Thoughtland

PK column in The National: YouTube’s most disliked video ever is its 2018 recap. What’s going on?

By Pat Kane. First published on DECEMBER 14TH, 2018

THE story certainly caught the eye. YouTube’s most disliked video ever – having just received more than 10 million thumbs-down icons on the digital platform – turned out to be YouTube’s own 2018 “Rewind” video. This is the company’s annual celebration of what it regards as the year’s best content, made by users.

(Incidentally, this beats Justin Bieber’s “Baby” music video into second place for most hated clip. Well, there’s no accounting for taste.)

PK column in The National: Three decades since its advent, is it time the internet grew up?

By Pat Kane. First published on SEPTEMBER 29TH, 2018

In these highly polarised times, we should note when there seems to be unity across the parties. The effects of online abuse on female participation in politics appears to be one of those overlaps.

In the last seven days, both Theresa May and UK Labour’s shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, have highlighted how much social media, and its hordes of screen-jabbing misogynists, dishearten and discourage women politicians – both actual and aspiring.

PK column in The National: Technology can be good for the soul ... when seen as a tool and not a drug

By Pat Kane. First published on JULY 8TH, 2017

IT’S graduation day, with two happy sets of families around a table in Birmingham.

And everyone’s smart devices are being used in a variety of all-too-human ways. There is a 14-year-old girl whose sputtering, shattered phone is vital to her very being. She is awkwardly tethered to my barely-long-enough power cable, which is stuck into a dusty socket behind the booth. She taps and stabs away impassively.

But there has also been much joyous image-taking by all the generations. Some are editing the burst-mode shot of a mortar board thrown up into the air. Others are enjoying a live video clip of The Boy Himself receiving his hard-won degree, huge pride all round.

PK column in The National: Encrypting a cyber back door merely risks putting the key in hands of terrorists

By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 7TH, 2015

THERE is one thing to be said for Theresa May’s proposals this week, contained in her Investigatory Powers Bill, to make the UK “the most intrusive and least accountable surveillance regime in the West” (tweets Edward Snowden).

At least the argument is now firmly in the wide open spaces of public debate. We don’t need to wait for a Bond movie to ponder the perennial question of “who watches the watchmen”: that is, how we, the people consciously permit our security to be defended.

The technology in question isn’t invisible Aston Martins or exploding watches. It’s the Tory Government’s attempt to use the all-pervading social presence of the internet, and turn it into the ultimate “dragnet”.

Snowden famously let us know that all our “private” cyber-interactions were being traced, searched and read by GCHQ and other US agencies. May accepts all that – and now wants to be able to pursue it to the max, under some process of judicial and political permission.

I know. It’s hard to separate our heads and hearts from the horror of a Daesh beheading video. Or from the vast shadowy bulks of superpowers like China and Russia, moving purposefully behind the veil of the foreign news pages. How will their actions reframe reality today, tomorrow? Who will protect us from all this?

But we must try to be citizens, and at least deal with the polity that we can directly affect. We can think through the question of how our open digital society relates to the demands of national security. And we can think of it as indy-minded Scots, as well as reluctant Brits.

Take the idea that commercial digital companies should allow the UK Government to build a “back door” into all encrypted software – to be opened only in extremis, of course. There has already been much informed pushback.

Encrypted data is coded by senders in a way that means only receivers can “unlock” what has been sent to them. Nowadays, encryption tools are incredibly powerful. Indeed, some of the most powerful, like Tor, were originally devised by the US Navy. As an openly available resource, Tor doesn’t just enable US spying, but also the activism and plotting of all kinds of radicals – and there seems to be no “back door” installable.

The spectre of Islamist or anti-Western radicals using cryptography to coordinate their attacks is thus enabled, like many other of their angry threats, by our own actions and interventions. A lasting and painful irony.

