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Wednesday 23 July 2008

Charlie does surf. Meet the new wizard of the web

Charles Leadbeater tells Matthew d’Ancona about the riches to be mined from online collaboration — and says that the Conservatives have a chance to launch a new form of politics

‘The web’s potential for good,’ he says, ‘stems from the open, collaborative and even communal culture it inherited from its birthplace in academia and from the counter-culture of the 1960s, combined with pre-industrial ingredients it has resurrected, folk culture and the commons as a shared basis for productive endeavour.’ It is, in other words, ‘a peculiar mixture of the academic, the hippie, the peasant and the geek’.

Some would add ‘the bully’ to that list. Leadbeater acknowledges the concerns that come with such disruptive technology: loss of professional authority; loss of individual-ity; degradation of friendship and reflection. So what happens when ‘We-Think’ becomes ‘We-Sneer’, the intolerant voice of the herd towards its weaker members?

‘That’s not new,’ he says. ‘We are, of course, intensely concerned by how we’re seen by others — the web hasn’t created bullying or flattery or sycophancy. The question is more whether growing up in that way makes you more concerned to please your peers, to get a good rating. That might be so but again I think that’s a sort of old person’s worry, actually.’ He points at himself and at me when he says ‘old person’, by the way.

‘When young people navigate these things they are quite good at understanding what the limits are, and what not to do. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be concerned with bullying and with people who are exploited — but I don’t think it is a killer objection.’ Teenagers, he says, are developing their own web etiquette and conventions that will govern the way they interact in decades to come.

As for our democracy, he agrees that political practice is light years behind what is possible and, indeed, necessary if politicians are to keep pace with this revolution in social practice. ‘They seem so out of touch and so behind, really.’ Gordon Brown has shown little passion for the web. Blair, Leadbeater recalls, ‘was clueless about it, had no idea. He thought it was terribly exciting in principle, but to see him on a computer was hilarious.’

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