In recent years Folkestone where I live has been attempting an ambitious arts-led regeneration programme, enabled in the first instance by the generosity of our resident billionaire Roger de Haan. I was at a meeting last night called to let people air their views on what’s going wrong in the Creative Quarter, which is the focus of that regeneration.

A few directors of the Creative Foundation were present. The nub of the complaint from the floor was that after happy beginnings a gulf had opened up between the the Foundation and the community it was trying to serve.

I’m not going to go into all the local political arguments but in response to a complaint that no one from the Foundation appeared at private views or other Quarter events, one of the directors pleaded lack of time.

This was perhaps honest of him, but it wasn’t well judged. In PR terms it was certainly “off message” because what he communicated was not honesty, but the fact that he had more urgent priorities than the engagement of the local artists and retailers who are working in the Creative Quarter. It didn’t go down well. This set me thinking about PR and its traditional stock-in-trade – the message.

For some time in my professional work I’ve been advocating the importance of honesty and transparency in communication, particularly for internal communication when you are concerned to engage staff – though it’s also relevant to external communication where the relationship between organisation and customer is not simply transactional (ie where there are emotional ties around the notion of “brand” rather than a simply rational exchange of goods and money). I would argue against the old wisdom that effective communication meant deciding on your “message” and remorselessly hammering it home at every opportunity. I’d argue that this message-driven approach mostly alienates people, making them feel they are being “communicated at” rather than “with”.

I’d acknowledge that in the political sphere, the dumb filter of mass media has forced politicians to face every interview with a clear and simple message which they must stick to in the hope that it will get through the filter. It’s cheapened political discourse in the process, but that’s the reality politicians have to contend with.

Equally at the meeting last night it’s clear that the director’s honesty was misjudged. In other respects the directors had found an appropriate honesty: they acknowledged that mistakes had been made and said they would try to put them right in the future.

But even this honesty was not particularly satisfying. I’ve come to think that effective communication is all about stories, and the Creative Foundation’s problem is that it has in a sense “lost the plot”. The truth is that the Foundation is doing a great deal of good work, but has stopped telling itself the bigger story (so misjudgements are being made) and critically has stopped telling the wider community that story. Into the vacuum has slipped a mish mash of half truths and malicious gossip.

That bigger story is not a work of fiction. It’s about the reality of what you do, and that’s where the honesty really matters. I think when an organisation understands its own story then individuals can find their own words to tell it without being forced into crass message-speak. I suspect the whole vision/values thing so beloved of brand thinkers was a misguided way of getting at the same truth, and in the next instalment will say more about what this could mean for organisations trying to understand their identities and command the assent of their staff and their other stakeholders.

It’s sometimes said that the internet has brought on a democratisation of culture: anyone can be a critic, or a Youtube film star, or Myspace musician. Access to a potentially large audience is no longer controlled by corporations, and in itself that seems a good thing.

It will certainly be a good thing if what it really creates is a proliferation of niche interests and expression, a way for people to find others who share an interest or outlook, a space where ideas can be nurtured and developed without the pressure of the mainstream.

Perhaps it’s wrong then to talk of democratisation, since democracy implies the empowering of the mainstream, the despotism of the middle ground.

I’m not objecting to political democracy: I’m with Churchill in thinking it the least bad of the alternatives, though it seems to me a distortion of the system when politicians talk of mandates: it’s evident in the UK certainly that few people are sufficiently engaged in the political process to read an election manifesto, so when they vote they are not approving any given programme. Democracy is valuable only because it ensures that politicians ultimately know they will have to answer for their decisions to their electorate.

My real concern here is mainstream or popular taste in culture, and I’ve been prompted to irritation with it because I recently read The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Zafon.

The Shadow of the Wind has been an international bestseller. I bought it because the blurb suggested it was “beautifully written” while offering an engrossing story. Well, it’s a good yarn, but it’s depressing to learn that anybody could think it was even well-written. Zafon has a nice touch with weather and colour, but the rest of the book is frequently overwritten and occasionally ham-fisted. Admittedly I’ve only read the book in translation, but I’m talking about the kind of detail that gets included, which does translate, and leaves me wanting to pick up a blue pencil.

I suspended judgement as I read the book, wondering if its clunky overwriting was going to lead some ironic point about stories and truth (which the book is somehow about), but I can’t make the link. It’s just not very good.