Cryptography is also pretty banal and high-street these days. Many non-baddies who provide secure online services – like banking, or health, or many of our streamed online entertainments – are just straightforwardly alarmed at how this measure would evaporate their customers’ trust.

But even on their own security terms, the simplest knock-down of the Tories’ scheme would seem to be this. If we let this government, or any government, hold an encryption “mega-key” (the code that unlocks any and all back doors), then what happens if the key falls into the wrong, or at least the alternatively motivated hands?

This would make the principled whistleblowing of Manning or Snowden, never mind the tawdry data-hacking of commercial service providers like TalkTalk or the dating site Ashley Madison, look like minor street scuffles. Data access, for the ill-intentioned, would be total.

Could this happen? Consider our leak-ridden culture: what do you think? The ex-Lib Dem MP Julian Huppert, now teaching at Oxford University, gives a simple example of what could go wrong. (In case you hear “Lib Dem” and switch off ... while in the Coalition, Huppert was instrumental in blocking the last Tory attempt at state cyber control, known then as the “Snoopers Charter”).

Huppert recently wrote about the clumsy pratfall of the Transport Security Administration in the US. In response to passengers who feared their suitcases might be susceptible to interference by random handlers in airports, the TSA created approved luggage locks which only TSA keys were able to open.

Unfortunately, in a Washington Post article praising the initiative, someone in the accompanying photo posed with a set of the master keys clearly visible. The photo had enough resolution to enable people to copy the keys and make 3D copies. The TSA scheme is now utterly useless.

Scale that up to the level of a busy, and ever more digitally reliant society. One all-too-human slip, and the government encryption back door could make us all hugely more vulnerable to cyber-violation – not less.

The question of what security arrangements we would make in an independent Scotland hovers over all of this. Our current situation is a curious mix of the passive and the misguided.

The passive element continues to be the inability for Scots to put some distance between themselves and the interventionist belligerence of Westminster – whether it’s Middle-East raids, or defying nuclear non-proliferation with Trident renewal, or indeed an illiberal and intrusive cyber-surveillance. We wave our fists, then watch them act.

This networked planet is a flow of overt communication and images, as well as covert messages – a realm of “soft power”, as the diplomats call it. An independent Scotland could use its distinct security arrangements as a soft power strategy.

We would tell the world we are a non-nuclear nation, with a humanitarian-only defence force, actively seeking to be involved in conflict prevention and mediation, and committed to transparency and accountability to the greatest possible extent.

Independence would let the frustrated and alienated of the planet know of our good intent, which we’d be wise to follow up with consistent actions. Given how easily anyone’s malevolence can reach anywhere through global network, this may be our ultimate safety strategy.

However, we are where we are. It’s frustrating enough that an aggressive cyber-policy is largely led from the south of England – the major data cables come in to the UK at Bude, Cornwall, and Cheltenham’s GCHQ is the obvious behemoth driving all surveillance.

But even within our narrow powers, I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favours (the misguided bit).

The world-class computing science departments of Scottish universities would be a research asset to a fledgling nation-state, trying to figure out how to get the cyber-security balance right.

However, as far as I can see, there is already a huge amount of Scots integration with the US/UK security state. 

Take Edinburgh University’s Academic Research Institute, which actively works with GCHQ. Or Police Scotland, inviting the FBI over to a cybercrime conference this coming December.

Police Scotland might also be part of the problem in another way. There is a consistent retort to the idea that the internet should simply become a “dragnet” of information, wide open for security forces to freely navigate. The retort is we could be wasting time, technology and resources making sense of an unfathomably giant mountain of data. 

“We are unnecessarily expanding the haystacks while we search for the needles”, said one National Security Agency insider this year.

Many experts say that if domestic terrorism and crime is our biggest threat, then it’s the police and security force’s strong social relations with the wider community – and the trust that people place in it – that brings the best results.

