You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

The charitable organization MySociety which builds civic websites in the UK has launched its first campaign - Free Our Bills. It’s a rather wonkish one but well worth supporting. Basically they are putting pressure on parliament to improve the way it publishes legislation online to make it easier for independent groups like them to parse the data and pull out key parts of the text (see their detailed description of the changes sought if you are interested).

We invite contributions to the Media@lse Electronic Working Papers series.

This series is intended to:

• Present high quality research and writing (including research in-progress) to a wide audience of academics, policy-makers and commercial/media organizations.
• Set the agenda in the broad field of media and communication studies.
• Stimulate and inform debate and policy.

Please read the guidelines at the website before you submit a paper for consideration.

Please email your paper to Bart Cammaerts, Deputy Editor b.cammaerts [at] lse.ac.uk

Series Editor: Professor Robin Mansell

Series Deputy Editor: Dr. Bart Cammaerts

The Editorial Board is comprised of LSE academics and friends of Media@lse with a wide range of interests in information and communication technologies, the media and communications. They come from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including economics, geography, law, politics, sociology, politics and information systems, cultural, gender and development studies.

The Media@lse Electronic Working Papers series aims to achieve a quick turn-around of papers from submission to online publication. Rights are retained by the author.

We look forward to receiving a paper from you.

The local council covering London’s ever-shrinking red light district (in Soho) is using Bluetooth to warn tourists about so-called ‘clip joints’ that it said “lure people in with false promises of ‘adult entertainment’ but once inside security staff demand hundreds of pounds from visitors.”

I recognise the legal difficulties of prosecuting these people but this seems a bit of a ‘passive aggressive’ way of dealing with the problem. To say nothing of the ethical dubiousness of using ‘bluejacking‘ to send people unsolicited text messages…

David Brake

The Institute for Public Policy Research (leading UK think-tank) has launched a 3-week consultation (on their blog) concerning Britain digital future.

Today we launch the first of three week-long online consultations, as a way of gathering opinion, ideas and recommendations for our Digital Manifesto. We will post questions under the following themes, over the following weeks:

• 7th-13th April: Innovating
• 14th-20th April: Reassuring
• 21st-27th April: Empowering

In each instance, we invite replies to our specific questions (added to this blog) from all sorts of perspectives, and all types of expertise. With authors’ permission, we would like to be able to use or quote these ideas in our final publication, and credit them accordingly.

I reckon that media and new media scholars should make their voice heard about their preferred direction of new media development in Britain (and elsewhere)? Top of my head: open source, in-house capacity, surveillance, digital inequality, etc, etc, and unfortunately etc. again.

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I’m blogging this from the LSE itself today - I’m at an event about blogging and journalism. My comments in italics

Meta comment: The notes below may or may not turn into a ‘proper posting’ - as John Lloyd and Robin Mansell pointed out one of the problems with blogging as an alternative space for journalism is that good journalism requires time and time is money. I could spend several hours turning the comments that follow into a report on the event complete with my own thoroughly-thought-through comments but when I was a journalist that would cost you at least £200 to get. There are very few opportunities to make a reasonable income from blogging so it will always be dominated by people who have time to do it either because they have an income elsewhere and adequate spare time or because they have an axe to grind about some particular issue.

Time taken to improve this blog posting would come at the expense of my thesis and at the moment I can’t really afford it. Anyway, nobody said anything that sufficiently outraged me to make a counter-blast worth my while.

If I had spoken out at the meeting it would have been to suggest that what is needed now is some way to broaden the kinds of people who blog today. There are millions of people who might want some way to express themselves but who feel nobody would want to listen to them. Perhaps some kind of school blogging programme should be considered alongside other IT literacy items on the syllabus?

My notes on the event follow:
(more…)

WriteToThem.com - like the name says this site lets you locate and then email or fax not just your member of Parliament (as its predecessor faxyourmp did) but your local councillors, MEP or MSP plus Welsh or London Assembly Members. It’s bizarre that this had to be done through a charity - MySociety - set up by a committed policy wonk rather than being something that our own government would have implemented ages ago, but better late than never I suppose. At least the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister did fund the project in the end.

Now comes the question of whether these representatives will actually respond to enquiries. My MP, Jeremy Corbyn certainly didn’t when I tried sending him a message via faxyourMP (and the statistics suggest he rarely does respond). I ended up having to pick up his email address directly via a pamphlet…