If people, even intelligent people, think The Shadow of the Wind offers beautiful writing then I wonder how they would react to something that was really well-written. Could they even tell? If it’s a problem with education it’s not about grammar, but perhaps there is an issue with sensibility: if we don’t give people the experience of genuinely good writing, then it’s hardly surprising they can’t recognise it when they see it (or its opposite).

But who’s going to judge the “genuinely good”? The idea of a canon is now regarded with suspicion, as if this wisdom of our elders was on a par with thinking leeches are therapeutically effective. We have no bearings but our personal taste, and one opinion is as good as another.

I think this is what people really mean when they talk about the democratisation of culture, and it looks like a race to the bottom. It’s not particularly comfortable to find yourself defending something like elitism, but is it so outrageous to suggest that some opinions are better-informed than others? Of course knowledge doesn’t necessarily correlate with good taste, which remains a subjective element in aesthetic judgements, but in aesthetics as in any other human activity there can be an exchange of reason, and some reasons will be more compelling than others.

It’s true that most of the time nothing much depends on who wins out in this exchange: it’s not (for instance) like the imperative to convince someone that his racism is stupid and harmful. But it’s also true though that there are times when these matters of taste and judgement do have consequences. One obvious example is the traditional route to book publication.

Publishing has become a rather mixed-up activity. It has a tradition of worthiness, whereby publishers look for authors they believe in and who they think should be exposed to a wider audience. But it has also become increasingly commercial. You can only afford the worthiness if you have enough revenue coming in from your best sellers. Commercial considerations have begun to take command. Few agents, let alone publishers are prepared to take on new literary fiction, because they know it won’t sell unless it can generate a headwind of approval. Even where they do take it on they are unlikely to publish in hardback. Meanwhile a senior executive at the French giant Hachette suggested recently that the appearance of eBooks with lower pricing could destroy the hardback altogether.

But perhaps eBooks offer a way forward for authors, and indeed for publishers who increasingly find themselves beholden to supermarkets for mass market sales. Unlike a paperbound book, the marginal cost of “publishing” an eBook is zero. You don’t have to take any kind of risk in predicting advance volume sales. You can concentrate on preparing the book and promoting it.

People over 35 mostly seem to feel that eBooks will never replace real books. It’s true that for the moment the eBook experience is not quite good enough, but it’s important to remember that in the musical world MP3s don’t offer anything like the rich experience of vinyl or even CDs, and still have triumphed. Arguably too the iPod was not the best MP3 player on the market, but it looked good, was nice to use, and offered an easy ecosystem in its integration with iTunes. As with most disruptive technologies, left field elements like immediate access and versatility overwhelmed the more predictable factors like overall quality.

I’d bet that paper publishing will continue to exist, serving different needs and tastes, but the eBook will become the mainstream publishing format, and will do so in quite a short space of time. But then as with MP3s, there is little to hold back anyone from publishing an eBook, and the Web offers easy global distribution. Publishing in the past was primarily a distribution business, controlling entry and quality because it controlled distribution. But if the latter control is disappearing, what will happen to its role as a gatekeeper of quality?

Which brings me back to the question of popular taste. In the US last year self-publishing outstripped mainstream publishing. That’s still using paper, but also harnessing the power of the internet and digital printing to produce short publication runs at costs that would have been unfeasible before. If eBooks become the norm, the self-publishing floodgates will open all the wider. Many if not most people seem to feel they have a book inside them, a story to tell. This could well be true. Most don’t have the literary gifts to tell that story, but many try anyway. These books will be available for anyone to download and read.

There’s little doubt that the traditional agent/publisher filter has not been functioning particularly well: inevitably good work is rejected and a lot of mediocre stuff gets through. That’s always been the case but the commercial pressures I mentioned earlier have probably made things worse. In the eBook the filter becomes optional. Do we need it at all?

We assume that if a book has made it into print basic quality issues will have been addressed (it’s not always true, but it’s a fair assumption). Will a deluge of illiterate and unreadable self-published eBooks create a demand for virtual commercial publishing sites, where books of good quality get recommended, in the process re-inventing the filter? Or will tastemaking be a more democratic product of communities of interest spreading the word about writing they have enjoyed? Will this democratic tastemaking bear out the wisdom of crowds or the mindlessness of the mob?

