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Roger Warren Evans
Roger Warren Evans
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You are in the company
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Roger Warren Evans |
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item0028E 588,589 588 6 January 2003
It is clear that, for any message to be communicated effectively, in must be communicated in a personally convincing way. Great political leaders have been those with the gift of such communication. Thus the First Principle of my Communications Theory is humanisation, personalisation. No abstraction - corporation or nation state or Government Department of local Council - ever communicated any complex message effectively. That can only be done by a person, a natural person, speaking personally. Yet very few of our fellow citizens have any continuing personal contact with anybody from "government", in any shape or form. All direct contact is likely to come in the form of a demand-for-payment, or a prohibitory or advisory notice of some kind. At the level of District and County government, it is less and less likely that any citizen will have contact with "their Councillor". And official Government websites are forbidding and negative places. Since the 1960s, the average ratio has fallen from 1:1500 to about 1:4000 - one elected Councillor per 4000 residents. And such Councillors (particularly since the "reforms" of Labour's 2000 Local Government Act) are unlikely to prove an effective "government representative" for many purposes. True, the admirable convention has developed of holding local "surgeries", at which citizens can beard their MPs or Councillor (and in Wales, Assembly Member) - but these are hit-and-miss affairs. Where Community (Parish) Councils exist, the ratio is more favourable: in my home-town of Mumbles, we have four City Councillors, but eighteen Community Councillors, for a population of 17,000. Community Councils are not regarded by professional politicians as having any substantive role to play in "government", and all major Parties tend to diminish and ignore their role. Public affairs will never be properly aired, unless ways are found of personalising them. I favour strengthening the community councils, and developing new forms of elected and appointed public communal figures - Public Trustees, Questors. As we reach the limits of representative democracy, our attention should turn to the creation of new institutions of participatory democracy. My message? Personalise, personalise, personalise... Do you know of any better way? Drop me a line
589 6 January 2003 Are you a Libri? 2003 will be the year of Libri. The Libri Trust is a new charitable initiative targeting the improvement of public libraries, both in the state and community sectors. Chairman is Kiffer Weisselberg (of Islington, London), and he is supported by an enthusiastic band of Trustees (including me...). Local authority libraries face major challenges, with rising costs which result in a derisory 10% of funds being spent on books at all. Libri aims to change all that. Weisselberg says that at least 25% of all funds could be spent on book-purchase - which would mean more than twice as many books for the same money. And Libri seeks to contact kindred spirits outside London, willing to work for library reform.
What do you think? Drop me a line
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New
How best do we communicate with each other, in
this strange E-medium? What is the importance of "personality",
and of personalised communication? The dismal take-up for "Government" websites
(just 3% of our fellow citizens, by end-of-2002), represents a sobering
failure. The resulting questions can be addressed only by a new, coherent
communications theory. It is not a matter of "Nation speaking unto
Nation", but of those in government speaking effectively to their citizens, in
the despatch of public affairs.