Mikey Weinkove and Saul Albert (Part 2) (i-v3 029-3)
View the rush: The People Speak part 2
Mikey and Saul, co-founders of The People Speak, talk about the principles behind their Directionless Enquiries service.
Transcript:
Q. If we could start with the story of how you sort of conceived the of the idea for directionless enquiries, that would be good.
SAUL: Okay Mikey, I think you are responsible -- one of your previous relationships was responsible for this project.
MIKEY: Yes, well, this all started off with a conversation between me and Saul and basically it was when the 118 service was first being introduced and if you remember then there was a lot of publicity about all the different 118 numbers you could dial and at the time I felt very upset about this because I just thought already directory enquiries was, you know, a bit of a rip off and a bit annoying and I mentioned to.
SAUL: Well, it was also that there was a lot of publicity at the time about all of the call centres being outsourced to good knows where and people were up in arms -- I do not really mind talking to somebody in an call centre in Bangalore but it is not always the best place to get information about what is happening next door is to you or down your street.
MIKEY: Yes, so I was saying whenever I need a bit of information I phone up my girlfriend who is sitting bored in an office in front of an computer and she is very, very happy to talk to me and give me whatever information I need -- it is an system that works very, very well. I said to Saul 'Would it not be great if everybody could phone my girlfriend'. Obviously she would be kind of annoyed about that but the point was.
SAUL: I think we should point out the ex-girlfriend.
MIKEY: Yes ex girlfriend now.
SAUL: So seeing as Mikey no longer had access to that particular service it was almost we had to then design a different system that everyone could use to do more or less the same thing.
MIKEY: Because everyone, actually, in the sense everyone likes helping each other and if it doesn't happen too often it is quite nice just to be able to help someone along the way by giving them directions, for example. Or by just imparting a bit of your wisdom that you have gained over the many years of being on this plant.
Q. Could you just explain how your girlfriend was able to answer all the questions that you asked her?
MIKEY: Well a lot of the questions were things that you could look up on the internet so it might just be a phone number or how to get to a place or what the capital of Uzbekistan is -- any questions like that. Sometimes she also answered questions from her own personal knowledge as well -- for example if it was a cooking related question or a cleaning related question.
SAUL: Or a Turkey related question.
MIKEY: Yes a Turkey related question. She was into cooking and cleaning. I mean, you know, it is not me. Anyway --
SAUL: Ex girlfriend.
MIKEY: Ex girlfriend, yes.
SAUL: (4.00) But the at the time, I think that was in 2003/4?
MIKEY: 2003, yes.
SAUL: 2003 and it was before internet telphony had really taken off. So Skipe was there but really in its infancy. There were not the proliferation of voice over IP services really available and in fact a lot of what has come to be known as web 2.0, social technology, was really in its infancy as far as the mass market was concerned and we were stuck then with this idea which was to provide a Directory Enquiries service that was based on the knowledge and information that people could share with each other but the two paradigms that we wanted to use to make that happen, which were social technologies and voice over IP, were not really there at that point. They had not arrived and I think we looked at various ways of implementing this kind of system using traditional telephony, using switches and all kinds of hardware that you would have to buy from an specialist telephony manufacturer and it would have cost something like £10,000 or £20,000 just to get the equipment. This is let alone actually programming it and designing the system.
Q. So what is the idea can you describe (another voice: you are just leaning out of shot there)
MIKEY: (5.25) I will lean in shot. The basic idea is this: if you are out on the street and you have a mobile phone, you phone this number and you are connected to somebody that happens to be in front of a computer and able to answer a question you need to know out on the street.
SAUL: And technically the way that works is that we have plugged together a bunch of open source software piecings that do the various jobs that you would need to accomplish that so receiving a call and then routing it to whoever it is that is then signed in at that point -- actually we can use a piece of software called Asterisk, which an open source piece of software called PBX or telephone switch which in the old days used to be --
MIKEY: It is basically like a virtual telephone exchange.