The means to tip the balance one way or another exists outside the digital world: it’s in the vision of our educators. We need to believe in the possibility that not all assessments are equal, that some judgements are better informed or better reasoned than others. At the same time let’s hope that in the free-for-all that is the World Wide Web, peer groupings will not become isolated islands of self-confirming opinion, but will inform each other. Reithian cultural ambition has been looking a little threadbare in the face of reality TV, but in a more interactive world we are no longer in the hands of programmers competing for mass market numbers. In this sense, and to return to my opening point, in culture at least the internet may free us from the despotism of the mediocre.

I’ve just downloaded the first chapter in Tales of Monkey Island, the very welcome return of the title that first made me aware of the joys of computer games. You can’t buy it in the shops (yet): you pay $35 and download each chapter month by month. The episodic format is quite a smart way of keeping your interest going, and I hope will give the game scope to build the kind of length and involvement you could enjoy with the original titles.

The distribution model as far as I’m aware was first developed with the Steam-powered launch of Half Life 2. I hated Steam: it was a DRM mechanism that added no value to my experience as a customer. In fact it plonked a background application into my system, consuming resources, occasionally forcing ads on me. It meant that I could not  buy a game legitimately and then having played it give it to my sons to play it in their turn. This seems to me a form of reverse theft. If you buy a “real” game like Monopoly you can play it with whom you like, as often as you like and lend it to friends if you want. By doing the latter of course you may be depriving the copyright owners of income, but that’s none of their business. They have sold the product. You don’t own the copyright, but you do own the product, with unlimited rights to play, loan or resell.

I refused to buy the sequels to Half Life 2 because of what seems to me an infringement of my privacy and consumer rights. Steam has evolved a little, so it’s less intrusive and does add some marginal value by making it easier to download new games.  But this doesn’t outweigh the anti-consumer stance of its basic premise, and the same considerations sadly apply to Tales of Monkey Island.

There’s a mild irony here in that the game is a pirate romp. I create intellectual property myself so I’ve no desire to support “piracy”, but something bad is going on here and sooner or later there’s going to be a backlash.

So far courts have connived in the wholesale removal of basic consumer rights by allowing vendors to reclassify a straightforward product sale as a licence. Don’t get me started on the anti-customer behaviour of Microsoft, but then I don’t want to get started because Microsoft is only as bad as the rest of them (it’s just that I have a sneaking liking for Microsoft and only wish the company could be as good as it could be).

Still the real idiocy of software licensing was exposed when a spokesman for some computer gaming giant this week lashed out at High Street retailers, complaining that much of their turnover came from sales of “previously owned” titles and the people who had created the games weren’t benefiting at all. Well, there you see stripped bare the reality beneath the industry cant about protecting intellectual property: in the real world when you sold a book you accepted that you’d made your margin and what happened to the book next was not your business (hence secondhand bookshops). Now a game DVD in a box with artwork is as much of an object as a book, but because it’s also software it seems there are people in the industry who have trouble accepting that they will not be getting a piece of that afterlife. We’re talking about naked greed.

The one area in which the afterlife of a book has benefits for the author is in library payments. Interestingly this week Microsoft et al set themselves publicly against the legal judgement that would have let Google advance its landgrab of published books, which included provision for a fund that would have paid out to in-copyright authors whose work got used in some way. I’m not going to pretend to know what’s really going on there, but in a week that also featured Rupert Murdoch launching a drive for consensus (aka a cartel?) among news publishers in favour of charging for content, it seems that all in all we’re heading for deep waters and whether any clarity will emerge is an open question.

Whatever happens, it seems that the driving force here is the publishing industry (in whatever form) attempting to reinstate control of the distribution chain. It’s not about the real creators of the IP – the writers and artists – but about the middlemen who have profited so handsomely from their work, by controlling the distribution channels. The one clear (and ironic) thing is that the genie is already out of the bottle. Distribution itself is the one thing no one is going to be able to reclaim or control. Publishers are going to have to think of different ways of creating value that people want to pay for. Authors may be sensibly asking whether traditional publishers have anything to contribute at all.

