Quotulatiousness

June 13, 2013

Twitter and #EthicalCleansing

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

In sp!ked, Mick Hume talks about the dangers to free speech on Twitter:

The latest bizarre episode in this campaign of ‘ethical cleansing’ on the web occurred at the end of last week, when a 21-year-old London student was sentenced to 250 hours of community service as punishment for a 16-word tweet, having been found guilty of sending a malicious electronic message at an earlier hearing.

Like several other recent Twitter incidents, the case began after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich on 22 May. As a natural home of rumour, gossip and ill-informed opinion, Twitter was soon ablaze with comments about the killing, including rumours that Drummer Rigby had been decapitated in the street. Deyka Ayan Hassan, a 21-year old English and politics undergraduate from north London, quickly joined in the Twitter-fest with what she intended to be a fashion joke about Lee Rigby’s outfit: ‘To be honest, if you wear a Help for Heroes t-shirt you deserve to be beheaded.’ Hassan’s lawyer told the court that this was the sort of remark she would typically make ‘about clothes and shoes she didn’t like’ (which sounds believable enough to anybody familiar with the level of online ‘banter’). Hassan also insists that at the time of tweeting, she did not know that the dead man was a soldier or that Islamic extremists were accused of his murder.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hassan’s joke about the t-shirt did not meet with universal approval online. She was soon inundated with hundreds of hate tweets, threatening her with everything from rape to being burned alive in her home. The naive and shocked student then went to a local police station to report these threats and insults. Rather than listen to her complaints, the police arrested Hassan for sending the original tweet. She was then fast-tracked into court, as if this was an urgent case, and pleaded guilty.

Bad taste in humour and a bad sense of timing should not be criminal offences, and the authorities talk about this as though incidents like this don’t actually happen:

Cases such as this demonstrate how the creeping culture of You Can’t Say That is now spreading across the supposedly free fringes of the internet. As other incidents listed below show, it can now be deemed a crime to post accusations, insults or just ‘naughty’ words that tweeters, the police and the courts consider ‘inappropriate’, ‘offensive’ or ‘insensitive’. And we thought that Thought Crime belonged in the realm of fiction.

The Hassan case should also be a warning to those many users of social-media sites who now see it as their role to police what others say online – and to inform the real police about tweets and posts they find offensive. The police are happy to act on such information, since they far prefer pursuing thought criminals across their tweets to chasing real ones on the streets. But as Deyka Ayan Hassan’s experience shows, the law is no respecter of anybody’s freedom of expression. She thought she was reporting a crime, and ended up with a criminal record. Those who try to live by the ‘hate speech’ laws can perish by them, too.

[. . .]

The culture of You Can’t Say That is making seemingly unstoppable progress across society, even while apparently oblivious civil libertarians rage against the spectre of state surveillance. Last September, no less a figure than the UK Director of Public Prosecutions himself announced that ‘offensive comments made on Twitter are unlikely to lead to criminal charges unless they include threats or turn into campaigns of harassment’. In what was billed as ‘an important statement about the boundaries of free speech’, Keir Starmer reportedly ‘suggested that prosecutions would not be brought over one-off jokes made online, even if in they were in poor taste’. Tell that to such examplars of one-off poor taste jokes as Deyka Ayan Hassan and some of the other characters listed below.

History without context

Filed under: Britain, Education, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:44

There’s a battle going on in Britain over the way history is taught in state schools:

Since the arrival of the national curriculum, public debate on school history has focused almost exclusively on what topics should be taught, namely whether the emphasis should be on British or world history. This debate has been fuelled by a steady stream of surveys revealing the ignorance of today’s school-leavers. One commissioned last summer by Lord Ashcroft found that while 92 per cent of 11- to 18-year-olds could identify the animated dog from the car insurance advertisements as Churchill, only 62 per cent could identify a photograph of Britain’s wartime prime minister. Fewer than half knew that the Battle of Britain took place in the sky.

However, having become a history teacher at a state secondary school two years ago, I have realised that such debates miss the real problem. I was surprised to learn that since its inception the national curriculum has stipulated a sensible split of British and world history: every pupil between the ages of 11 and 14 is expected to study a chronological sweep of British history from 1066 to the present day. To understand the degradation of history teaching, one has to focus not on what history is taught, but how it is taught.

[. . .]

The main tenet of a child-centred view of history teaching is the idea that pupils should not be “passive” recipients of a teacher’s knowledge, but “active” individuals empowered to find things out for themselves. As a result, “chalk and talk” teaching from the front is heavily discouraged. After a senior member of staff observed one of my lessons, I was told that my role was to be the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage”.

