Myth 1: The British Public Voted for a Hung Parliament

Seriously. I’ve been wracking my brains on this one. I remember going into the polling station. I remember voting. Really. All of it. What I don’t remember is a big box I put my cross in that said “give me a hung parliament”. Nor do I remember colluding with people in adjacent constituencies, to say “I’ll vote this way, you vote that way and you vote that way, so we each send a different representative.” Despite Steve Jobs best assertions, there isn’t an app for that.

What has happened is not “the fault of the British Public” – it is the failure of the political parties, and the media that have conveyed their messages, to convince a majority of the public that they, uniquely, have the right answers for the problems that face us as a nation. But boy did they ever try to! To be clear: We, dear political editors, did not vote for a hung parliament.

Myth 2: The Markets Demand…

Over the last few weeks the markets have dramatically transitioned from a place of exchange operated by traders and exchanges, to anthropomorphised monsters with demands and wishes. “The markets demand this”, “the markets demand that”. Dear journalists, the markets demand nothing. If they are a mouth piece, then they are a mute one. Their movements and indexes simply indicate the hopes and hedges of a vast array of traders. You know, like the opportunistic ones that trashed the global economy with complicated derivatives based on unsound debt. Traders depend on predicting the future, and uncertainty makes predicting the future harder, and just a little bit more exciting too. That temporarily leads to greater flows, and with that, volatility. I have yet to hear a trader bleating about this. For them it is a greater opportunity to make money, all be it a very temporary one.

It is arrogance of the highest order to attribute all the movements of the market to what is happening in and around No. 10 right now. If the political commentators could take their heads away from their bottoms for a couple of seconds, they might notice that the Eurozone is having a bit of a headache right now. Apparently there are other countries in the world, like Greece, Italy, Ireland and Spain. Those countries, and others, are just about to discover the joys of quantitative easing. You know, that magic new word from last year that caused so much angst in the press here. The markets demand nothing from us. As a country, we demand low rates of interest for capital, but that is a whole other story.

Myth 3: We Have an Unelected Prime Minister

Perhaps the political editors have been watching too much CNBC and CNN. In the words of the song, “This is not America.” Once again I cast my mind back to my ballot paper. I recall-not the presence of the names Brown, Cameron or Clegg there in. Nor do I remember taking part in the party system that, rightly, chose those leaders. Nor do I recall, in the history of our country, any right to a re-election should a party change its leader. We do not vote, nor have we ever voted, for our Prime Minister. Over the centuries, we have fought and died for the rights we enjoy today. Those rights extend to being able to select an individual to represent our local population in a house of representatives (historically from our local population, although now we seem less fussy – with many MPs are unable to vote for themselves as they live outside of their constituency).

In our system all of those representatives choose to operate as a collective (a political party), with the occasional individual exception, and that second level of representation is implicit in our system. However, please note, there is little to stop your MP switching to another party when they take up their seat. In that sense, we barely vote for a party, let alone a Prime Minister. The general public in the UK has never had the right to elect a Prime Minister, and indeed, many of our Prime Ministers have been selected mid-term – making a mockery of the assertion that the general election process is has been co-opted into a presidential race. Even in the age of the leader’s TV debate.

We Have the Right to Expect…

I do believe that, as a public, in times like these we have the right to expect accurate, non-partisan reporting. This is not a game. It is the future of our country. As a public we deserve access to the facts, coherently presented in a well structured narrative. For me, I think the most disturbing thing to come out of this whole election is not the electoral result, it is the behaviour of a number of political editors and a number of journalists. I’ve watched Sky’s Adam Boulton lose the plot, multiple times, and the BBC’s Nick Robinson thrust words into people’s mouths and minds that weren’t even close to being there (and his Conservatives roots have irked some – I defy anyone to find balance in Nick’s blog post). Both have engaged in talking over elected representatives who were simply trying to make a point. The tables of political interviewing have been firmly turned, or perhaps been over turned. Rather than manipulation of sound bites, how about a bit of mutual respect and decency? At times some journalists have shown utter contempt for public political opinion.