Can we say that Police Scotland – centralised away from its localities, strutting its paramilitary uniforms through our high streets and stop-and-searching with impunity, enthusiastically promoting advanced CCTV – is really on a mission to build up trust with the various communities of Scotland?

And as for the real James Bonds … It’s worth noting that the current Spectre movie is, to say the least, thoroughly sceptical about the powers of an all-seeing digital security system. 

Entrusting our national security to misogynistic killers like 007? Probably not. And in any case, it still matters precisely what nation we’re talking about.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today)

The National column: Innovation can be at the heart of our nation if we give it the help it needs

My Saturday column for The National, Oct 3, 2015 (online version, PDF page file). 

Note: the column generated some useful and enlightening comments on The National site from Mark Sorsa-Leslie, an entrepreneur who had direct experience of Finnish state support of his start-up in the 2000s. I append it for interest below the fold of this blog. 

Innovation can be at the heart of our nation if we give it the help it needs

Pat Kane for The National

LEADING business-friendly female Scots politician caught giving public money to risk-laden private enterprises! Or: Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement this week of a £78 million, helping smooth the way to Scotland as an “innovation nation”, no less. 

You may well roll your eyes back till the scary white bits show – particularly if you’ve been the subject (or more accurately object) of some “innovation” programme in your workplace. But roll them back downwards: this really matters.

Like any other developed-world economy, Scotland needs to find a way to raise itself steadily out of its own deficit hole, the sides made slippery with fiscal, demographic and many other challenges. 

Making new stuff that the planet wants to buy or use is at least something we can actively get on with. It’s also based on a national resource which is in potentially infinite supply: the imagination and energy of our people. 

But there are some unresolved dilemmas at the heart of innovation policy that we’re steadily working our way through in Scotland. One key debate is about where best to put public money, in order to generate the most powerfully innovative companies. The two contending approaches seem to be “upstream” and “downstream” innovation. 

“Upstream” innovation is recognisable from the pages of Wired magazine, or movies such as The Social Network. Nesta, the innovation charity (to which, let me disclaim, I am contracted as a curator) describes “upstream” as the combination of “cutting-edge university research, entrepreneurial finance, and fast-growing new businesses, especially but not only in the technology sector”. 

The metaphor means, I guess, that innovation comes best from incredibly fertile and powerful initial conditions. Innovation is a ground-breaking force, bursting through the crust of convention and complacency, providing a new flow of possible products and services. 

You can see how this fits with the heroic-entrepreneur narrative that frames American innovators such as the electric-car pioneer Elon Musk, or the late Steve Jobs (the Apple founder about to be mythologised in a film by Danny Boyle).

Where public money comes into this model is an acute question. The economist Marianna Mazzucato – who now finds herself both on Sturgeon’s Scottish Council of Economic Advisers, and on Corbyn’s Economic Advisory Committee – has caused a stir over the past few years with a very effective conference routine. 

She holds up an iPhone (which popular mythology says sprung whole and entire from the hippie capitalist brain of Mr Jobs). She then itemises all the parts of its machinery and software which relied on state-funded, blue-skies primary research – a lot of it (but not all) from the US defence budget. 

Private companies don’t have the capacity to make these visionary techno-scientific commitments. Yet, as entrepreneurial enterprises, they benefit from using the fruits of this public research. 

Why, asks Mazzucato, can’t the state also be an entrepreneur? Just like the venture capitalists, why can’t the state get a direct return on its investment – and particularly from these potentially mega-profitable companies who have directly benefitted from state-sponsored science? 

Looking at Scotland today, you can imagine Professor Mazzucato’s ideas finding traction. This week we found Scotland has more top-rated research universities per head of population than any other country.

Read any reporting on innovation in Scotland, and you can see how much this country is abreast of the 21st century’s most transformative sci-tech. Medical neuroscience, gaming, renewable energy, genomics ... The building-blocks of an age of plenty and wonder are right at the heart of our ancient universities’ research interests.