SAUL: Yes, so we can -- using just a little, virtual telephone exchange, a piece of open source software that we use at no cost -- we can emulate all of the functions that we would have needed to pay as astronomical for and have hardwear in place for just a few years ago and also people are much more willing these days ous use technology in a social way. So people are more familiar with the idea that they might be able to provide themselves and their community with an information service with the kind of service that you would have had to pay somebody to sit in a call centre for ten years ago.
Q. Could you just describe clearer -- you were out on the street, you phone a number and someone answers. Who is that person?
SAUL: Okay, so there is a community of people who will provide this service to each other. So I might be out on the street one day making a call to Directionless and the next day I might be stuck behind my desk at my job doing something kind of boring and waiting for an opportunity to be distracted by something fun or interesting or worthy. So then I might receive a call one day or might make a call the next day -- or in fact the other way round because the way we are designing it is so that really you only receive calls if you make calls so in an way it is a currency of exchange where you make a call and, by making the call, you are really promising that you will accept a call from somebody else so it is very much based on that kind of exchange although not necessarily one-for-one. We are looking at ways of encouraging that kind of genrosity I suppose amongst the community of caller agents.
MIKEY: I mean it is more like a party, really. Everyone brings a bit of information to the party and they also bring a few questions and desires for information to the party and it always gets put into a big bowl and people take whatever they need from the bowl.
Q. So it could be anyone. How do you know what sort of information, who is going to be good at knowing what and it doesn't end up being useless? You will not be put in contact with the person that has the information that you really want?
SAUL: Basic assumption is that a person in front of the computer with an internet connection --
MIKEY: And a brain.
SAUL: -- and a brain, can provide you with as much or more information than any directory enquiries operator paid to sit with a database of phone numbers or places so, really, everybody who has that basic set up, which is most people working in offices or a lot of people working at home or sitting in an internet cafe, has the kind of information resources that they can answer general questions about what happened when, using Wikipedia or just using google. It is just knowing how to use these basic tools give people an amazing ability to provide information to each other -- and you hear this a lot with people who perhaps are not used to using the internet, will couple come up with questions that really any five year old kid who has a internet connection can answer and that is astonishing to some people from older generations or people who are not used to using the internet but, actually, those kinds of skills are really available to everybody and what we are doing is really providing a interface to those skills for perhaps, either people not in a position to use the kind of internet knowledge gathering skills because they are out on the street using a mobile phone rather than sitting in front of their computer or people who actually don't use those kinds of systems. So you could phone directionless enquiries and make the kind of question that somebody could answer, who is sitting in front of the computer, without actually having a computer or knowing how to use a computer at all.
MIKEY: I think there is another point to add as well, in that I think it is interesting to get one person speaking to another random arbitrary person and they will have an interesting conversation. All they actually need is the premise on which to start a conversation. So that element is quite important and it can be overlooked and it is actually quite fun to talk to another person but generally the problem is it seems a bit weird if you just go up and talk to somebody but if you have a particular question to ask them and, you know a structure in which to have that conversation, then it is actually really, really interesting to talk to another person that you don't know.
SAUL: It is also part of a very basic human interaction that happens all the time which is that people approach each other in the street and ask for directions and that is a very widespread phenomenon, everybody is used to it, everybody knows how to deal with that social interaction -- it is very familiar -- and it is a general socially benevolent activity that people participate in everyday. So what we are doing in trying to bring that kind of interaction online is giving people an excuse and also giving them a way of having the same context because what is missing when you are asking people questions on line forms and chat rooms and email is that there is not really a context for that exchange to take place. What we have done with directionless enquiries is worked on a local basis. So the London number is directed really at people registered to the system and who have expressed the fact that they know something about London or a particular part of London. So you can phone that number and you will be connected to people with that local knowledge. So, in a way, it provides people who are dealing with an information system that is online, not geographically bound but giving them a geographical context so I would phone up and say I am in Islington and I need to find a good cafe -- actually there is lots of good cafes in Islington so maybe you would be somewhere maybe where it is harder to find a good cafe but --
MIKEY: Shepherd's Bush?
