I received an email from Anthony Barnett, who kindly loaned to the exhibition the first printing of Charter 88, reminding me that the ‘Convention on Modern Liberty’ is not far away (28 February to be exact).
This has no formal connection with the exhibition, but it is clearly dealing with many of the issues it considers, not least what are our ‘fundamental freedoms’, and where do we stand on them today.
I note that the challenges listed on their website include not only counter-terrorism and the ‘database state’, but also ‘financial breakdown’, surely something that wasn’t on the convention’s planners’ minds at the start of the process.
It’s also an interesting website, with lots of Web 2.0 elements that are integrated quite elegantly (and also include a YouTube clip of Hancock’s famous Magna Carta ‘did she die in vain?’ clip – something I wanted in the show, but copyright and costs prevailed).
The relationship between the web and politics was something that we thought about including in the exhibition, but space and time ruled out. And, of course, the web makes a better home for that sort of discussion. It has come up during tours, though, and the petitions from the Civil War have led several visitors to remark on the current version, the Number 10 e-petition site.
Politicians such as David Cameron and political parties seem to be getting better at making decent-looking sites, and campaign groups and citizen journalists have also been using them to turn politics, if not on its head, then at least to glance in a different direction.
None have proved as web-savvy as the Obama campaign, and it will be interesting to see how the president-elect uses the web once he is actually president. It even looks like he may get to hold onto his Blackberry (‘They’re going to pry it out of my hands’).
Hearteningly, I was speaking to Jacob in the press office today, and he mentioned that the Taking Liberties interactive has had over 100,000 responses, the majority of which have been online, rather than in the St Pancras exhibition alone.
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