So “upstream” innovation, as in the Silicon Valley model, would seem to fit the way things are in Scotland. But we’re missing something – indeed, quite a few things. 

One is that we don’t have America’s (or even London’s) density of venture capitalists, those San Fran moguls who are willing to risk their private investments in university start-ups, but also know they have a vast internal market in the US – one that can absorb failure and amplify success.

So for small nations, the state has to step in as investor – as it does in many other successful small and innovative countries, like Finland, Estonia or Israel. Yet as readers of this paper may keenly appreciate, the Scottish state currently lacks some of the necessary powers required. 

A serious, multi-billion national innovation investment bank is what nation-state independence would have allowed us to set up. The “Scottish Business Development Bank” – mentioned in the SNP’s May manifesto and building on Scottish Enterprise’s small fund – is an on-off project that doesn’t look like it will remotely hit the mark. 

As for this week’s announced fund, the STUC’s Stephen Boyd – a sharp watcher of innovation policy – welcomed its arrival. But Boyd also cautioned it was “a mistake for the First Minister to present the new fund as a potentially transformative measure. It’s nowhere near the scale necessary to overcome Scotland (and the UK’s) most damaging structural problem: the failure of the financial sector to support growing, innovative businesses with patient, committed capital.”

The new fund is clearly flowing in at the other end of our watery metaphor – what’s called “downstream” innovation. Downstream innovation doesn’t wait for the next paradigm-changing new invention, but looks much more closely at what existing companies in the marketplace need from R&D. 

Downstream innovation tries to redirect university departments away from what Nesta calls “curiosity-driven basic research”, towards “more applied research and technological development and deployment”. It also expands the meaning of innovation away from the techno-Eureka! moment. Downstreamers look for new ideas that work at the level of daily business practice – pricing, location, marketing, etc. 

Now I understand the hands-on spirit here, a Scotland that “CanDo” (the official branding for the “innovation nation”). Whatever Scotland is, it ain’t no Cupertino, CA. So what do we actually have, and how can we make the best of it? 

The Nesta research identifies one more advantage small nations have: the ability to sweep up people in a “national mission” for innovation. A story that says ideas are encouraged from society, culture and daily life, as well as from the labs of brainiacs, is to be entirely welcomed. 

Hugh MacDiarmid’s old aspiration for this kind of society still inspires me: “I never set een on a lad or a lass/but I wonder gin he or she/Wi’ a word or a deed’ll suddenly dae/An impossibility”. Look out for the Unusual Suspects Festival later this month in Glasgow, which aims to foment this everyday culture of innovation. 

However, just a wee hold-on-a-minute. We don’t want any unnecessary inferiorism here; the implication that radical, world-changing innovation is “no’ for the likes o’ us”. Go online and you can find an overly-cute web cartoon from Scottish Enterprise that preaches the downstream message, under the headline that “innovation isn’t rocket science”. 

But we should still find a way for innovation to be rocket science as well. In recent years, Scottish scientists have zoomed in to the tiniest scrap of our biology (Ian Wilmut divining the process of cloning with Dolly the Sheep), or zoomed out to the most fundamental particle of our cosmos (Peter Higgs’s anticipation of the Higgs-Boson).

We should try to support the stream of innovation at its sparkling, elemental, daring source, as well as conduct our trade routes across its wide forths and basins. An “ImagiNation” – the free thought of scientists and artists, supported to follow their curiosity – should always sit behind an “Innovation Nation”. The makar and the maker are fellow visionaries in Scotland’s future.

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Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Why Wikileaks should be an asset for the brand called democracy

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - thoughts on the Wikileaks controversy. A huge moment for net-activists everywhere, where the openness of the web as a structure meets the self-defined boundaries of state power. High stakes, no matter your assessment of Assange. All comments welcomed. [All research links are at the bottom of the piece, in extended entry, as well as hotlinked in the text]

* * *

For those of us who have marvelled (and sometimes quivered) at the truly revolutionary power of the internet, the current Wikileaks phenomenon is the point where all the hype and idealism hits the hard reality of global politics.