SAUL: Shepherd's Bush. All right, so I am in Shepherd's Bush, I need to find a good cafe. That is the kind of information that I might be able to get from somebody in directionless enquiries and then after the fact -- when I have been to the cafe -- I then have the ability to go back and say to that person, thank you, that was a useful bit of information, I enjoyed the cafe. Do you know about this or that other thing that I found out about while I was there?
So it is almost an introduction between people that would otherwise not necessarily meet each other. It is like asking the right person on the street, the right kind of question.
Q. I think there is also something about the -- what do you feel are the motivations? Why do you feel this works?
MIKEY: (13.01) I do feel feel this sort of ties into a kind of feeling that I have about how systems organise and treat people and I think if I system can give people responsibility and actually allow them to act in a positive way, then they will do that, they will do that with gusto, and it is just about creating the circumstances that allows people to do that and there is so much stuff out there that which kind of treats people as if they are going to mess things up or they are incompetent our approach to people is that generally they are competent and that they can -- they might mess things up occasionally but if you don't put pressure on them like they are going to sue them if they mess up and stuff like that -- if you don't put all these kinds of difficult provisos on it and just offer them an opportunity to help, they will gladly take it and they will get a warm feeling, as I always get a warm feeling from doing the stuff that I do.
SAUL: It is interesting also to see those kinds of exchanges, those authority-giving exchanges, happen on line perhaps more often than they happen in other contexts, in institutional contexts or even using older technologies that were perhaps developed with a different strucure so one of the things that we have discovered through building directionless enquiries is a lot more about the regulatory infrastructure of the telephony system and paid services. So if you operate a business that asks people to pay them to use a telphony service, you are bound by a code of conduct and a series of best practices and a regulatory framework called phone-pay-plus which is regulalating the kinds of things you see scandals about everyday day, such as crooked television phone-in competitions and the kinds of things that you might expect to have a regulatory framework for. But when we are operating a service we actually cannot use the 118 numbers as a way of advertising Directionless Enquiries because you have to provide quality of service guarantees. You have to provide all these kinds of regulalatory frameworks and guarantees that people will not be missled or that they won't be sold something that doesn't come up to scratch -- that actually it is very difficult to involve people in on a level of responsible adult behaviour. You can not exact that expect that people behave in a socially benevolent way and then provide them with a service and then use the telephony system, which is in fact why internet telephony provides you with that opportunity because, as a space for exchange, it is far less regulated and that is is where the opportunity to do this has come from.
MIKEY: (16.00) I think there is something to be said about a difference between a kind of system of economic exchange and a system of social exchange and the two -- there is a very uneasy relationship between the two things but actually, if you think about it, most of the things that you do in your life, or want to do in your life, don't or should not involve money like any kind of --
SAUL: Direct remuneration.
MIKEY: Yes, direct exchange or sort of like, you know -- it reminds me of the song, very cheesey, the no-charge song. Do you know that song?
SAUL: No, I don't know that song. Please, don't sing it.
MIKEY: Sort of like country and western where little Tommy says for cleaning my room I want so and so dollars and for looking after little Sally I want so and so many dollars, for washing the car I want so and so many dollars and then his mum goes for all the years I have looked after you, no charge. For all the times that you were ill, blahblahblah, no charge and then she hands a bill back to little Tommy and little Tommy crosses out the numbers and says: no charge. But the point is that that illustrates that actually as soon as you start to introduce munditory exchange into this system -- it is a bit like this classic problem of when you go to the pub and you buy a round of drinks, as soon as you start to count out how many drinks he has had to how many drinks they have had then it just, actually, becomes a bit unpleasant, when actually you just sort of want to buy some drinks and everyone wants to have a drink and if you start kind of worrying about the how many drinks each person has had, then everyone thinks you are a little bit sad -- which you are.
SAUL: Or a little bit cheap?
MIKEY: Yes.
SAUL: So you should never go to the pub with Mikey.