I never really got the iPod, or the whole mobile music thing. I had a cassette Walkman many years ago, but never used it much, and so didn’t find the thought of being able to listen to my entire music collection whereever I was particularly compelling. But I have a smartphone these days with decent music storage and playback, and a good stereo handsfree set of earbuds, and so I’m writing this on the train to London, and it’s like the world disappears. It’s funny how an ambient technology like music changes our experience so directly. It’s blissfully anti-social: all the inane conversations that bother you when travelling disappear. But then you could say this was a dehumanising thing, cocooning us in a world where we control our environment totally, screening out what might be truly stimulating.

Still mobile music is unusual in this respect. Most of the important trends in software right now stress collaboration and interaction. I was looking by coincidence this morning at the initial presentation of Google’s Wave concept. Google claims it set out to think how we would design email if we started now rather than forty years ago when the idea was first developed. Wave combines email, instant messaging and other social networking and online conferencing elements. I can see that it could be a revolution in the way we do things, though I remain fundamentally uncomfortable with the fact that all this will happen on a Google server: I can see why that’s necessary for much of the collaborative capability, but its attractiveness will depend on the commercial model, the security, and the balance of client/server elements. The commercial model matters because if it’s used to feed me ads I won’t want to know. The client/server thing matters because it has to be properly functional offline. Of course not everything is going to work offline, but you need to be able to work on your “waves”, filing, deleting and drafting new messages whether or not you’re near an internet connection.

These things matter, and I’m sure too that Microsoft and others are working on similar developments. But whatever emerges as a finished product, Google Wave signals a big shift, and lifts the whole social networking phenomenon above the irritations of Facebook and Twitter.

Email remains by far the most popular communication tool on the net, but email is little more than a glorified post office system, a mechanism for asynchronous communication and data exchange. Wave could be less like a post office, more like an encounter with individuals or groups. If Facebook is a meeting space, it’s like a noisy pub, but Wave-like communication could be more like having lots of private rooms, each set up with the people and the resources most appropriate to that group of people. This is not really re-inventing email. It’s more like glorified instant messenging, but so glorified it’s practically unrecognisable.

It will be interesting to see the impact on Facebook and Twitter, which have become a species of vanity publishing. They depend on an experimental and fairly random notion of a social network, which sits in an uneasy relationship to the contact/address books that most of us use to underpin our email activities. I have “friends” on Facebook who are not in that email (Outlook) address book, and never will be. But it’s the Outlook list that actually matters to me. Outlook itself is moving towards social network integration, with the Xobni add-in offering direct connections to Facebook, Linked-In and the like.

Our address books embrace many different kinds of relationship and network – friends, family, work, services and so on. I think we’re seeing the emergence of the internet as a resource for participating more intelligently in those different networks. Existing social networking sites are too crude, too inflexible, too difficult to control. But what’s interesting about the Wave concept is not so much its different messaging capabilities, as the way it could bring our address books to life, helping us move more easily among our different networks, mixing written and spoken words, voice and video. These are interesting times.

I went to a debate at the RSA yesterday lunchtime. Jeremy Paxman was defending the motion (or not) that English was “on the skids”. It wasn’t a particularly incisive debate, revolving around the idea that English grammar has always been more descriptive than prescriptive, and the possibility that the diversities of spoken English were a sign of its vitality.

Paxman was groping towards a valid point, which is that any language depends upon some consensus, upon some commonly accepted conventions, in order for it to work. He let himself be sidetracked by the description/prescription worry, but if the idea of “English grammar” is to be meaningful at all, the possibility of consensus, of inclusion and exclusion, needs further exploration.

Both debaters acknowledged that children needed to be given basic skills, so they could communicate adequately away from their particular tribes (so they could hold down a job and so on). All the same it’s a common worry that the rules of this “standard English” are a bourgeois fiction and we need to find another way of saying “anything goes” which all the same acknowledges the practical reality of the rules.

I think we should be clear that “standard English” is a tribal version of English as much as any other. It just happens to be the language of the ruling tribe, the tribe in power. There’s nothing wrong with speaking a local patois, but if you want to be accepted by the ruling tribe, then you will have to learn to speak its language. That language is evolving, is a living thing, but that doesn’t mean it has no worthwhile conventions, and it certainly doesn’t mean that anything goes. If you show ignorance of those rules the tribe will exclude you, or at least look down on you. That’s how tribes work.

