Monthly Archives: May 2009

The latest institution to attempt to follow the Obama social media template is the Catholic Church.  Pope Benedict XVI may not be the most charismatic communicator, but his YouTube broadcasts, translated into 27 languages, are an interesting attempt to connect him with what he describes as the global digital generation, even if his message is more a case [...]

This past week saw yet another great example of how a small group of angry consumers can force even the largest corporation to change its policies.  In this case the wonderfully named Busts for Justice, forced M&S to stop charging well endowed customers more for larger bra sizes.  The story features all of the usual empowerment traits [...]

Thanks to legal scholar James Boyle and a great article by The Observer’s John Naughton, we now have a new term for control freaks … ‘cultural agoraphobics’. Naughton quotes Boyle’s views that “cultural agoraphobia … leads us always to emphasise the downsides of openness and lack of central control and to overvalue the virtues of [...]

In our book we described how Gordon Brown struggles to shake off the ‘analogue politician’ moniker given to him by David Cameron. For all his intellectual rigour, Brown is not a natural communicator and despite surrounding himself with some smart new media thinkers, he continues to look uncomfortable in the chaotic, antagonistic and non deferential [...]