(Ho ho hos all round)
Q. I think there is something going on with bringing that way of thinking which is pretty sort of 20 century was dominated by the opposite of that everything seems to have become more than more of lets see how much that is worth social care all these things that have been would have been even you know when you are paid to do work it is relatively new in human history but exactly what you are talking about there seems to be those ideas of coming back stronger than ever we are seeing a lot of the exchanges in the position you paid for mums net people go and look after each others children for free couch sufficienting staying at someone's house an stranger, why are we seeing this in a broader sense it is not just the internet they don't exist -- why are we seeing this sort of, those sort of ideas?
SAUL: (19.27) I think there is two forces at work in the professionalisation of social life or the socialisation of professional life and it is a double edged sword. There is benefits and problems to it, which are introduced by the way I just put that. The reason I think that people are able to coordinate the delivery of peer services -- information services, if that is what we are talking about, or mass collaboration -- is because they are getting more intelligent and their capacity to communicate is increased by the availability of tools and technologies that facilitate that but also because it has become part of the way that everybody works. In their professional lives, they are using technologies that have inherently social element. They are far more personalised. They are far more domesticated and, again, that can become a problem because -- okay, we are developing a call centre that allows a community of caller agents to provide each other with information services, so that is a beneficial device or a beneficial social infrastructure that we are providing but it also does turn your living room or your laptop while you are sitting in an internet cafe, it turns it into a work station and you are being asked to perform a task which is actually quite boring and it is work but we are doing it in a way that makes it fun. It doesn't make it, necessarily, less stressful. It doesn't give anybody else in a call centre in Bangalore a job. In an way there are problems with that model but you know, I think it does.
MIKEY: I would not call it work to go and you know to answer some questions. I really enjoy it, actually -- as I said earlier, just imparting my knowledge to people. That is not something that that I really would want to charge anyone for. In fact in a way I should be paying them to sit and listen to me and my wise words.
SAUL: That is the second reason why this is happening. It is not just because people have access to these technologies. It is also because you are able to put people with one need in touch with people with a different need which are complimentary, so it is a way of joining people together with complimentary needs: Mikey needs people to listen to him sharing his knowledge and someone else, somewhere else, needs some part of that knowledge and so in an way that infrastructure provides those people with the opportunity to mutually satisfy their needs.
MIKEY: (22.13) But I also think it is not something that is just kind of suddenly emerging. It is something that has always been there. It is just that we -- those networks, because they have not had a technological basis, have had to be very small and so, you know, you get your local group of friends, you know, somebody phones up somebody else 'Can you look after the kids tonight?' but it is just the local friends and then one day they will do it for the other person. Those people I think have always operated on that level and I think it is almost kind of like the infiltration of people trying to monetise that which has kind of led to an ability of people that want to do just for the same social reasons to be able to come in behind that just expand those social networks to much wider groups of people and, you know, I really think it is about the technology has just exposed what is really natural in people to actually look out for each other.
Q. But why is there something innately social about the technology itself? Why is the technology having this effect?
SAUL: (22.39) Right, well I think what you were just saying, Mikey, is that it is not the technology. It is the technology that exposes the social exchange because you can quantify communication when you have a technological medium because you could look at the band width absorbed by different parties involved in the exchange. You can look at the at the server logs. You can examine the ratio of calls to people answering calls or people asking questions on forums. So these social exchanges have never been captured by technological means before and we are given, suddenly, all of these tools to annalise the social interactions but actually the technology just logs it. It doesn't necessarily provoke it.
MIKEY: Yes, for example, in Turkey if you go on to a bus in Turkey and someone opens up a packet of sweets or some pastries, they will just passes it round to the whole bus. That is just normal. It is considered a normal -- that is probably been going on since before there were even buses, when it was a horse and cart or whatever.
SAUL: There are just no clever internet boffins calling it Sweets 2.0.
MIKEY: Yeah, or like foodshare.tu, you know, or something like that. That is the whole point it has always been there. It is just there has never been a web site for it or we did not know about it or we could not really talk about it.