Instead of learning through listening to teachers or reading books, pupils are expected to do so through projects. It did not take me long to work out why pupils are so ignorant of British history, despite spending over a year studying it (as laid down by the national curriculum). To study the Norman Conquest, pupils would re-enact the Battle of Hastings in the playground, conduct a classroom survey to create their own Domesday Book, and make motte-and-bailey castles out of cereal boxes. Medieval England would be studied through acting out the death of Thomas Becket, and creating a boardgame to cover life as a medieval peasant. For the Industrial Revolution, pupils pitched inventions to Dragons’ Den and lessons on the British Empire culminated in the design of a commemorative plate showing whether it was or was not a “force for good”.

Such tasks allow pupils to learn about history in an enjoyable and engaging way — or so the theory goes. In reality, all content and understanding of the past is sucked out, and the classroom begins to resemble the playground. An unfortunate side-effect is that pupils are frequently confused by the inevitable anachronisms involved in making history “relevant”. “Sir, how many Victorians would have had a TV?” I was asked. Imaginative tasks and projects can be excellent supplements to a history lesson, but when they become the mainstay of classroom activity, the consequences are disastrous.

Proponents of child-centred education are impervious to such criticism because progressive teachers have long denied the importance of knowledge in the first place. Instead, skills are seen as paramount. When I first visited my current school, the assistant head asked me how I intended to prepare for my new career. I responded that I was going to spend a few weeks boning up on my general historical knowledge. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” she said. “History is a skills-based curriculum. You should really be able to teach it without knowing anything at all.”

Update: Of course, the same issue with history appears in other countries too:

“Back to the hole in the boat: America is losing its historic literacy. Recently some 556 seniors surveyed at 55 of the nation’s top colleges — only 60 percent placed the American Civil War in the correct half of the 19th century. Only 34 percent identified George Washington as the American general at the Battle of Yorktown. Thirty-four percent thought it was Ulysses S. Grant. At 78 percent of the institutions polled, no history whatsoever was required in the undergraduate program. Historian David McCullough said, “We are raising a generation of young Americans who are historically illiterate.”

Hugh Johnson forced to downsize his wine cellar

Filed under: Books, Britain, Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:36

As the Guardian noted last month, Hugh Johnson is the best-selling wine author in the world, but even he has to cope with time and space restrictions:

Monday’s sale at Sworder’s auctioneers of over £100,000 worth of wines, gathered over a career in which Johnson has overseen a revolution in British attitudes to wine, includes rare vintages dating back to 1830, a £2,000 1945 Chateau Latour made in the balmy summer after VE Day and his own desert island bottle, a single 1971 German riesling for £6,000.

The 74-year-old is trying to be philosophical about letting it all go as he moves with his wife Judy from a house with a five-room cellar to one with a coal hole to be closer to children and grandchildren.

“Everyone with a big cellar realises in the end they don’t have enough friends to drink it all with,” he says. “To start with I felt it was a catastrophe but in the end I felt: ‘Just take it.'”

Some of the bottles are thick with dust and their capsules chipped. Perished labels reveal dates that scroll back through time: 2006, 1996, 1945, 1830. There’s even an amphora dredged from the Mediterranean dated AD100. For many in the wine world the sale marks the end of an era that began in the 1960s when wine was the preserve of the elite and Britons drank on average just a third of a glass a week. Between then and now, Johnson’s annual pocket wine guide, featuring hundred of bite-sized verdicts, has sold 12m copies, his World Atlas of Wine, first published in 1971, has sold close to 4m and wine consumption in the UK has increased twelvefold.

[. . .]

Sitting among his bottles for one last time he reflects on how the wine world has changed. In 2006 he spoke out against rising alcohol levels reaching 15%, which he described as thick “steroid-driven muscle” and “boring”. It was part of a long-running battle with his US rival, the critic Robert Parker, whose highly influential scores out of 100 based in part on his love of powerful, fruit-driven wines, reshaped the wine market. Now with more lower alcohol wines on the shelves, Johnson feels the fight is swinging his way.

H/T to Michael Pinkus for the link.

MySpace revamp pulls the plug on blogs

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:16

I heard about this the other day, as an author mentioned on her mailing list that her MySpace blog had apparently been replaced by someone else’s music files. It was part of a deliberate change to make MySpace more “modern”:

MySpace, the Justin Timberlake-owned social network that refuses to die, is back yet again with a new desktop interface — and minus several years of users’ blogs and comments.

Blogs don’t form part of the new MySpace — sorry, Myspace, they’ve dropped the capital S — and neither do home pages full of pinned videos and user comments.

It’s all about music streaming and discovery, much to the chagrin of loyal users who’ve seen years of blogging disappear at a stroke as the platform narrows its focus.

[. . .]

Myspace might not lament the loss of users who only came back to read their own postings, but it highlights an interesting point about all social media platforms. What you post can vanish at any time, and emotion-laden rants content remains available solely at the whim of the site owner — which could surprise a generation brought up to expect everything on-demand.

Myspace could relent; there’s no indication that the content has been binned, and backups could be dispatched to customers wanting to leaf though their digital past. But that’s not part of the future — if, indeed, Myspace still has a future.

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