What sort of people get into politics?

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After reading this fascinating breakdown of Trump and Cruz's Facebook support, I decided to do the same for British politics - to see what sort of people are fans of Cameron and Corbyn.

You can find the results on Medium - this piece on Cameron and the Tories and this piece on Corbyn and Labour.

Some of the results, especially to do with the PM, were pretty surprising. But beyond that, this exercise was another reminder of how much data can tell us about the world, and how much of an advantage accrues to those who own and analyse it.

I could have spent days carrying out similar surveys on pretty much any interest group you can imagine - and if I didn't have to earn a living, I might well have.

In other news, I've written for Politico about the Mark Clarke scandal and the decision to bomb Syria - and reviewed Mike Savage's Social Class in the 21st Century for the Telegraph. It's a fascinating (if flawed) attempt to map Britain's new landscape of wealth, privilege and power - and another reminder of the power of data to tell us important and surprising things about the world...

Has Twitter ruined Twitter?

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Has Twitter ruined Twitter?

Over the past few weeks, Twitter’s been all over Twitter. It launched the new (and impressive) Moments tool; it got a new CEO (well, half of one); he fired 336 people; and pretty much everyone started talking about what was going right and wrong with the company, not least after reading this impassioned piece on Medium by Umair Haque.

I don’t think Twitter’s doomed at all. But I do think Twitter as we’ve known itis dying. And the verdict will be both murder and suicide — on the part of both Twitter’s management and its keenest users.

Twitter became popular, in essence, because it was where the cool people came to hang out. Celebrities and journalists came to talk to their fans, and each other.

For British journalists like me, for example, it was a godsend — it provided a way for us all to bitch and gossip and stroke each other’s egos in a way that we hadn’t had since the move out of Fleet Street scattered the big newspapers to the four winds. Even better — it turned out there were quite a few people out there who didn’t actually work in journalism, but were still just as funny and clever as us hacks, and often even more so. It was like being one of those great pubs where you’re pretty much always guaranteed to bump into someone you know.

What changed, as Umair and other disillusioned tweeters have said, was the signal to noise ratio. Partly, this is down to the problem of abuse that Umair identified — the way that the seemingly infinite horde of trolls and zealots and bores would intrude into conversations or shout you down (especially if you were a woman).

But there was a stylistic change as well. Journalists, and news organisations in general, noticed that Twitter was a good way to pick up traffic. Well, not traffic as such: a report back in January claimed that it’s responsible for driving less than 1 per cent of traffic to sites, compared with roughly 25 per cent for Facebook. Still, Twitter links remained important because it was a good way to reach an influential audience — plus, people often go on to repost the same links on Facebook, where the traffic magic happens.

Gradually, over time, people worked out the hierarchy of attention. A tweet like this wouldn’t do that well:

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How Arctic Monkeys won the battle but lost the war

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How Arctic Monkeys won the battle but lost the war

Ten years ago this week, Arctic Monkeys released their very first single — ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’. Like everything the band did, it was a sensation: their subsequent album, ‘Everything You Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’, shattered the record set by Hear’Say (you know, from Popstars) for first-week sales. Even the Telegraph got into them — as I know, because I had to spend most of 2005 and 2006 patiently taking the ‘The’ out of ‘The Arctic Monkeys’ in piece after piece after piece…

At the time, Arctic Monkeys seemed thrilling and new. Here was a band that was using the latest technology — this amazing thing called MySpace — to build up a following. In the process, they seemed to have rendered the record labels completely pointless.

Their songs were raw, personal, heartfelt, packed with a furious energy

More thrilling still, Arctic Monkeys didn’t just have a sound — they had a manifesto. Like the punks of the 1970s, they seemed to be there to save us from tedious, anodyne, manufactured pop, to sweep away Hear’Say and all the rest of Simon Cowell’s plastic androids. Their songs were raw, personal, heartfelt, packed with a furious energy: Oasis meets the Strokes with a dash of John Cooper Clarke. There were serious suggestions that they were the closest thing we’d get to a new version of the Beatles.

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