Q. So I mean the change is that where it was only companies that had money and they could afford to use these technologies and they used it to make money and PERPT their sort of organisation of hierarchies and the dominance of their company but now people like you or anyone else can get on and start trying to put it to social purposes is that the change?
A. Yes.
A. Yes.
Q. Describe that and what do you think what went wrong or how did I do not know there is a RE surges in those things happen again we are seek seeing people want to and T*EUFL?
SAUL: I am looking for forward to the next recession or depression or economic crash which everybody is talking about happening and it seems from the fragility of the US stock market or mortgage market in the US that maybe we are going to to be entering a second recession and I remember the dotcom bust and what happened after that -- that was a really interesting moment because, as part of the dotcom boom, there had been a lot of ancillary activity, a lot of free software development, a lot of development of very interesting technologies around the edges of the commercial exploitation of the web as a new commercial space and it was really in the aftermath of that, in the early naughties that a lot of what came to be known as social software emerged -- people began using Wikis and bloging and these things emerged as part of the landscape of communication that was in the mainstream but it was not monetised. It was not really part of that because the monetisation had happened with the previous wave of investment in web shops basically -- places where people could consume on line -- and they failed as commercial spaces but in the wake of that was a tremendous boom in social technologies and I think what happened in the mid naughties and, really, quite recently is people began investing in social technologies which then became this web 2.0 bubble and there has been a lot of investment in providing social infrastructures as a way of monetising social relationships and I think that is also proving to be a rather speculative and possibly not a very good investment, if you want to get a monetary return.
So, if, as looks like may happen, there is a spectacular stock market crash and all of the money drains out of the NASDAQ again, what we might be facing is a situation faced in which people really need to exchange things and the kinds of monetised economies of exchange that the web 2.0 bubble predicted don't come into being but people suddenly have all these tools that they can use to share and collaborate without having to resort to really direct monetary exchange or reliance on companies putting up huge amounts of venture capital to support their social technologies and, if people really feel comfortable with it and do it on a wide scale, I think there is a lot of opportunity for genuine social benefit.
Q. It is quite exciting the shift in relationships between the big companies and their users and I think already what you are talking about is happening and that companies are struggling to find a very direct biz models they are having to spread themselves KWAOEULT thin in the way that they are getting the money because they really can PEUS their customers off they can not SR*EF not got the (PWHRA* PWHRA* PWHRA*) control exactly the way they are perceived by their something so how deep do you feel that shift is where commercial power used to exist?
MIKEY: Is that one for me? Yes.
SAUL: (29.13) Well, I mean in terms of advertising I think we know where we stand on that level. I do not know if you want to saying say anything about that Mikey? I can if you want?
MIKEY: Well, I mean personally I do not think that you know -- I think that there is always going to be people making money and coorporations. They will find ways to exploit the situation. So I do not think it is kind of like the end of the commercial world as we know it really at all. But, you know, consumer power is going to get stronger for sure but, I mean, I do not think that -- is that that much power really? You know, I think the interesting thing -- I think that you know, rather than talking about companies, I think that it is going to be more interesting to talk about how these networks actually allow people to look at politics in a different way and represent themselves in a very kind of direct way about what they want and that is going to be a more powerful force because the relationship between the government and the people is much more of a kind of contract of we will look after you in some kind of way, whereas the commercial contract is not quite the same.
So to me I think there is much more potential in these networks actually becoming a source of kind of people actually being able to articulate their political view points more clearly and more effectively.