The stream of US diplomatic cables, managed into the public realm by respectable news organisations like the Guardian and the New York Times, has freaked the US establishment so much that it's shaken the network society like a rag-doll. They've not just brought cyber-brandnames like Amazon and Paypal to heel, but they've even put the squeeze on Visa and Mastercard, in their attempt to choke Assange's organisational windpipe.

Now the Wikileaks' founder is under arrest, we'll see whether the tentacles of American power extend even further into the extradition procedures of another sovereign state (ah, I think we know the answer to that one). But as the circus proceeds, and the adversaries line up on either side - defenders of diplomatic statecraft on one hand, anarchistic unravellers of state power on another - perhaps we can look at all this from another angle.

It's not just national governments who've had to respond to the Net's x-rays of transparency. Since the heydays of Naomi Klein's No Logo in 1999, brand-led corporate capitalism has been grappling with motivated activists who want to rub countervailing facts in the face of glowing public rhetoric.

And a decade later, it's clearly had an effect. Recent consumer surveys have found that only 9% of people trusted companies to act in their best interests (60% said "sometimes", and 31% said "never"). In the current context, three reasons are often cited. First, the financial crisis was the final act that confirmed consumer cynicism about the worth of corporate governance and the business sector in general.

Secondly, our mobile media allows us to filter our own information, untouched by the gatekeepers of traditional media. And lastly, the social web allows us to prioritise the opinions of our friends, family and peers over the thudding messages of top-down branding. 

In this environment, where information about the sharp-dealing or shady practices of a company are easily and speedily circulated, a new philosophy of marketing is emerging. Instead of pushing people into a preferred way of engaging with a product, companies are now beginning to share their problems (and solutions) with consumers.

Instead of promoting a product's worth, they try to propagate it, encouraging creative use (and even mis-use) of an "adaptive" brand. Instead of business being all about getting straight to the purchase, it should be about participation. In the words of the UK marketing company New Tradition, you "cement a connection with the consumer" through an open platform (like Facebook) "who may or may not purchase a product at a later date". 

Thirdly, branding shouldn't be about generating loyalty, but about associating your product with like-minded people, or intrinsically interesting ideas, that already have an existing and vibrant following.

It's easy to get a sense of the old days of business by watching any episode of Mad Men. Here you have a patriarchy of secretive, arrogant image-builders, unremittingly cynical about how they manage the gap between the aspirational images of advertising they pump out, and the sordid reality of poor products and corrupt business practice.

Now, what does that sound like? And how does that map over to our current clash between the world of nation-state diplomacy and statecraft, and the anarchistic information-idealism of Wikileaks and their allies? Pretty well, in many ways. The political classes of the developed West have been largely mistrusted for at least a decade now - and let's not forget our own local data-driven crisis, the Telegraph's drip-feed of information about MP's expenses.

The street-level disrespect of social media is never-ending, all-pervasive, democratically exhilarating. On a tiny level, I've particuarly enjoyed the website featuring four YouTube videos of Nick Clegg implacably opposing tuition fees before the UK General Election - "on a loop for ever and ever and ever", as the cheeky website owner says.

But as marketer Ian Thomas says, Wikileaks really raises the game here - expanding the ambition of this informational scrutiny from a national to a global level of governance, appropriate to where the real power of decision operates.

Yet what does this scrutiny reveal? There's been a storm of interpretation of what impact the cables so far released will have. Writers like John Naughton, Glenn Greenwald and Assange himself claim that out of the blizzard of material, we can now see that our leaders have always known that Afghanistan is a hopeless, corrupt, Vietnam-like quagmire - but that they cannot fully face their tax-paying, soldier-expending electorates with that fact.

