Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Wouldn’t you like to have a personalised tour of the holiday destination that you’re going to rather than being herded around by some impersonal tour?

I’m sure that many people would but figure that it’s bound to be too expensive to do something like that so never give it another thought but there’s growing assembly of what are called “greeter networks” around the world which offer you the opportunity of just a personalised tour yet for no charge at all. How come? Well, it’s made up of a network of volunteers in each of the spots offering this service which is supported by a very small full-time administration to match up tourists and the local volunteers.

For example, if you’d like to see New York then the Big Apple Greeter Network can connect you with one of their volunteers who’ll give you a local’s view of the city. What you can’t do is to book them for days at a time (not yet anyway) but this is one way to see the city as a local does and you can always go to the big tourist draws on another day.

Sadly this service isn’t available everywhere yet but it’s currently available in Adelaide, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Houston, Lyon, Melbourne, Nantes, New York, Paris, Kent, The Hague and Toronto. You can check out the up to date list on the Global Greeter Network.

A very worthwhile endeavour and one way to actually connect with at least one person in the country you’re visiting.

Thanks to the Times it seems that bloggers no longer have the priviledge of anonymity. To be fair in the case of Nightjack the police who he worked for were closing in on him and would probably have worked out who he was fairly soon even without the aid of the Times.

However, now that the Times have removed the anonymity for bloggers, perhaps it is time that the same cloak of anonymity was removed from newspapers too? After all why should the foreign correspondent who wished to remain anonymous be allowed to do so by the Asia Times (no relation to the London Times as far as I know)? Sure, chances are the Chinese would have thrown them out of the country or perhaps something a little less subtle, but after all if Justice Eady can “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity” how much more so does that apply in the case of newspapers? Can we take it as read that the practice of having anonymous columnists will be ended forthwith?

Now, I’ll grant that there were special circumstances in the case of Nightjack in that Richard’s blog was a little too real and appears to have compromised some cases that he talked about but that’s a separate issue. The key think is that Justice Eady’s comments are way too far reaching. Taken to their ultimate conclusion and you could easily see the end of criticism in totalitarian states which, thanks to blogging, was finally finding a voice of sorts where previously it had none. The situation of newspapers is no different: why should their sources be protected any differently? After all, they’re talking to a news outlet so why should they have any expectation of anonymity?

Why should newspapers be allowed the protection of anonymity when bloggers have lost it?

So much went wrong in this particular case that it’s hard to know where to even start.

The social services have an awful lot to answer for in this one. For a start, although they didn’t directly kill Peter clearly their inept actions contributed to his death, one wonders whether a number of those involved shouldn’t be residing in jail somewhere at the moment? No, it won’t bring Peter back but it would send the strongest message to the social services people everywhere that the key social service that they should be providing isn’t money, it’s the protection of life. Disciplinary action is all very well but some jail time meted out is a much stronger message and one that seems more appropriate in this instance.

Related to this seems to be their inbuilt bias in favour of the underpriviliged. I don’t dispute that the social services generally are needed to support those on hard times, but their “keep the mother with the child” regardless of circumstances approach obviously didn’t work too well in this case. I’d also question their bias in favour of mothers too. We’d not have heard anything about Peter had his father been able to keep him and that’s how I’m sure we’d all have wished it to be. It’s definitely better for a child to be with a parent rather than being in care but that parent shouldn’t always have to be the mother as seems to be the case now.

Crazy as it seems, this attitude is what probably led to the doctor giving the killers the benefit of the doubt and thereby missing the injuries. That benefit of the doubt isn’t given to normal families as I found out when accused by a midwife of abusing my own son and frankly we felt at some risk of having him taken into care despite 1) him having no injuries and 2) the supposed abuse being merely a side-effect of him being born breech.

Then there’s the Orwellian handling of the case or rather information about the case as it’s proceeded. The court required all information that would identify the killers to be removed from websites around the world. Frankly the only thing that succeeded in doing was to create a feeling of revisionist history reminiscent of Orwell’s novel and has merely driven public commentary about the case to places like this. Even now, the notorious boyfriend can only be referred to as “the boyfriend” because he’s appealing against his conviction. Well, you would if you were him, wouldn’t you? After all, with the strong feelings that this case has generated his life in jail seems likely to be rather short and with an extremely unpleasant end.

That concealing of information is a major failing of this case. For instance, the government report couldn’t be handed out because it would identify some of the social workers. Let’s not forget that some of these people should be in jail; protecting them in this merely serves to let the authorities off the hook in terms of bringing the appropriate people to court. Thus, we only have the head of the social services section named (Liz Santry who one suspects won’t be a councilor after the next election).

Lot’s of lessons to be learned for sure. Let’s hope that the same mistakes aren’t repeated anytime soon.

Much as we might laugh at the Trabants that East Germany used to turn out as being unreliable and prone to break down, sadly that’s what many blogs seem to look like these days.

Oh, they don’t break down, but the quality of the workmanship that you see in some of the posts is really deplorable. What’s perhaps worse is that a lot of those low quality blogs are taking sponsored posts and if anything the quality of the posts that they get paid for is even worse than the norm for them.

Why do the advertisers put up with it? OK, they might just want the link from the blog but do they really want their product to be associated with shoddy workmanship? After all, the authors of these posts are numbered amongst their suppliers ultimately. Surely they can’t be so uncritical to accept what are often very shoddy posts indeed?

How bad are they? How about “you must visit this site. i think there products are really great. visit this site they have great products.”? I’ve paraphrased the real example so you can’t search for the actual blog entry that was based on (which was worse than that).

Good quality writing doesn’t mean that it can’t be about trashy subjects. Whilst many would call The Sun a trashy paper, every one of their articles is well written. Sure the writing style is laid back but it suits the content just as the relatively dense writing style of The Times suits it’s content and readership.

Just as there’s a range of writing styles in newspapers, so too one would expect there to be a range of writing styles in blogs. That doesn’t mean that the spelling, grammar and repetitiveness of my example is acceptable though because it isn’t and especially so since the advertiser paid $50 for it (quite why they approved payment is beyond me).

I’m not saying that you need perfection from day one but you should at least aim for that.

The problem with really high profile cases such as Vanessa George’s seems likely to be is that the very high level of publically expressed opinions can mean that the court case can be thrown out.

To avoid that what usually happens is that a reporting restriction is invoked whereby it’s deemed to be in contempt of court to publish specific information about the case in advance of a verdict being announced. That system worked really well in pre-internet days but is increasingly unworkable in the Internet age as I’ve said before. As it stands right now there don’t appear to be any reporting restrictions in place for this particular case which has had the effect that it’s been talked about on TV, radio, newspapers and, of course, blogs and 99% of what’s been said is very much along the lines of “let’s lynch her now” as you’d probably expect.

However, there’s also the not so small matter that she hasn’t been convicted yet so is rechnically innocent of the charges at the moment. That’s as it should be, of course, since the whole British legal system is built on the premise that people are considered until a case is proven against them. You might think that with all the public outrage that she couldn’t possibly be truly innocent of all those things that she’s been charged with but it does happen. After all, people have been arrested for taking photos of their own children before now and they’re generally laughed at when they reach the courtroom.

The vast majority of people have only heard, at best, second hand reports of the charges. They haven’t even heard second hand accounts of the evidence. Don’t forget that the grandmother I referred to above was charged with producing pornography yet it turned out she was doing nothing of the sort when the evidence was examined.

Are you still prepared to say that Vanessa George is guilty having merely heard an account of the charges against her?