So when a business turns around and demands that its name should take a plural verb (as the insurance giant Aviva has) this is not an act of creative inclusiveness. It is an act of ignorance by an incompetent and unqualified manager. The convention for the moment is clear: collective nouns take a singular verb, with the odd exceptions of sports teams and the police. If you ignore this, as far as it is possible in English you will be making a grammatical error as serious as saying “we was”. Perhaps this will become a lost cause, in the same way that we have lost the useful distinction between “disinterested” and “uninterested”, or the way the third person plural pronoun is now used as gender-neutral third person singular pronoun. But for the moment at least, the convention stands.

I am all for creativity with the language, but creativity demands the conscious manipulation of limits. If you don’t know where those limits are, then you literally don’t know what you’re doing. Naiveté has its charms, but our tribal language of power offers a lot more than charm.

So I had to vote against the notion that English is on the skids: that’s a ridiculous claim. On the other hand I want to stand up for education over ignorance. Specifically I’d want to say that people in business or the media who would claim to be professional communicators but who are ignorant of the conventions of the tribal language they use should be sacked.

It’s often said we are living through a revolution called the Digital Age, and I’ve talked a little so far about how technology might be changing how we read or consume narrative. But I wonder if this sense of time calls for a different way of writing on a more fundamental level, a level that can address the spirit of the age as well as its attention span.

The Spirit of the Age was the title of a book by the great English essayist WIlliam Hazlitt published in 1825, and it seems that this desire to speak to and for your times became commonplace in the 19th century. It’s true that people appear always to have been conscious of their lifetimes as part of an era, but the sense that a distinctive era might require a distinctive formal response from its artists is certainly more prevalent from the late 18th century onwards. Shelley gloried in the possibility. Tennyson worried about it, and as the century turned it found its most articulate expression in the eruption of Modernism.

Modernism as a self-conscious movement was partly a response to the advent of some radical new technology, but also a sense of discontinuity, a fracturing of links with the past, with received views on belief and authority thrown out of the window. It’s no co-incidence I think that its two most important early representatives in English literature were Americans living in Europe, outsiders trying to feel their connectedness, to trace whatever continuities were still left to them while rejecting the shackles of tradition. Ezra Pound noted that while he threw the bricks through the windows, TS Eliot sneaked in around the back.

Time and familiarity tames what once seemed radical. Returning to Eliot’s verse after a gap of many years I was struck by how comprehensible it was, where once it seemed almost impenetrable. I could blame school: in the sixth form we worked through The Waste Land line by line, deciphering its allusivness, and killing practically all sense of it as poetry. But Eliot’s “back door” to modernism was a persistent lyricism. It was not like Tennyson, (actually in his different way Tennyson had written about many of the things that preoccupied the Modernists, but he did so within the traditional forms of rhymed or blank verse); but it was like he was trying to find a way to carry a sense of dissonance and fracture within a form that still mostly looked and read like lyrical poetry.

I think what also got in my way was a sense that Eliot was writing as a philosopher, and needed to be understood that way. This was not perceptive or helpful. Eliot famously declared that writing poetry was an escape from personality, but that does not mean that the work can somehow be read as free from personality, as somehow purely theoretical. He himself rejected the idea that The Waste Land was an epoch-defining statement saying rather it was the grumbling of a disgruntled young man. But its success is in being both these things. He found a way of reaching into himself to create a distinctive common language for his time.

That’s to use “common” in a special sense: Eliot’s range of cultural references is not something most of us can share directly, but that’s part of the point. He is teasing out connections that have influenced Western culture, which indirectly sit behind the possibility of a common cultural inheritance, but which also set him apart as an individual. Poetry rests on the paradox of finding your own voice which is all the same a reaching out to others, a seeking of common ground which may contain the shared awareness that the common ground will be limited.
So what is the spirit of this Digital Age that we might need a new kind of formal expression? I’m not sure that our serious preoccupations are that different from those in the early part of the 20th century. The things that seem new like the cult of celebrity, or the resurgence of an anti-scientific religious sensibility, may yet prove ephemeral. The sense of a new transparency in public, business and to a lesser extent our personal affairs (where it is more like visibility than transparency) may be important and enduring, but it’s probably too early to say. All we can do for the moment is explore the possibilities.