Added to the Iraq disclosures of a few months ago, this is Wikileaks attempting to lay bare the infernal mechanisms of the "War on Terror". They regard themselves as a "fifth estate" practising what Assange calls "scientific journalism" - a data dump so comprehensive that it will spur the fourth estate to rise out of its investigative torpor and establishment collusion.

But beyond the bloodthirsty ravings of some members of the American establishment, there is another consistent take on Cablegate - which is that they show an American diplomatic service trying to do their best, as their post-Cold-War empire slowly declines. For them, as Neal Ascherson puts it, "preventing [nuclear] apocalypse has become more important than striving for world leadership... this is a diplomacy clearer about what it doesn't want than what it does". 

In the aftermath of all this, let's return to our brand discussion. If we think of Western statecraft and diplomacy as a brand now damaged and tarnished by the demystifications of info-activism - as the Nikes, Gaps and Shell Oils had been in the past - how should they respond?

For one thing, that intriguing netherworld - where politicians and diplomats conduct gentlemanly double-bluffs between the members of unaccountable power elites - will now never be the same. And if they think that any amount of new regulation, individual imprisonment, or coercion of networks will return them to the status quo ante, they are deluded. 

So perhaps they should listen to these clever brand marketers. Instead of pushing hard their right to conduct international double-speak in order to promote the nation's interests, maybe they should share out those same global problems with all those citizens who may want a voice in the process.

What's the geopolitical equivalent of the vibrant users' online forum, where all can go to explore, inquire and test out solutions? How can statecraft tap into the kinds of participative enthusiasm for peace-making, community-building and conflict-resolving that so many netizens already display? Gordon and Sarah Brown's new website lauds the activist network Avaaz as exactly this kind of endeavour. 

And as large brands now look towards associating the values of their product or service with authentic movements and social groups, perhaps there is a future concordat to be struck between Wikileaks-style organisations and their currently enraged American pursuers?

As Evgeny Morozov wrote in the Financial Times earlier this week, Assange's movement could become "either a new Red Brigades, or a new Transparency International...But handled correctly, the state that will benefit most from a nerdy network of 21st-century Che Guevaras, is America itself".

At the very least, we have an immediate branding glitch: Hilary Clinton was making speeches about the power of free information to create healthy societies only a few months ago, but is now squeezing the fibre-optics of the internet like the most enthusiastic Chinese firewall manager.

As Morozov says, better to harness the power of these hackers "as useful allies of the West as it seeks to husband democracy and support human rights" - that is, make them a complement of Western soft power or public diplomacy - than to martyr their main representative and thus radicalise his followers. 

The leaked US embassy cables themselves hardly show a steely American empire bent on world domination - more a faltering hegemon, resigned to world mitigation. A YouTube video of John F. Kennedy has been flying around the wiki-sphere. In it, JFK reminds his fellow citizens that the very First Amendment the Founders struck was to guarantee a free press, empowered to investigate and criticise the state. There's surely some grounds there for mutual understanding.

When the current idiocies die down, perhaps the cerebral Obama can channel his great Democratic forbear, and think his way through to a better accomodation with the Wikileakers - whose aim, as Assange has often said, is to make themselves unnecessary. Barack was, after all, Brand No. 1 for a while.

Map of Thoughtland: Urban Learning Space [archive]

Urban Learning Space was established with core funding from Scottish Enterprise Glasgow. We are working with people around Scotland to address real life challenges. Our network of experts are using transformational design practice to promote individuals' capacities for change. Nurturing an innate capacity for learning by using collaborative design processes, we create new approaches. These range from the building of creativity tools to support innovation, transforming public spaces into learning landscapes, and harnessing emerging technologies to explore new learning contexts

via www.labgroup.org.uk

 

Strange what the Net can recover. Thoughtland was involved in a vibrant, Glasgow-based think-tank called Urban Learning Space in the mid-2000's, which was funded to explore new kinds of technology-enabled learning in city environments.

