. The bottom line is that the Iranian Security Services now carry out ‘deep packet inspection’ of a lot of Internet traffic, which allows them to see where traffic originates from and where it’s going, as well as content. Which means that if someone in the West sends a supportive email message, a one to one Tweet, converses by MSN – it increases the chances of the Iranian authorities identifying the recipient and taking action. Much of this sort of intelligence work relies on a lot of traffic between ‘targets’ that can be identified and analysed.

So, being a slightly thoughtless, well-meaning, armchair revolutionary encouraging someone in Iran to take action against the Government via personal message can get someone at the sharp end killed or imprisoned. Real life, as they say, is a bitch. A recent retaliation against Twitter probably got more news footage than many of the deaths that take place in these riots, which tells us something about the priorities of our own news services. A further piece about ‘Twitterised Revolution’ is here.

Now, this doesn’t mean that support cannot be offered – it means that we just have to redress the balance of risk. And activity should not be mistaken for effective action. My initial thoughts:

There are folks in Iran (and other more authoritarian and totalitarian regimes than our own) who are risking life and limb to get video footage and stories out of of their countries, and succeeding. If you’re wanting to help the cause, when you come across this stuff promote it via your own Social Media sites, blogs, etc. Take a look here.
Campaigns like the recent one to turn your avatar green for Iran are great for awareness raising. And they don’t impact individuals ‘over there’ but offer visible support to users of the services.
Work within the laws of our own country, and via the political processes here (wherever here might be for you!) to raise awareness, find out what your own Government is doing and vote accordingly next time around if you don’t like it. Engage with your elected representatives to put pressure on at a Governmental level.

By engaging directly with people ‘on the ground’ in these regimes, encouraging illegal activity, you might get someone killed. You will almost certainly do less good than if you work within your own country. The folks out there can do with our moral support and the indirect support of our Government and media – they can probably do without armchair revolutionaries throwing virtual bombs and pissing off the local authorities who then retaliate with real bullets.

Sitting back and engaging in the above suggested activities may not be sexy or cool, it may even be regarded by some as cowardly – but if you want to play at being Rick, just think about the consequences for those on the other end of the connection. Don’t forget that the aim of the game is to effect change for those people, not provide Westerners with vicarious thrills.

(Image from From http://www.antiauthoritarian.net)

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Monthly Archives: January 2010