Just a quick share dump, with a few links on the new age of digital politics. The relate to the hype about what the internet can do and what it cannot. First, that story about Facebook likes getting used (on an industrial scale) for cleverly segmented marketing: Cambridge Analytica has marketed itself as classifying voters using five personality traits known as OCEAN — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — the same model used by University of Cambridge researchers for in-house, …
TRUST FREE ENVIRONMENT: Ernest Hemingway said that “the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them”. Trust in business is often indicated by credit (ie belief). Currencies have no intrinsic value in and of themselves. We invest in them because our empirical experience rewards our belief. So when Gerry Adams says “trust is not a precondition for making political progress”, what does he mean?
Not quite the morning after the night before, the Assembly sits tomorrow for the first time since Peter Robinson’s tactical, though perhaps not strategic, masterclass. The resignation of four DUP ministers on Thursday leaves many unanswered questions, literally, the most pressing of which in the short term is whether the current Assembly has a future as it descends into farce.
Every year, the MacGill Summer School gives us under exercised political anoraks a moment to resolutely focus on Irish public affairs. Last night the subject was trust between the governors and the governed, a title none of the three speakers were particularly comfortable with. And it invoked some biting, cynical wit on Twitter… Don't miss my talk at Macgill, "Political Reform: The Politics of Reform, or The Reform of Politics?" — lɐƃɹǝℲ (@Fergal) July 22, 2014 There’s a wider sense …
One of the things we are seriously short of in Northern Ireland is ‘trust’. Trust, argues Simon Sinek, is not reliability, it springs from you share with others: What’s a nation? A single group of people with common set of values and beliefs.And the single biggest challenge that any culture or any organisation will ever face is its own success. \ This he says works fine at the beginning. But as time goes on: The problem is why they do …
I had intended writing another instalment on the ongoing crisis within journalism, but time’s short for original thought these days, especially when there are folk like Jay Rosen (et al) to do the thinking for you. Here’s the Guardian’s excellent précis of his presentation to SXSW. It’s refreshing to say the least: Mainstream journalists’ antagonism towards bloggers, he suggested, was sustained by the huge stress they find themselves under, which stems from five developments: 1. The collapsing economic model of …
Politics would be better if only politicians would …..begin re-building trust in politics, by trusting each other, by engendering trust between parties for the common good, by allowing and facilitating trust in themselves among the governed, and most of all by trusting the people, if given two paths, to choose the right one. Why is this important? Quite simply because trust is the mortar that binds the fundamental building blocks of democracy together; and without trust these sit uneasily and …