This is not the media’s election. It is ours. We have sent a message via our representatives, and it is this: None of you, or your policies, represent us all as a nation. We have different opinions, different priorities and we want something different than we have had in the past, because we are different than we have been in the past. Our actions require that your action, dear politicians, is to work together. You need to make the hard decisions that need making to steer our country through the aftermath of an economic crisis that is still unfolding. As a nation, we do not agree that any one the parties has it right.

In the mean-time, dear political editors, this is not a sixth-form debating society. The public is not stupid, at least no more stupid than they are misdirected into being by incorrect, spun, sound-bite reporting and the insertion of words and thoughts into the minds of others, and inanimate objects. Get yourselves a good night’s sleep, and, as our unelected representatives, concentrate on getting to the facts, getting beneath the party spin, rather than regurgitating it, and representing our nation, with a coherent voice, to the outside world.

Measurement and efficiency were some of the themes for 2009, and I’m sure they will be for 2010. Through Homecamp I learnt about monitoring home power use, and with Redcatco we got even better at measuring things and making business cases.

In 2009 I experienced my first ever SXSWi, which meant heading to Austin, Texas, with Chinwag and the Digital Mission crew to meet with lots of new and familiar faces from the digital industry.

And I got to see a few bands while I was out there too, including The Webb sisters, for the second time in the year!

A fair amount of the year was taken up with psychology study – reading, experiments, write ups and an exam. Probably the highlight of all of that was attending the CAPP conference, hearing some very well grounded, but inspiring lectures, case studies and talks. I ended the year with a First in cognitive psychology, so it feels like the hard word paid off.

The summer was an eventful one. Although a lot happened in the spring, Redcatco social media work started to build up over the summer, and I seemed to be speaking and doing social reporting at more and more events. I even bumped into this chap…

There was still time for fun side projects, one of the most memorable was the Twitter Cook Off, watching a chef judge a set of sandwiches via Twitter, as you do, and listening to Caalie relay the results to Nicky and Maggie Philbin.

I was involved in quite a few NESTA
related events over the year, and also a couple of Reuters ones. The meant that I got to work with some bright, fun people, and chase political leaders around London. A very different perspective from the Cabinet Office events I helped with earlier in the year. This was also the year of the Digital Britain report.

The 1pound40 event at Reuters was one of the highlights of the year, although presenting at SMiB09, Online Information 09 and the Dell B2B Huddle was close to top of the list too.

The number of meet ups seemed to grow over the year, and I added to the mix by kicking off the Thames Valley Social Media Cafe, inspired by the model Lloyd Davis pioneered in The Tuttle Club. One of the evening highlights was the Cozytweetup that ended up with a candle lit picnic in St. James Park, before everyone was moved on, in a very friendly manner, by the police.

During the summer our eldest son managed to break his arm not once, but twice. Oh, and he burnt the other arm just for good measure!

VannFest was, as the previous year, the highlight of the summer. And for the record, I didn’t get a tatoo… Although did this photo of me ever cause a saga! I’m assuming it was the QR code on the T shirt .

VannFest wouldn’t be VannFest without a picture of some sky candles…

There were quite a few business trips during the year. Too many to mention, although the visit to Bonn, Germany sticks out in my memory. Amazing place:

Very oddly I appeared in a Vodafone advert in Germany, both on-line and in posters. You’ll have to look closely, but you’ll see me on the screen of the phone, next to Robert Scoble (remember what I said about those faces at that dinner!)

Over the course of the year my photography set up evolved, with some new cameras and lenses. I started to shoot some video – having been won over by the Canon 5D Mark II.

I squeezed in a photo walk or two, including a memorable afternoon with friend and Flickr super star photocillin.

And Canon let me try out some amazing gear, at just the right moments during the year, including the largest lens I’ve ever handled. The photo doesn’t do it justice – that’s a full size camera body on the lens in the picture there. It takes two hands to lift and gets comments everywhere – including during the Legoland fireworks, where more than one young lad said “I want one of those!”. Needless to say, it captures some amazing images.

Seeing real-time Time-Slice photography in action at the Canon Pro Solutions Exhibition was a definite peak camera-geek moment.

The expanding photography set up meant the chance to shoot some memorable pictures at various places around the planet, as well as Sara’s amazing body painting art.

I read lots of books, not just psychology ones, including reviewing quite a few, and featuring in some too.