Closed down in 2009, we decided on a whim to see what traces remained... and found this archive of podcasts of their seminar series from its final years. Presentations by the futurist Michel Bauwens, ex-Microsoft guru Chris Yapp, and the educationalist Stephen Heppell are particularly useful. Download them before a gust of digital wind blows them finally away.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Linda Norgrove & Shirley Manson - what these "wandering Scotswomen" can teach us about our diaspora

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - noting the conjunction in one morning's Scottish papers of two brilliant young women of the Scottish diaspora - joyously Shirley Manson from Garbage, and tragically Linda Norgrove's funeral in Lewis. Two wandering Scots, illustrating each side of the contradictions and paradoxes of Scottish diaspora. All comments welcomed.

***

Two daughters of the Scottish diaspora came home the other day, under very different clouds. Shining out of Wednesday's papers were the features of Shirley Manson, the Edinburgh born-and-forged lead singer of US indie titans Garbage, giving solid advice to music students in Paisley: "there's two things you have to accept in this industry - poverty, and a huge element of failure".

Elsewhere, a different measure of poverty and failure, but also a tear-inducing celebration of a life nobly lived: the Lewis funeral of the 36-year old aid worker Linda Norgrove, killed in the course of a raid in her kidnappers in Afghanistan. The moment was a beautifully mixter-maxter of elements - a humanist service, with the coffin passed along hundreds of mourners in best Hebridean tradition, under lowering grey skies.

Two emotionally-contrasting scenes of confident, globally-minded Scotswomen - one sparking the fires of creative aspiration to the very heights, the other kindling a flame of compassion and service in the most demanding of circumstances. The Scottish nationalist matriarch Winnie Ewing once coined the snappiest of slogans about the desire for nation-state independence: Stop the world - we want to get on.

True, I agree: I'll vote for that. But stories like these make you realise that we're already on the whirl, at least: the Scottish diaspora as a vast scattering of capable humans across the entrepots, trade routes and trouble-spots of this planet - a scattering that has been going on for many centuries, containing a multitude of dramas right across the human spectrum.

I've been thinking about the relations between homeland and global adventure as a result of a consulting gig I've just undertaken - an advisor with a new social network aimed at serving the Scottish diaspora in all its manifestations, called Kiltr.

Yes, the joke is double-edged: as well as being a Jockular version of what Facebook and LinkedIn are already doing, it's also a tool for balancing the various info-streams of contemporary living. But the question of what the diaspora actually means for Scotland, what kind of a resource it is for the nation, is a fascinating one, no matter the medium that services it.

In September the Scottish government outlined its Diaspora Engagement Plan, a robust document that delivered effective statistics ("20% of the Scottish-born population live outside of Scotland, and estimates put Scotland's international Diaspora population at around 40 million") and many useful categories (there are, apparently, six types of diaspora Scots: Reverse, Returning, New, Lived, Ancestral and Affinity).

There is a battery of networking initiatives already in place - some capitalising on the impact of the Homecoming and the prospect of the Commonwealth Games, some more business- and research-oriented. And there are also some hearth-warming ambitions for diaspora policy. They're aiming to return flows of capital - whether financial, intellectual or culture - from successful Scots around the world. But they also want to create a "community of mind", using the expected digital and convivial means, whereby an "idea" of the country can engage Scots-lovers (as well as Scots-born or -descended) in the fate of the nation going forward - what the document calls "reverse" and "affinity" Scots.

All very Panglossian, and with the orotund uplift of messrs Russell, Salmond and the rest of the SNP expertocracy resounding through it (which is not necessarily a bad thing). But in a search for more context, I asked the Holyrood office to send me a DVD of the Scottish Diaspora Forum held at the Parliament building in July 2009. 

By far the most interesting contribution was historian Tom Devine's keynote on the history of disapora - and particularly on the "intellectual honesty", rather than "myth and Romanticism" (as he put it), that should inform any such "community of the mind".

