When we all turn up to go to events we often try out best to mingle and talk to others, find out where we are going and even get the best seats. It seems that most people today enter the building and are already plugged in and letting the social media world know where they are.

When the presenter begins talking its use to be a really bad thing if someone did not look at you or if they were looking down at their phone. When people switch off they tend to go straight for the phone and text friends about how dull the speaker is. It seems that ll of these trends have changed. Now, if you are talking to an audience it can be a good thing if the entire audience looks down at their laps. Technology has moved conferences from being rather teacher-ish to being interactive through the use of twitter and social media. It seems that more and more people are listening and typing in real-time so that the world does not miss out on what people are hearing at conferences all around the world.

If that wasn’t enough, the awkward moments of meeting people are out of the window because the audience can also follow the conference feed from what other people are saying, so when the much needed refreshment break arrives, people can spot each other or even ask to meet-up during the break. The topic of what the speaker was talking about has almost become viral and spread in a few moments.

Lets not forget that there is a bad side to everything and technology is not human and therefore always gets the blame for any side effects. So far we are assuming that the speaker was good, but really they could have been anything from average or really bad to quite offensive and obtuse in their views. Even if the speakers was good, the tweeters will tweet. All the while the speaker is trying to convey a message in words, the audience have been interpreting each word and relaying it. So what happens to the speaker and his message, does it stay the same, or does it become distorted? The poor person is completely isolated from the instant direct feedback and will probably take a long time to get any real response out of the audience.

Even though, the message is now out there and once this trend is embedded it will only grow to a point where people will demand instant live feeds of every conference. The Oscar’s are is no longer a private event, in fact the are now many more smaller local events round the corner from us that are gaining popularity and can only be found through social media.

Manchester City Centre

Manchester has been named the rudest city in the world by Foursquare, which has analysed the number of times people swear when leaving tips about places they have visited.

Foursquare’s engineering experts assessed the 400 million check-ins it received last year and found that Mancunians’ missives contained the most profanity.

Manchester is the only UK city to make the top 20. The only other non-US city is Melbourne, Australia, which is ranked some way below Manchester in 16th.

Foursquare engineer Matthew Rathbone (who is from the Midlands) wrote on the company’s blog: “It’s good to see that the Mancunians truly are not only the rudest people in the UK, but the rudest people globally, only El Paso comes close.”

The top five in the swearing stakes:

1. Manchester, England

2. El Paso, Texas, USA

3. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

4. Bloomington, Indiana, USA

5. Riverside, California, USA

Taken from the drum

The Twitter era of court reporting is here, despite the risk of prejudice

Is there a legitimate demand for the use of live, text-based communications from the courtroom? That’s one of the questions that the Judicial Office for England and Wales is asking in a new consultation paper.

Because I spent a couple of days this week sending tweets from the courtroom where Julian Assange is challenging extradition to Sweden – and as I started writing this in court when the evidence started to get rather dull – my affirmative answer to this question will surprise nobody.

After all, if you were looking for the most appropriate case to launch the Twitter era of court reporting, you couldn’t do better than Assange. It’s not just the international appetite for news of the case, particularly among those with an interest in electronic communications. It’s not just the evidence we heard that one of Assange’s alleged victims had deleted tweets that were helpful to the defendant.

It’s that reporters covering an extradition case enjoy all the advantages of court reporting and none of the downsides: accurate reports are privileged against libel but there is no risk of prejudicing a British jury.

So while reporters from the Guardian and elsewhere have been providing valuable running news reports on the evidence, I have tried to give my followers more of an impression of who was winning the argument.

I even offered the occasional comment. When Björn Hurtig, Assange’s Swedish lawyer, alleged from the witness box that Swedish prosecutors had leaked information to the press about the WikiLeaks founder, I ventured that he had no sense of irony.

There was an immediate response from someone who said: “It’s not terribly difficult to argue that individuals should be allowed privacy protection and governments should not.”

I tweeted back that WikiLeaks had breached the privacy of individuals, arguing that even those who worked for governments had a right to privacy. All this was going on while the witness was still giving evidence.