Oh, and printed one of my own…

Back at home, the apple and pear trees and the vines were fruitful, the kids grew up some more and the recording studio remained sadly unused – something I hope to fix in 2010.

In the autumn I got to watch two of my favourite bassists play, at the same time! Michael Manring and Steve Lawson played together in London:

And I even managed to edit together this video for the bass guitar blog:

That wasn’t the only music in the year. Later in the autumn I went up to Birmingham and photographed and interviewed behind the scenes at the UB40 Live Loud and Local gig:

In November Kate showed quite how much interest a fox on the underground can create! By then I’d also set up SocialOptic with Jim, something which will be very much at the centre of 2010. With November on the scene, I dived in and took part in Movember – growing a moustache to raise awareness of men’s health issues, including prostate cancer. It opened my eyes to a few things I will write a lot more about in 2010.

To round out the year, snow arrived. Followed by more snow, and lots of it! The roads were chaos, so I holed up in the home office and click-clacked away to close of projects, ready for a clean start to 2010.

As the snow subsided, visitors arrived, and finally the family managed to squeeze in a break down to the west country.

Including a morning on the beach in Devon, before heading home for the New Year…

Photo by Josh Russell (cc) via Flickr

As predicted, I received a huge amount of flack for my moustache when I spoke at the 1pound40 conference at Reuters news agency. I’m pictured above,  squeezed in between Sam Brook and Kate AG (who is currently working on the BBC’s Treeoclock project) – off to the right of the photo is Christian (aka @documentally – the man who first taught me to take photos), Hannah Nicklin and Sue Thomas. You can’t see the tache these, but it did end up in a sketch…

Sam Brook, myself (+Mo) and Kate AG

(used with kind permission of the chaps at Drawnalism)

Anyway, back to the Mo. First, thank you to those who have tried to make donations and succeeded – a very big thank you! For those that tried and failed, or haven’t tried yet, because of the way the Movember website works, you’ll need to click on this link, then click on it again to actually get to the donations page. Trust me, you’ll want to – the latest pics will be there, and you can even rate my mo! It would make me very very happy if together we could get that total to £1,000 by the end of the month.

There are some very good resources around the web about prostate cancer – remember, that is what Movember aims to raise awareness about. This NHS prostate cancer resource is very helpful: Introduction to prostate cancer. It includes a video, with the very soothing voice of a prostate cancer expert. There is a fair amount of research that suggests that diet and exercise can play key roles in reducing the risk and impact of prostate cancer – webmd has some specific recommendations.

Be healthy, and have a chuckle at my mo .

]]> http://benjaminellis.org/2009/11/14/mo-of-the-mo/feed/ 1 http://benjaminellis.org/2009/11/04/facial-hair-explained/?&owa_from=feed&owa_sid= http://benjaminellis.org/2009/11/04/facial-hair-explained/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:05:55 +0000 Benjamin Ellis http://benjaminellis.org/?p=412 This post is three days late, for which I beg your forgiveness, and not easy to write – for reasons that will become clear. First, a public notice:

• I am growing a moustache.

At this point, some of you will know what I am about to say, for the rest, an explanation is in order. It’s movember:

Movember is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues, specifically prostate cancer. Mo Bros, supported by their Mo Sistas, start Movember (November 1st) clean shaven and then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their moustache. During Movember, each Mo Bro effectively becomes a walking billboard for men’s health and, via their Mo, raises essential funds and awareness for Movember’s men’s health partner – The Prostate Cancer Charity.

On Nov 11th 2005 Alex Porter, my father-in-law, died of prostate cancer (Guardian obituary by Bernard Crick). Cancer is the second largest killer of men my age -  the only one that claims more lives is heart/circulatory disorders – you can use this tool to see what your health risks are (adjust it for your age, sex, …).

One man dies every hour of prostate cancer in the UK, more than 35,000 men will be diagnosed this year -Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK.

To date, Movember has raised over £30 million globally for the fight against prostate cancer and depression in men. And, more importantly, as a direct result, male awareness of health issues has improved with Movember helping to spread health messages directly to millions of Mo Bros & Sistas around the world.