On the upside, the 800 year constancy of the Scottish disapora - a continuous outflow of capable chancers, fetching up everywhere in Europe but particularly in Poland - gives an explanation for the Scottish Enlightenment which doesn't just rely on the benefits of Union. Our long-standing trade in European ideas - indicated by the great medieval University of Paris having 19 Scots rectors since its founding - shows a deeper grounding.

On the downside, our most notable historic feature of diaspora has been what Devine called "men of violence" - the mercenaries much in demand during Europe's bloody 17th century wars, or the "ethnic garrison" of Presybterian Scots imported to Ulster in succeeding centuries.

And as he rightly pointed out, we have to reckon with the "very-difficult-to-imagine hegemony" of Glasgow over the Maryland and Virginia tobacco plantations, or of Scots throughout the Caribbean colonies and other outposts of empire and exploitation: a "darker impact" of diaspora that should not be mitigated. All those Scots names in the Jamaican phonebook, and not there by choice either.

Yet we can make a return to our two inspiring diaspora Scotswomen at the top by considering Devine's central point: his "paradox of Scottish emigration". Why does the record show that even when Scotland was the very height of modernity - the second richest nation on earth at the peak of Empire - our flows of emigration were as constant and enormous as they ever were?

The historian's answer lies in the sheer extremes of Scottish development. A lingering Reformation commitment to mass education and skilled trades, combined with the bitter economic hardship of many at the sharp end of industrial and agricultural revolutions, meant that many took flight to new lands - but armed with the confidence that their skills and talents could flourish.

Devine closed by suggesting that this weight of history might to some degree overdetermine the current global image of Scotland, obscuring the recent transformations of Scottish society: "the Scotland of 1950 is much closer to 1850 than it is to today... We need to demonstrate to the diaspora that, if many left the country because of negative forces, there's been a vast improvement".

Though Shirley Manson's training ground was more Miss Selfridge and punk clubs than Linda Norgrove's degree in environmental studies from Aberdeen University, both would seem to be driven by the "positive forces" fuelling Scottish disapora. They have used their modern upbringing in this developed, sophisticated country as a springboard for personal ambition - enabling a very familiar kind of Scottish wandering across the globe, but still with evident connections to the homeland (however happily or tragically expressed).

Part of a plan of to engage our diaspora would have to be the creation of platforms that curate such stories - sexy and cool, tragic and noble, and every other kind. These platforms would bring the grand ambitions of Scottish global progress down to the level of the everyday, the idealistic and the quixotic. And let's not forget, as Devine would remind us, that our military diaspora is still kicking its boots in the dusts of foreign lands. At the very least, these "global Scots" (and the question of their deployment, under what sovereign power) should not be excluded from the conversation.

If we steer our discussion about the diaspora by the lights of "intellectual honesty", it won't just be a cosy place, filled with the cultural consolations of clan and tartanry, or of indie and pop culture (the delightful musings gathered by the emigre website Dear Scotland). Amidst the joys of pleasant connection and mutual support that the modern world of communication affords, sparks will and should fly. To stay "on-kilter" implies a necessary dynamism in the first place.

Map of Thoughtland: New Media Scotland

New Media Scotland is a national development agency fostering artist and audience engagement with all forms of new media practice....Our programme supports forms of emergent practice. We seek to innovate and challenge, aesthetically, technically and conceptually. We're excited by projects that blur boundaries, respond to developments in science and technology, and forge new ways ahead for digital culture.

via www.mediascot.org

If you're looking for the Scottish hackerati, you'll find a guide book to their activities here. Their front page curates strange digital performance events and casual games for free download. They enable a number of hacklabs like The Electron Club, DorkbotALBA and Geek Girl Scotland. Their curated Programme reveals a rich culture of new media experimentation. A usefully arty complement to more business oriented digital hubs in Scotland like 38 Minutes.