In February 2016 the first mainstream social networking site in the UK, Friends Reunited, closed down.
In the spring of 2003, while on a walking trip in Slovakia, a friend told me about the website Friends Reunited, and so, like thousands of other people, I thought it would be interesting to see what had happened to my classmates from school. Before the arrival of internet social networks, the lives and fates of old schoolmates, and others with whom you had lost contact, were unknown; and that was particularly true if you had moved away from your home area. So the opportunities provided by Friends Reunited were new and exciting.
The site offered a choice of institutions (schools, colleges, universities) to which people could add their name and details. But there was no doubt that the main institution attracting nostalgic curiosity was secondary school, with a special attachment to the leaving year, the time in your life, when you moved from childhood to adulthood, fell in love and deepened your friendships. I felt a need to connect to my former fellow pupils, who had accompanied me in my journey from child to adolescent, all of whom I had unintentionally lost contact with when I was sixteen in 1978. So then, aged forty, a new window was opening in cyberspace, which would satisfy my voyeuristic curiosity and would provide me a psychological bridge back to a formative period of my life.
Of course, I knew that Friends Reunited was not there primarily to reunite friends, but to make money. You had to negotiate your way through the flashing banners for dating agencies and get blocked whenever you want to say something that fell outside their template for nostalgia. In the early years of the site you were forbidden, unless you paid, to send your email address to anyone, or to write anything more than the most anodyne notes to others.
In 2003 there were themed notice boards on which you were invited to post your memories about your former school. On each one I decided to take up the theme and compose a written memory sketch, so the topics of my contributions were decided by Friends Reunited, not by me. No sooner had I finished than the notice boards were reserved for subscribing members (£5 and later £7.50 p.a). I never paid Friends Reunited anything, and nor would it seem did many other ex-students, so my posts for a long time retained their first place position on most of the boards.
At the end of decade the experiment which was Friends Reunited had been overtaken by other social networking sites such as Facebook. Friends Reunited abandoned its attempt to charge fees for ordinary members, made its service free and attempted to expand its social networking functions. By this time, however, most people, particularly the young, had lost interest in the site and new postings became fewer. And in January 2016 the site close down for good.
I abandoned Friends Reunited in the mid 2000s as a tool of communication, but occasionally used it thereafter as a source of reference. Yet there two things about Friends Reunited that could never be picked up on or improved by the newer social networks. One was the honesty of contributors. In the early days of social networking, people were far less internet savvy. They did not fear using their own names, or worry about what they said hanging around on the Internet for eternity. The other was textual completeness: they wrote a reasonably full exposition of what they wanted to say, not short comments to ongoing ephemeral debates, as with Twitter or Facebook messaging. All that, plus the fact that people were commenting on a single subject, namely their school years, gave much of the material at Friends Reunited an ongoing relevance and interest.
But most of all the closure removed access for ever to a mass of material, photos, chat and reminiscences, and did so far more effectively than water or fire could ever destroy paper records. Many think that the Internet serves to retain information for eternity, making no comment ever ephemeral, and indeed that is often true. But it is also true that millions of pages of information can be taken down, removed from servers and denied to future historians and memoirists. To be fair, Friends Reunited has provided (but for how long?) a facility for users to retrieve their own digital photos, but this does little to address the problem of the long-term loss of millions of reminiscences and other comments from public record.
We should not forget, however, that Friends Reunited from start to finish was primarily a business which acted to maximise profits, not to maintain public records. And although the commercialisation of private nostalgia is in many ways an ugly thing, Friends Reunited nevertheless provided a service which was of value to many.
31 May 2016
24 May 2016
England and Wales become more secular
Religious adherence in England and Wales continues to decline
A British Social Attitudes Survey published in May 2016 shows that the proportion of the population declaring themselves as adherents to a religion in England and Wales is continuing to decline. Nearly half of the population say they have no religion. The percentages are:
A British Social Attitudes Survey published in May 2016 shows that the proportion of the population declaring themselves as adherents to a religion in England and Wales is continuing to decline. Nearly half of the population say they have no religion. The percentages are:
Anglican
|
19,8
|
Other Protestant
|
15,7
|
Catholic
|
8,3
|
Non-Christian religion
|
7,7
|
No Religion
|
48,5
|
5 May 2016
Taking our cash away: the removal of high denomination notes
In May 2016 the European Central Bank announced that it would stop issuing EUR 500 notes in 2018.
The reason given for the abolition is that the high value note is used mainly for criminal and “grey” payments, so doing away with it will lessen tax evasion and more serious crime. Evidence for all this is a little thin, and my guess is that abolition will at best slightly hinder such payments.