Hear is my polite request:

1. If you would like to, please make a donation on my movember page (it’s looking a bit empty to start with thank you for lots of donations – you can give directly here).
2. Spread the word.
3. Don’t be rude about my mo when you see me – well, not too rude!

We all need things to aspire to. There is no person that is perfect. There is no place that is perfect. We stand astride the great river of life, caught between two banks. We can not choose where the tide takes us, but we can paddle in the right direction, for all that we are worth. We do not know where that might take us, or the difference it will make, but we can, at the very least, try.

John Wesley said this:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

A raft of wonderful suggestions came back – things that I have now read, watched and pondered over. Friends, you are, of course, uplifting and inspiring! I’m going to pick one item to share back for now. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it is a TED video.

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success – from this year’s TED in Oxford. 17 minutes worth watching, but if you can’t hit play, or are after my thoughts, then read on…

Start with “The Sunday Evening Career Crisis” – that moment when the gap between our hopes for ourselves, and the reality of life starts become painfully apparent – and, as Alain says, we end up weeping into our pillows.

Our lives are regularly punctuated by “career crises”, when what we thought we knew is challenged by a threatening kind of reality. From my own perspective, I know only too well how fragile our perception is. The more deeply I study psychology, the more I am amazed that we get through life at all. Our grip on reality is, at best, tenuous and fractured.

It is easier than ever before to make a good living. We live longer. We earn more. We eat more. We have more. But it is harder than ever before to remain calm. There are a myriad of reasons for that. I lay a fair portion of the blame at the feet of the media, in all its forms. Not through malice-a-fore-thought, but through accidental complicity. Alain touches on the topic in his talk: Magazines make us feel that any one us can (even should) achieve something, anything, everything exceptional. The press has also become an instrument for delivering ridicule. Highlighting the mistakes people make. We fear the judgement and ridicule of others like never before.

“it is as unlikely that you would, nowadays, become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy, but the point is that it doesn’t feel that way.”

Snobery, Alain says, is a global phenomena. The idea of taking a small part of someone and using it to come to a complete view of who that person is. Today’s snobberly? Job snobbery, at pandemic levels. We are obsessed by people’s career achievements and social position.

People make a strict correlation between respect and our position in the social heirarchy. In my experience that is an anachronism that has hung around too long. I’m inspired by people like Zarine of Just Giving, who’s view is that the CEO is at the bottom, not the top, of the organisation.

I’m perplexed by the reactions I get from people when I describe myself variously as a geek, a photographer, a bass player, a CEO or someone who has spent $35 million building a business. None of those things makes me a better or worse person, or any more or less interesting. Yet you would never know that from the different reactions I get from some. Alain’s advice? Don’t judge people. That should be a familiar phrase. Simple advice, but more of a cultural battle that we realise.

We aren’t materialistic Alain says, we have simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It isn’t the goods we want, it is the rewards we associate with them.

“The next time you see somebody driving a Ferarri, don’t think this is somebody greedy, think ‘this is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love’ – in other words feel sympathy rather than contempt.”

There you go. One of the big problems of our society, he says, is envy. The closer people are to us in status, the bigger the risk of envy. We live with a desire for equality, combined with inequality all around us. The hope we have for our careers has never been so high, and tiny differences so large.

This meritocracy that we live in has a flip side. If anyone with talent, energy and skill can get to the top, then by implication those without them end up at the bottom. People’s position at the bottom becomes merited and deserved, rather than unfortunate. The consequence? Increased incidence of suicide, in fact the highest incidence of suicide in the world. People own their success like never before, but also take their failure at a deeply personal level.

The reality is that today’s “meritocracy” is far from being that. It simply doesn’t work that way. The system isn’t efficient, or rather the real-world isn’t that meritocratic – there are too many random influences on where we end up for us to be ultimately culpable for our destiny.

Alain makes another interesting observation about society. We’ve ended up worshipping ourselves, rather than something transcendent that can provide us with an escape from our own human ant hill. Alain, even as a secularist, sees that as a loss.

We think we know what success means, but our ideas of success are fickle, changeable and impressed upon us by others, rather than coming from within. Winning someone else’s battle can be a very hollow victory. Make sure you are fighting a war that you want to win, at a price that is really worth paying. Perhaps there is a kinder, gentler philosophy of success?