I looked again at Hitchcock’s Vertigo last night, for the first time in many years. The film has a mad hallucinatory quality throughout, appropriate enough for a story about love and obsession. Afterwards I was thinking about its structure … the way it switches from the decidedly languorous pace of its first 90 minutes to the packed revelations of the last half hour, which in that intensity feel even more hallucinatory. It occurred to me that the film’s voice of reason, the doting Midge, disappears after speaking to the psychiatrist about James Stewart’s chances of recovery from his second breakdown, and in that last half hour without her you’re locked into the intensity of Stewart’s disturbed obsession. It struck me too that the story’s twist, in which Kim Novak has in fact colluded in the murder of the villain’s wife, could have been a fantasy in the broken Stewart’s mind, through which he tries to make sense of his devastating experience and loss.

You don’t have to read the film this way. There’s nothing to suggest it’s the “right” way to look at it. But it’s an interesting, perhaps enriching possibility and it made me think again about the consolation of stories, and the sense of “what really happened” that sometimes disturbs your reactions to a piece of fiction, and that I touched on when talking about Eden Lake a couple of months ago.

The questions were raised too in a recent discussion of Ian McEwan’s writing in the London Review of Books, which praised the end of McEwan’s Atonement for its self-referential sophistication, the way it teases the reader with expectations of resolution while veering off to worry about the writer’s need to make things good. I can see and praise the skill of much of the writing in Atonement, but thought the ending revealed a conceptual muddle and a betrayal of an underlying compact with the reader, a compact that in one way or another defines the form of a story (I probably need to explain that idea about form a little more, but not now).

The observation that we can be caught up in stories, that they can change our sense of reality, sometimes with serious consequences, may be worth noting in a context like this blog, but it’s not enough in itself to make for a satisfying work of art. Vertigo makes fruitful use of this idea, but it is not what the film is about (it harnesses your possible awareness of its own artifice to deepen your sense of the pressure of the unreal on the protagonists). My problem with Atonement is that while playing with the play of stories on our imaginations, it ends up only being about the act of writing. I can’t help feeling that when a writer ends up writing about writing s/he has nothing much to say.

That’s the problem with so-called post modernism (or at least, one of its many problems). Being self-conscious isn’t much of an end in itself. It can complicate the relationship between artist and audience, but I want to know that it’s complicating it for a reason. Ian McEwan may be worried about the kind of pleasure he offers his audience, but that worry needs working out in a way that continues to offer some kind of pleasure or formal gratification. The structural problem with Atonement is not so much that its aesthetic worries don’t make sense. It’s that you don’t care about the writer Briony in the way you cared about the main protagonists.

Hitchcock mastered that balance of artifice and formal gratification more than fifty years ago. McEwan, (an often great writer I hasten to add) who made his name with a sense of the everyday macabre that Hitchcock would have appreciated, could do with going back to his roots.

I haven’t seen Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop but it seems an Act of God that it should appeared on our screens at the dawn of the MP expenses row. The film (like the TV series it sprang from) excoriates the culture of spin that has so dominated these Labour governments, obscuring their many real achievements. The expense row could well be the end of that culture. It’s about time.

It’s important to note that the spin culture did not come out of nowhere. It was the media themselves who transformed and trivialised political discourse in this country. It was media hunger for big stories that left public figures unable to speak straightforwardly and honestly for fear of distortion. This is not confined to politics but part of a general malaise where a problem had to be described as a “challenge” and the word translated back by its readers. If someone had dared say “problem” people would not have thought “at least he’s being honest”. They would have thought “it must be really really bad then.”

Enlightened thought in business communication has for several years been arguing that the deep impact of the internet is the pressure it creates for a new transparency in all of our affairs. If there’s a fault in your product, it will come out. If you’ve been treating people badly, the internet will spread the word. You could not afford to treat CSR as a PR tool. You had to mean it. Many businesses were only just beginning to understand the implications when the tsunami of the credit crunch overwhelmed us. With senior management reputations in tatters it won’t be the same when the flood subsides.

Secrecy runs like a jugular vein through political life, and always has done. It’s part of the culture of power. So it’s probably not surprising that politicians have been even slower than business people to grasp the nettle of transparency. Now they have been stung all the same. We have a Freedom of Information Act because of this government, albeit one hobbled from the beginning by the kicking and screaming of the civil service, and the civil servants were right that the Act we have would prove the thin end of the wedge.

The Act might accelerate change, but it is not driving it. There’s a cultural shift in our expectations. In the past power partly relied on your ability to hide things, to control perceptions. Now you can expect to get away with nothing. That’s going to be a hard lesson for the current generation of politicians, but there’s a reasonable hope in the air that if they don’t learnt it they will be finished.