SAUL: (30.59) I think that is mirrored by the commercial transaction as well or predicted by the commercial transaction. It is true people are -- consumers are forming networks and communicating and directing the companies that provide them with products or services but actually their ability to provide themselves with those services is, I think, the most appealing opportunity that arises from the technical ability and people's familiarity with using their social networks to do what would have been called business but, actually, is just the mediation between people. It is not really a business as such to be able to phone a directory service. Actually, what you want is a number for somebody else. You are paying a middle man in a way or an intermediary in a transaction and that I think is predicted by the way that basically many businesses have been disintermediated by increased communication. I mean that is a jargonistic way of saying 'all the middle men in lots of different transactions are being cut out,' and the end point of that is that there really are very few middle men. There is just networks of consumers, producers, doing all kinds of wonderful things together and that is kind of utopian. It will not look like that. Companies will adapt to be able to enter those networks in a privileged position because they have more resources, but, hopefully, if people can communicate and can organise themselves as groups of consumers but also as groups of producers, which are not so dissimilar in a lot of ways, then the sophistication with which companies will have to address those people will be much more respectful and will really encourage them to produce more interesting better and more suitable and appropriate services and products.
Q. Great. We can go on to discuss that more deeply, particularly the political stuff, but could we first talk about the principles behind your work and how you sort of views a lot of these ideas how you see people that use your at the stage technology you are already PWRURG PWHRURB PWHRURG the PRAOURS ER customer PWOURPBD what would you say are the principles behind this?
SAUL: (33.43) Everybody has fun.
MIKEY: Nobody gets killed.
SAUL: Yes. That is basically the short version.
MIKEY: Yes, I think it is interesting that the word, or the terms, producer and consumer have come up because I guess the people speakers come from more of a kind of like entertainment kind of background and you could substitute the words consumer and producer with performer and audience. We don't like to look at the kind of set ups that we make in that way. It is more like participants and facilitator and I guess that a lot of what we try and do is try and create situations where people can participate but participate on their own terms. So a very important thing about everything that people speak, does, is as far as we can we allow people to set their own agenda in the projects that we do and we try and just create a system that allows people to do that.
SAUL: Or the strap line is that we create tools for the world to take over itself. So by that we really mean we don't just want people to participate in our projects. Whatever the products are that we are creating, we actually want to be able to pass those on. So, for example, directionless enquiries, we are actually developing this as a piece of open source software and we are hoping by doing that we will encourage institutions and organisations that want to have a more peer-led interaction with their communities, essentially, will use that to have access to telephony services so a good example would be that my sister works at the Royal Horticultural Society. Whenever they do any kind of campaign about a particular kind of plant -- for example they will have five hundred people phoning in to talk about (road den drums) -- they can not cope with that level of traffic, so it makes perfect sense for them to have this kind of community call centre, where in fact people can talk to each other about things that interest them within the auspices of their overall institutional or designation in the RHC and I think that that that kind of technology transfer from the projects we do is really what we would like to see mirrored in a wider social field and I think that is is likely to happen, certainly with this project I think.
MIKEY: Yes. I mean do you want us to say more about some of the other projects we do to give some context.
Q. Yes, I think they are relevant I think particularly 'who wants to be', if we could cover that quickly I think the principles of that are very good particularly the idea that it should not be dull and dry I think are important?
SAUL: (36.45) I do not know if it fits into the category of principle but all of our projects -- directionless enquiries is one, we also have a project called 'Who Wants To Be' which is a direct democracy gameshow where we use the ask the audience feature of the popular television show, 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' to get the audience to set a aganda and then decide what they, as a group, will do about it and we have done that in all kinds of contexts. I mean maybe you can describe that project a bit because it is quite emblamatic of the sorts of things we do and what we are interested in.
MIKEY: I mean in -- I will just explain it quickly. In its purest form it is like a theatre show really, where everybody pays £10 to get in to be a member of the audience and what that happens to that £10 is that it all gets put into a big cash pot and then the whole point of the show, the premise of the show, is that those people are going to decide what to do with that collected money and they we try to make that as entertaining as possible by immediately visualising -- using technology -- immediately visualising any suggestions that they make and having this kind of fun voting system which is loosely devised from who wants to be a millionaire, hence the name. But it is a very fun and dramatic experience where every member of the audience is very very involved, partly because they want to see something good happen to their £10 but it is amazing at the end of the show, everyone is just really buzzing and talking to each other and they get a lot out of it, even though most people's ideas would have been passed by, but they have contributed to this thing created on that night and it feels very special.
