This week some digital housekeeping by both the Conservative and Labour parties to take down out-of-date speeches and details both parties had posted on the internet in the past has produced a bout of ridiculous scaremongering by a few technologically illiterate journalists.
Amusingly the press caught on to the fact that this had been done on the Conservative wesite about a day before they picked up that the Labour party had dome something extremely similar. In the meantime some Labour flack with even less common sense as the average Labour functionary - e.g. very little - had jumped in with two left feet and issued a statement calling the Conservative action in updating their website a "cynical stunt."
Needless to say it was quickly pointed out that Labour had also removed from their website a lot of old speeches and articles - their "News Archive" no longer contains material pre-dating the election of Ed Miliband as leader, and speeches delivered by Tony Blair as Prime Minister appear to have been deleted, for example. Labour had to admit, trying to hide appropriately red faces, that their own website has been "regularly updated." You don't say.
A rather better informed group of journalists at "The Register," Andrew Orlowski, Kelly Fiveash, and Lewis Page, have put up a common sense (and extremely funny) response to all the hysteria about the parties keeping their websites up to date,
"Oh My GOD! Have the TORIES ERASED THE INTERNET?"
which can be found at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/13/sorry_the_tories_didnt_make_the_internet_disappear/
and has the subtitle
"Pass the Lizard-proof tinfoil, I need to make a hat."
To anyone with a sense of proportion and who is not suffering from paranoia, it is only common sense to try to ensure that people who are searching the internet for your policy on something are directed first to what you are saying about that subject now, not what you wrote in possibly quite different circumstances five, ten, or more years ago.
Neither the Conservative or Labour parties have made it impossible for someone who knows what they are doing to look up what they said in the past. The Register journalists describe the steps taken by the Conservatives to stop search engines finding out-of-date material as being more like a no entry sign than a locked door.
As they put it,
"If we’re to hold politicians to account then this means proper, rational debate. That means, yes, keeping a record of what they say - but you're better off taking your own copies than relying on robots and the varied cloud systems they serve to do it for you - and then complaining that someone has "erased the internet" like a "criminal paedophile" when you are let down.
"But people would normally much prefer a conspiracy to blame. Once it was the Right that dealt largely in the language of conspiracy theories, as Democrat historian Richard Hofstader wrote in his famous 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. There were Reds to be found under every Bed. But listen to any academic venting about “neoliberalism” and you can just as easily erase the word “neoliberal” and substitute the word “Illuminati”. It's escapism and a form of narcissism, really."
Amusingly the press caught on to the fact that this had been done on the Conservative wesite about a day before they picked up that the Labour party had dome something extremely similar. In the meantime some Labour flack with even less common sense as the average Labour functionary - e.g. very little - had jumped in with two left feet and issued a statement calling the Conservative action in updating their website a "cynical stunt."
Needless to say it was quickly pointed out that Labour had also removed from their website a lot of old speeches and articles - their "News Archive" no longer contains material pre-dating the election of Ed Miliband as leader, and speeches delivered by Tony Blair as Prime Minister appear to have been deleted, for example. Labour had to admit, trying to hide appropriately red faces, that their own website has been "regularly updated." You don't say.
A rather better informed group of journalists at "The Register," Andrew Orlowski, Kelly Fiveash, and Lewis Page, have put up a common sense (and extremely funny) response to all the hysteria about the parties keeping their websites up to date,
"Oh My GOD! Have the TORIES ERASED THE INTERNET?"
which can be found at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/13/sorry_the_tories_didnt_make_the_internet_disappear/
and has the subtitle
"Pass the Lizard-proof tinfoil, I need to make a hat."
To anyone with a sense of proportion and who is not suffering from paranoia, it is only common sense to try to ensure that people who are searching the internet for your policy on something are directed first to what you are saying about that subject now, not what you wrote in possibly quite different circumstances five, ten, or more years ago.
Neither the Conservative or Labour parties have made it impossible for someone who knows what they are doing to look up what they said in the past. The Register journalists describe the steps taken by the Conservatives to stop search engines finding out-of-date material as being more like a no entry sign than a locked door.
As they put it,
"If we’re to hold politicians to account then this means proper, rational debate. That means, yes, keeping a record of what they say - but you're better off taking your own copies than relying on robots and the varied cloud systems they serve to do it for you - and then complaining that someone has "erased the internet" like a "criminal paedophile" when you are let down.
"But people would normally much prefer a conspiracy to blame. Once it was the Right that dealt largely in the language of conspiracy theories, as Democrat historian Richard Hofstader wrote in his famous 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. There were Reds to be found under every Bed. But listen to any academic venting about “neoliberalism” and you can just as easily erase the word “neoliberal” and substitute the word “Illuminati”. It's escapism and a form of narcissism, really."
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