That was not a problem in this case – professional judges are presumed not to be influenced by tweets or even pieces such as this – but it could certainly have been seen by a jury if Assange was being tried on charges of breaking the Official Secrets Act. And it exposes the fundamental difficulty inherent in controlling Twitter.

As the consultation paper frankly acknowledges, even if a journalist tweeting from a courtroom has complied with the requirements of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, “other users of Twitter may respond to these posts by posting or linking to prejudicial material or commentary which would not be admissible in court”.

And that, of course, assumes that the only people tweeting from court are trained journalists who understand the requirements of “fair and accurate reporting”. The paper wrestles with the problem of access to Twitter in the courtroom, suggesting at one point that the only people in court allowed to use mobile devices might be those in the press seats.

But who would they be? The family courts are already familiar with the concept of “accredited journalists” – those with a recognised press card. But the courts also know that journalism is not a profession: the right to freedom of expression demands that anyone can profess to be a journalist.

As the paper says: “Student newspapers, bloggers and social commentators may wish to engage in live, text-based communications from court but would not necessarily have media accreditation.”

They could apply to the judge for accreditation on a case-by-case basis, as they may in the family courts. But they could not be presumed to have the same appreciation as accredited journalists of the legal framework surrounding court reporting or the industry standards set by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). Instant reporting without self-restraint is more likely to produce prejudicial reporting.

There is only one answer to this problem and the wider risk of prejudice inherent in the internet.

Without relaxing our contempt laws, we must simply acknowledge that there is an increasing risk that juries will have read and seen things that are prejudicial to defendants they are trying. Judges must put much greater emphasis than they do now on explaining to juries why they are required to try cases only on the evidence they hear in court.

Just as we no longer sequester juries in hotels while they are deliberating, we should no longer pretend that we can protect juries from being influenced through modern communications.

Twitter has become a form of public broadcasting – as the PCC has acknowledged – and there is nothing the courts can do to stop it.

Joshua Rozenberg
guardian.co.uk,

Cyber bulling is a relatively new area that some schools cover really well. Most bullying policies tend to cover the cyber world as well as real world instances. Viral marketing is a different beast that aims to sell products. By mixing cyber bullying with a viral campaign pushed by children, aimed at bullying, we now have created a new modern day mythology creature.

The current trend in schools is called “slap a” and seems to stem from children and young people’s facebook contacts. This week has seen the advent of “slap a ginger” and took this one stage further onto “slap a slag”.

This behaviour is pure bullying on an open plan and should be tackled directly. Tackling problems like this could be quiet difficult due to the viral effect facebook pages and comments can have. The last viral piece I personally took part in was to change your icon to a childhood cartoon character in mark of a anti-bullying campaign for Barnardos. It seems that campaigns like this could be positive but equally a “slap a” viral campaign can can have opposite effects.

Right, so as the social person I am, I have restricted access to the real world and don’t ever use my voice. In fact all I do is make sounds at a rectangular shape!

You guessed it. I’m the modern internet generation nerd. I decided to avoid the forums and dodge the stereotype of being part of the alcoholic chemical generation. I guess the real question is does this make me special….answer, NO.

I’m constantly doing work and talking to someone all through twitter. If not twitter then some other (second-rate) social media service. As a tight skinflint it has to be free as well. I was told that the best things in life are free, but now feel cheated because David Cameron says otherwise.

Back to the main reason for typing this post! I have absorbed as much useful information as I did when MSN has those free online chat spaces. Everyone was there and talked to each other. It was what Facebook and twitter is now, but some how more dangerous. The strangest thing is that I am back here, in the same position. I’m really plugging in social media time around me, but it’s still a huge was of time in some ways. I’m sat here thinking I am talking to people. Its got worse for me recently. Those tweeters who want more friends may not have sympathy for me on this one. I have reached the point where I am enjoying tweeting because every other tweet I get a good response. I am truly not that interesting, I don’t think! So at this juncture, I have to ask myself, am I one of life’s looser’s who is trapped by the digital gaze, or am I a winner?

The final chapter to all this madness!
Although I don’t lack that much confidence and I do enjoying be a real world socialite, I have recently had a huge confidence boost by talking to like-minded people who are really interesting. If twitter will not take my life seriously and start making money to sustain my need for tweeting… I may have to actually do this myself.