SAUL: That is actually just a meeting. It is a kind of council chamber voting session. All of the work that we do is really taking these incredibly mundane, what have become very mundane exchanges, because of the way they are institutionally mediated. Voting is a great example. Voting used to be exciting. It used to be something that people found really tantalising exciting, empowering. It was something that people fought and died for. It was something that you would think represents the pinnacle of our cultural achievement -- that we have developed a system of making decisions that can incorporate the views of the entire population of the country, with a few notable exclusions: of people under 18 --
MIKEY: Convicts?
SAUL: And convicts yes, and people who are not officially allowed to be in this country and economic migrants -- Anyway I am getting off the point because the point is it used to be exciting and it should be exciting and it is not exciting anymore and all of the things that we do are about taking these exchanges and dramatising them again and unfortunately, or fortunately, we have to use the language of television and the language of fun social media on the internet and all of these fun, shiney, bouncey, subject areas that get people excited and willing to participate but once you deliver something that is actually meaningful, that actually allows people to make a decision or help somebody or have a discussion that has a wider relevance and that is on the record, and you make it fun, it is credible how compelling it is, how willing people are to participate in these things because they are exciting. They are just bled dry by of that by the way that they are mediated.
Q. It is the brightness and the funness of what you are doing that makes it interesting, I think, because it is sort of the office making it normal making it part of peoples lives giving it to people in an format they are familiar with and also making it absolutely as clear as possible how they influence voting and that is what is good about 'Who Wants To Be' you see exactly the one they had video on the web site where they PW*EUF in quite a big sort of club I do not know but a event they are all familiar with it was part of their life and people turned up probably originally to vote for their mates but in the end they all get together and make good decisions and the money I do not know if you actually write checks there and then the money is there who do you think of those making it part of peoples lives and the account ability and the directness the directly seen what an you the person?
MIKEY: (42.00) I think those kind of initiatives are great. Yes, I mean I would slightly, I am still want to put my oar in about what Saul said a minute ago about the 'unfortunately we have to use these devices' because I actually think they are quite good devices and the principles of, like, phone-voting for X-factor or Pop Idol is quite a good and exciting or the Eurovision song contest. Why can they not do that are that for the Europeen Union. They can do. The technology is there. It has been proven.
SAUL: But what about the quality of the songs.
MIKEY: Don't, don't. You know those devices are there and people participate in them and people have spent time in thinking about how to make it fun and engaging but they are just doing it for the wrong reasons. They are doing it to in the case of facebook or google to dominate the world, rather than just to actually use them to help people out and, in the case of television, it is just like for the pure sake of entertainment when, actually, with one tiny little step, you can use those devices for something much more interesting and creative if you have a different belief about what people can do and if you really believe that people have imaginations and can use them. That is the only real difference. I actually respect all of those cultural developments in television and social networking sights.
SAUL: I think that democracy used to be about entertainment as much as anything else and that the public realm and the public sphere used to be a far more entertaining place and dangerous place and the risks that people took in that context were real -- the people you elected or deposed or executed or -- I am not saying we should bring back those kinds of rather brutal.
MIKEY: Unless people want them.
SAUL: Well, there is the question. This is always -- especially in England, where we have our wonderful parliamentary democracy and we have a moderate system of first past the post so we look after people's interests by actually unreflective certain -- lets not get into all that.
MIKEY: I want to go back to 1832. Or was it 1833? When there was a big parliamentary reform bill and there was a lot of opposition to that because a lot of the MPs had their rotten boroughs with their six constituents, all of whom was their relatives, and, you know, there was a great deal -- people the same way as now were very turned off about politics because it was a completely rigged system but now the technology moved on to make really every borough a rotten borough because everyone could make those decisions themselves and vote online and participate in direct democracy. The technology is there but obviously people -- the people that would be able to make those changes are the people that stand to lose out because they lose control.
