Martin, Did you read this?
http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/comment/0,,2175214,00.html Comment ------------------------------ If you think the nation decides, think again Via phone-in, vote and blog, a vocal minority appears to be speaking for the silent majority *Carol Sarler Sunday September 23, 2007 The Observer <http://www.observer.co.uk/>* Pity the poor BBC. No, come on: you really must when, to top all its recent troubles, jobs are threatened over no greater or lesser a matter than the naming of Blue Peter's bloody cat. The story so far goes that the producers asked the audience to pick a name for the critter, but when the votes were totted up, the winner - rumoured to have been either 'Pussy' or, apparently equally dodgy in street slang, 'Cookie' - was at first deemed inappropriate, so they fibbed and declared victory for 'Socks'. Heaps of shame, tons of opprobrium, inquisition to follow. I do not blame the BBC for the fib, well-intended as it was to deflect playground cackles. Nor do I think its fib was the greatest mendacity involved: six-year-olds do not call their cats Pussy or Cookie, neither do they have sufficient grasp of double entendre to do it for sport. Good money says the votes were cast not by children at all, but by the kind of people - indeed, probably the exact same people - who enjoy the unparalleled hilarity of calling themselves Jedi on a census form. But that is why I do blame the BBC for offering the vote in the first place, be it on Blue Peter, on Strictly Come Dancing or on any of the rash of programming stunts that permit the bold declaration: 'You, the nation, decides!' It sounds fearfully modern and embraces buzzwords like 'interactive' and 'inclusive'; in fact, all it is doing is adding to the already alarming degree of power held by meaningless, self-selected samples. The communications media have always been especially susceptible to these groups; broadcasters refer to switchboards being 'jammed with complaints' that actually number perhaps 80 out of the 10 million who watched a show. The 80 will have been agitated by a predictable pushing of buttons - cussing, for instance - that matters greatly to them, but little to the millions. By the same token, the Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells might muster only a dozen letters to the editor on a single subject but, on a national newspaper, that is usually enough to guarantee publication of at least one. So be it; t'was ever thus. These days, however, in what some like to believe is democratisation ably assisted by technology, minority viewpoints are becoming jolly noisy. The advent of phone-in radio has expanded to fill entire networks 24 hours a day, as small numbers of citizens snuggle up together, warmed by the illusion that because their views are shared they are widely shared. Email has allowed for a massive growth in pyramid protest: if somebody is thought to have committed insult, one person emails 10 who each email 10 more, passing on a cut-and-paste letter to the offending person or organisation that then pings in by the hundred, regardless of how many of the protesters ever saw or heard the original 'insult' (transsexuals and Cliff Richard fans, for some reason, are particularly quick off the mark). In print, the web now facilitates and even encourages readers to enjoin in dialogue. Last week, for example, I wrote a defence on these pages of scientists trying to breed pigs which might one day provide hearts for human transplant. Within hours, a reader had posted the warning that, given our souls reside in our hearts, recipients would thus have the souls of pigs. It matters not that you or I or a million other Observer readers would know immediately that this is a chap to avoid at full moon; he selected himself as a contributor to the blog, we did not. And so what? you cry. Shall we deny him his say? What manner of libertarian would disallow a voice? Not this one, certainly: pig-botherers notwithstanding, bring them on - the expansion of communication is one of the attributes of this generation of which we can be properly proud. But, and it is a big but, if self-selected samples of opinion are to continue to expand, so should our caution in estimating their value. Instead, we seem to be more, not less, slipshod in our interpretation to the point where we confuse volume as in noise with volume as in quantity. The eight out of 10 cat-owners who expressed a preference are now just too clumsy to be bothered with. When Ant and Dec, or that breathy girl from The X Factor, announce that 'the nation has chosen', they skip the bit about 'the bunch of sad gits who stay home on Saturdays and waste money on premium-rate telephone calls has chosen' (self included, by the way). We devour survey results, careless of method: last week, a poll 'revealed' that two out of three people are unhappy. Now, leaving aside that I'd give teeth to see how the questions were phrased, what this actually meant was that two out of three people who have nobody more interesting to talk to than a pollster are unhappy, a truth, I'd have thought, by definition. Moreover, in their loneliness, these people selected themselves as surely as throngs select themselves for focus groups. Those who make money from progressively fashionable focus groups boast of their cross-sections of age, sex, race and so forth. But, again, they overlook what really matters: that their guinea pigs are aliens from a distant planet where a few tenners and a sticky bun are considered a sane reward for the mind-numbing tedium that is an evening's focus group. Even a jury's verdict is likely, now, to be the opinion of a self-selected sample. Where once, in sterner times, a cross-section was reasonably achievable as everyone did his duty, these days, limousine liberals are adept at deferring jury service, leaving the defendant's fate largely in the hands of the unemployed and the unemployable who select themselves or, rather, fail to deselect themselves and are about as socially representative as Diddly Squat. Self-selected samples, by and large, appear to relish their day in the sun. But while markets and manipulators invest in research, surveys, psychology, profiles and debriefings from the rising cacophony, it is a curiosity that, quite possibly, the more we listen to what some people say, the less we know about what - or even if - most people think. On 26/09/2007, Martin Belam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi all, I have my BBC hat back on at the moment, and one of the things I > am working on is a project to do with online voting and ratings. > > Part of my brief is to explore how the BBC might utilise and re-use > information and data gathered via voting, and hopefully make a business > case for releasing it. > > So, whilst trying to avoid a response along the lines of "Can we have > all the data, in as many different formats as possible", I wondered what > kind of data would you like to play with, what formats would be handy, > what time intervals, and what can you imagine doing with it. > > When talking about voting data I'm thinking of examples like... > > The Daily Mini-Quiz on the Magazine - > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/default.stm > Votes on local BBC sites - > http://www.bbc.co.uk/norfolk/raw/favourite_childrens_book_east_feature.s > html > Votes on CBBC Newsround - > http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_6040000/newsid_6048100/6048158. > stm > > And also things like the Player Rater > http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/6447317.stm > (which I can't find an open example of, I think you'll have to have a > look for them around 3pm on Saturday) > > > What I'm interested in is hearing any ideas you might have about > including that kind of data in prototypes, how you might track it over > time or by topic and so on. > > Just to be clear, this isn't a trawl for your IP so I can go and get > stuff built. It is so I can put into a document something along the > lines of - "And one of the reasons that releasing the data direct to the > web is a GOOD THING and the RIGHT THING to do is that it only took n > hours for the lovely BBC Backstage community to come up with x fantastic > applications for the data" > > Ideas welcome on or off-list to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > And please don't mention the Blue Peter cat.... > > > > All the best, > martin > > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please > visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial > list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ > -- Please email me back if you need any more help. Brian Butterworth www.ukfree.tv