Criminals use cars, but that it not a sufficient argument for their abolition. Ordinary people need cars, too. Likewise high denomination notes are mainly used by ordinary people for several purposes: to store their savings, to easily transport their money, to make instant payments, to avoid bank fees, and, of course, to make anonymous payments. The right to privacy in, say, buying a medical product does not signal any kind of criminality.
What the ECB is doing is quite simply diminishing, albeit slightly, people’s freedom, and handing power to fee-sucking banks and to the surveillance state.
Of course the situation is much better in the Eurozone than it is in Britain, where the highest denomination note is GBP 50, around 63 Euros at the time of writing. British shopkeepers often gasp in horror whenever a “fifty” is tendered. And today in Britain even the GBP 50 note is under threat of abolition to make cash retention, transfer and payment more difficult.
The right to hold one’s money in cash is a fundamental. Phasing out the EUR 500, but retaining the EUR 200 and EUR 100, both greater in value than the British GBP 50, is no huge deal. But going any further down this road is.
The reason given for the abolition is that the high value note is used mainly for criminal and “grey” payments, so doing away with it will lessen tax evasion and more serious crime. Evidence for all this is a little thin, and my guess is that abolition will at best slightly hinder such payments.
Criminals use cars, but that it not a sufficient argument for their abolition. Ordinary people need cars, too. Likewise high denomination notes are mainly used by ordinary people for several purposes: to store their savings, to easily transport their money, to make instant payments, to avoid bank fees, and, of course, to make anonymous payments. The right to privacy in, say, buying a medical product does not signal any kind of criminality.
What the ECB is doing is quite simply diminishing, albeit slightly, people’s freedom, and handing power to fee-sucking banks and to the surveillance state.
Of course the situation is much better in the Eurozone than it is in Britain, where the highest denomination note is GBP 50, around 63 Euros at the time of writing. British shopkeepers often gasp in horror whenever a “fifty” is tendered. And today in Britain even the GBP 50 note is under threat of abolition to make cash retention, transfer and payment more difficult.
The right to hold one’s money in cash is a fundamental. Phasing out the EUR 500, but retaining the EUR 200 and EUR 100, both greater in value than the British GBP 50, is no huge deal. But going any further down this road is.
4 May 2016
Antisemitism: the denunciation campaign
False claims of antisemitism are deployed to discredit the political left
The spring of 2016 has seen a bombardment of charges of antisemitism aimed at left-wing members of the Labour Party. The denunciation campaign, fuelled by the Tory Party, the Labour Right and reinforced by the press, with the liberal Guardian bating the pack, has led to the suspension of numerous members, including Labour’s former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone.
No-one but a fool would believe that that the denunciation campaign results from the sudden discovery that the Labour Party is constituted by ranks of Jew-hating Holocaust deniers, particularly as several of the people suspended are Jewish themselves. Indeed, the Labour Party is one of the places in British society where one is least likely to encounter antisemitism, or racism of any kind. The reasons for the denunciations are much more cynical. They serves two separate but related purposes: first, a drive to undermine the Corbyn leadership by smearing his supporters; and second an attempt to de-legitimise criticism of Israel by claiming such criticism is antisemitism.
It is worthwhile stating clearly what antisemitism is, and what it is not. Verbal and written antisemitism includes calling for discriminatory action to be taken against Jewish people, insulting them, or identifying people only because of of their ethnic origin. Antisemitism is about the attachment of negative characteristics, physical or cultural, to Jewish people solely on account of their ethnicity. It is about the peddling of myths, the purpose of which is to cast Jews in a bad light. Statements which are true are not antisemitic unless the purpose in uttering them is to fuel antisemitism.
The spring of 2016 has seen a bombardment of charges of antisemitism aimed at left-wing members of the Labour Party. The denunciation campaign, fuelled by the Tory Party, the Labour Right and reinforced by the press, with the liberal Guardian bating the pack, has led to the suspension of numerous members, including Labour’s former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone.
No-one but a fool would believe that that the denunciation campaign results from the sudden discovery that the Labour Party is constituted by ranks of Jew-hating Holocaust deniers, particularly as several of the people suspended are Jewish themselves. Indeed, the Labour Party is one of the places in British society where one is least likely to encounter antisemitism, or racism of any kind. The reasons for the denunciations are much more cynical. They serves two separate but related purposes: first, a drive to undermine the Corbyn leadership by smearing his supporters; and second an attempt to de-legitimise criticism of Israel by claiming such criticism is antisemitism.
It is worthwhile stating clearly what antisemitism is, and what it is not. Verbal and written antisemitism includes calling for discriminatory action to be taken against Jewish people, insulting them, or identifying people only because of of their ethnic origin. Antisemitism is about the attachment of negative characteristics, physical or cultural, to Jewish people solely on account of their ethnicity. It is about the peddling of myths, the purpose of which is to cast Jews in a bad light. Statements which are true are not antisemitic unless the purpose in uttering them is to fuel antisemitism.
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