Oh. That counters the impression I got – I have no doubt you’re right. Oops.

I was merely letting off steam, and thought I could see part of the reason why as a party we have not an iota of technology related policy and representation. It certainly feels like the blind leading the blind (with the notable exceptions of yourself and ryan) when you see the visible use of technology by the party such as websites, blogs and facebook.

In my experience that’s not true. In most local parties the most IT literate person is the EARS officer, and there are very few EARS officers who blog for example.

In total I must have trained hundreds of people in blogging and related issues, and also hundreds in other IT areas (such as EARS). I can’t think of any pattern of blogging = more IT literate.

The point in your penultimate paragraph is an interesting one, and I suspect they’d have been a much better discussion if that’s what you’d kicked off with!

I mean, that of the party, the ones who blog are the more technically literate within the party – that in itself is a problem – it reflects the poor level of technical literacy at every level of the party.

Worse than that is the perverse pride in not understanding technology, communications (and often even simple science) that is the norm in british society over the age of 30, and appeared in several places on the aforementioned list before I got fed up.

It’s ok to be a newbie, it’s ok to not understand stuff, it’s not ok to pretend that it’s not important or a subject worthy of ministerial concern or party policy, and it’s especially not ok to take a perverse pride in refusing to learn or understand how the modern world works.

I frequently see and saw people within the party and that list belittling anything and anybody technical as inconsequential, below their station and using labels like ‘technobabble’ or ‘geek’.

Yet these same people will suddenly feign interest and knowledge on all sorts of subjects they know little about – from policies on vacination, to linking drugs to mental illness, to economics – they don’t lable doctors as losers, they might even bother to try to understand what an economist is talking about, even though they’ll never use or need to understand on them on a day to day basis and can rely on the abundant committees and experts in parliament and the party to understand it.

But for some reason, (reflecting society as a whole) party activists, particularly elected members will turn off their brains at the slightest whiff of technology proclaim that they’re too busy and important to do what you would expect any office junior to be capable of.

Not only that, but I think it’s good that many people have taken to blogging even though they’ve got limited IT skills. Expecting a blogger to have IT skills beyond that is putting an unnecessary extra burden in the way, as if blogging should be some sort of select elite who is smarter than everyone else.

I agree that it would be great if more people had more skills – but the way to do that is to understand, respect and help. It’s not to say “ha ha ha” and label them as “illiterates”.

Mind you, if it’s to help with the technical side, that’s hardly surprising, seeing as I haven’t got a bloody clue about anything much in that direction. It took me ages to work out how to put links in my posts.

This was a self selecting set, “lib dem bloggers” who you would hope understood some basic everyday IT tools like using folders in email clients – much as I’d expect pretty much anybody hired to do an office job would – they’re not exactly OAPs or farmers with calloused hands miles from an office.

The headline is my response to the self-congratulatory rubbish in the libdem blogosphere about how we’re more clued up than other parties on technology just because we have some blogs and facebook groups.

The tories have published actual useful reports on actual IT policy, non lib dem councils have managed to make huge savings by switching to open source software, labour even has a minister for communications, the lib dems have no working group, no spokesperson, no policies, no idea.

The “over-inflated blogosphere ego” need pricking, our party is a decade or more behind where we should be, and the only time it comes up for discussion is how we can use facebook to raise more cash to blow on leaflets and weak tv ads..

Of course the idea that we should spend time on policies rather than electioneering doesn’t seem popular with activists sometimes, and it feels like every day is a by-election that can be won if we just had more cash to splash, rather than standing out and looking different to the other parties by virtue of our policies.

Personally I also like mailing lists. Far easier to follow than blog comment feeds and the accursed web forum (they are the worst of the lot).
Then again, I still like the old terminal based BBS style for some things.

All forums have the potential to descend in to idiocy – the best defence is openness and a sense of community in my experience. That prevents trolls from getting too far and helps eschew the ‘little hitler’ list admin symptoms which sometimes occur.

I think that therefore requires a rather different attitude from the one illustrated by the headline of your blog post on the matter: “Ha ha ha.. lib dem bloggers in technically illiterate “shocker”".

Or rather I like mailing lists where subscribers don’t act like complete newbies or be obnoxious and insulting.

I’m on about 70 mailing lists and they work much better than web foru, facebook and the other alternatives.

I co-founded the Devon and Cornwall LUG about 10 years ago, it has a lot of newbies, but they’re fine – it works nicely, even though it has just a broad range of skills (if not broader) and the users have less in common than the list you’re talking about.

The only problem was that ryan made the mistake of subscribing everybody who didn’t object in time – the better option would have been to send out some mails requesting people subscribe themselves.

As I write – it looks like Ryan’s unsubbed everybody and asked you resubscribe manually, better late than never.