I meant to blog my notes from a seminar here at QUT the other day given by Stephen Coleman, visiting professor of e-democracy at the Oxford Internet Institute. Now, e-governance and e-voting aren’t exactly my bag, but cultural democracy (by which I mean a democratic cultural sphere) and the ways in which digital networks and digital technologies might enable us to improve its reach and effects definitely are my bag.

So I was pleased to meet and hear from Stephen on two counts – one, his emphasis on the relationship between affect and people’s levels of engagement; and two, he is on the faculty of the OII Doctoral Summer Programme, which I’m fortunate enough to be attending this year.

Stephen is the author of A Tale of Two Houses: The House of Commons, the Big Brother House and the people at home, a research study which examines the attitudes of ?political junkies? and Big Brother fans to politics, politicians and each other and calls for a more creative approach to political engagement. The talk at QUT was an elaboration on the findings of this research.

The aspects of this that really sparked my interest were those concerned with the mode of engagement, indeed the basis of engagement, of the Big Brother fanbase – it was to do with emotional intelligence, human relationships, ethics and morality, even trust and authenticity; and ultimately it is an affective, rather than rationalist (which is not to say irrational), domain. By contrast, the jockeying for position, strategism and hyper-rationality of formal politics seems to belong to a world of its own, a world utterly removed from the cultural frame of most of us. I’m with the BBs – I want to be given the right to think and talk about whether or not someone is a decent human being, and whether or not I trust them, when talking about federal politics.

There is a politics of cultural democracy that is closely linked to this, at least I hope so. I hope that grass-roots, or bottom-up, or amateur cultural production and intense cultural engagement are at least not irrelevant to genuine democracy. And that’s about as political as I want this blog ever to get.

I’m off to Perth until Wednesday, and will be tragically disconnected from the web for most of that time. Until I return, may I suggest that visits to the clever people on my blogroll should more than suffice. Be good, kids!