Blue Lines Revisited

The conversation around Pinterest has been really fascinating/revealing in terms of the tech and mainstream media’s reactions to a popular social media tool with a user base which doesn’t fit people’s ideas of the “early adopter” profile and interest set. (Tumblr had this too, though it wasn’t as blatant - tech sites mostly ignored it or rolled their eyes at the fact we weren’t all following Scoble on Posterous instead). Pinterest’s demographic base in the US skews heavily female: this is a fact, but does it have to be The Story?

One thing that’s worth noting, though, is that Pinterest makes its use cases VERY clear on signing up, clearer than almost any other social tool I’ve used. Compare it to Twitter during its big early user spike, for instance - you signed up, got shown a hatful of semi-random “suggested users” you could follow if you wanted, and that’s it: you were on your own. Pinterest gives you suggested board topics, automatically follows you to power users (though you can opt out) and openly says “this is how its done”. Quora did something similar to establish its culture (it had that  offputting “here is how you should write on Quora, leave the Lulz at the door please” ‘welcome message’) so I think it’s a feature of current-gen social sites, something they’ve learned from the Twitter experience.

I joined up sometime last year: I am one of the apparently typical men who has joined and never pinned, but this is partly because I barely share pics on ANY of my social sites, not because I am keeping my pics of cars’n’meat to myself. Anyway it did seem to me that the users I was automatically followed to posted a lot about fashion and food, but fashion and food are subjects which - duh - very much lend themselves to visual collage, which is the Pinterest MO. I unfollowed most of them, replaced them with other users I knew from elsewhere (mostly women, but w/evs) and my homepage is now all infographics and cute owls.

This chart tells the story of how the state of the economy has come to dominate British political discussion - and it’s done so to a remarkable degree. Before the crisis of 2008 it had never “topped the charts” of issues the British public were worried about - since then it’s continually been number one.

One interesting thing is how previous peaks of economic worry faded away fairly swiftly. And for all its intensity, the 2008 one looked to be doing the same. Instead, since the arrival of David Cameron as PM, economic fear has been constantly high and characterised by a series of spikes: no sooner does it fall off than it rises again.

This has also been the period when Britain’s national media and political narrative has been shaped by the fate of the economy - recession, austerity, cuts, and doubtless that’s reflected in the poll responses. It seems to me that Cameron’s control over this narrative has rarely faltered - he’s defined the terms and his opposition has struggled to fight on those terms. But it’s just as fair to say that the opposition - both parliamentary and grassroots - have focused on the economy too.

The other story this graph tells, though, is of the radical change in the terms of how Britons see economic difficulty. At the far end of the graph, back in the 80s and 90s, it wasn’t that British people didn’t see economic issues as important - instead, they worried about a very specific economic issue: unemployment.

This worry - a spidery black line on the graph - is intimately linked to overall economic performance. Fears over unemployment surge and fall as the economy busts and booms. But public focus is on the human cost of recession, rather than the more abstract fear of “the economy”. A period of low unemployment under New Labour quiets both fears, but when the bad times return, it’s the economy as a whole people are scared about, rather than the job losses at the sharp end. It would be fascinating, and probably depressing, to dig deeper into the reasons for this.

This article, somewhat complacent about the ripples of anti-science in the UK, reminded me of a scary conversation I had a few weeks ago. I was talking to a former colleague, a very well-respected social researcher who is high-up in an agency which does a lot of the British government’s market research work. This had essentially dried up when the Coalition government came in, she told me, because the emphasis had shifted away from “evidence-based policymaking” - this phrase a shopworn New Labour one, of course. What had they replaced it with? “Principle-based policymaking”. This had far less need of original research, since it simply involved implementing things the government already knew to be right.