It’s very uncertain where traditional media will fit in this new reality. The justification for traditional media has usually been the need to hold our leaders to account, but with the journalists themselves accountable for whatever they put forward. Somehow we’ll need to ensure that scrutiny still works in the blogosphere, or indeed works better (the cost of litigation has meant that it was largely a tool for the rich).

But the confluence of catastrophes in the last 12 months means that the age of spin may decisively be over. Political and business leaders are going to have to learn a new language, as part of a real shift in their behaviour. It will be a refreshing change.

I’m going to stray a little into my day job for a while (copywriting for commercial clients) but there’s a relevance that goes both ways.

I was part of a discussion the other day where someone suggested that technology would change the way we write: he meant that as speech-to-text software became more sophisticated and prevalent we would abandon the keyboard and simply speak our thoughts, watching them appear on screen. Though I can see this would make many tasks easier for those who struggle with keyboards, I’m not sure it would change anything fundamental at all. It’s not as if the keyboard is the only thing keeping people from being fluent writers. Most people seem to speak more eloquently they can write, but that’s because we have different expectations when someone is speaking. Inflection and tone come into play. Hesitation and repetition often pass unnoticed.

There may be a point here all the same. If the mass of informal writing is effectively dictated rather than written I wonder if that could influence formal writing itself.

This set me thinking that what matters is not so much the technology with which we write, but the technology which we use to read.

There’s already been a substantial shift away from print. It’s likely you’re reading this on a screen. I have no doubt that as screen technology continues to improve, that shift will become almost total. It’s not that the medium itself influences how we read, but the way the medium facilitates design certainly has an impact: think about how different it feels if you read a short story in a magazine rather than a book. But if designers can make the most of the new screens and formats, (which themselves are becoming ever more comfortable to read) my guess is we’ll read on as we’ve always read, the medium itself becoming largely invisible just as it does with the printed word.

The more difficult area of a change may be in our attention spans. We’re told that the children of the computer age are so used to everything being delivered in a nanosecond that they will have no patience with longer text. I’m sceptical about this. It’s not so long since TV programmers decided that people could no longer wait a whole week between episodes in a serial: the days of the Forsythe Saga or War and Peace were long gone. But then along comes 24 and in its wake a torrent of often brilliant serials. Of course people will wait. There just has to be something worth waiting for.

The same is true of reading. It’s the nature of the internet and the browser “experience” that people will expect a quick delivery of top level information, but that’s hardly surprising when there’s so much information about. I think they will skim surfaces in search of the things that interest them, but when they find that information you had better be ready to give them as much detail as they could possibly want.

It’s not that people don’t have time to read any more. They just don’t have time to read rubbish. And there’s a lot of it about.

I live mostly alone, and mostly work alone, which means that when I do something like watch a film I have limited opportunities to share the experience. Often after watching a film I’ll look at the internet movie database (iMDB), usually to check out details like “where have I seen that actor before?” but also to look through the comments posted by other viewers. With honourable exceptions they are generally crass, but at least it gives some sense of discussion – against which you can gauge your own reactions. Here in these crumbs of sociability is one of the great virtues of the internet. And though most of the iMDB comments are crass, the facility to do this at all seems a good thing, and part of the strength of the site.

I watched the low budget British thriller Eden Lake last night. It’s pretty good, and twists away from the cheap gratification of showing rough justice – which what you’d expect if Hollywood tackled the subject. If you’re planning on seeing the film stop reading now because I need to discuss how it ends.

It’s billed as a horror film, but the most horrible thing about it is that its violence is carried out by a bunch of teenagers on an innocent couple camping for the weekend by a lake in the country. Many of those iMDB comments saw the film as a scathing and all too realistic comment on the youth of today, showing them to be without scruple or any moral feeling. The film asks for that reaction, but it’s not all that’s going on. It plays on our outrage that where we look to children for innocence (hence “Eden” Lake) we could find fully adult corruption. The children are nuanced: some have scruples, but all are pressurised by the leader into sharing the violence. You spend much of the film hoping that the couple will escape this nightmare of monstrous, “abnormal” children to find the normal sanity of the adult world, but when the heroine finally struggles back into that adult world those adults mirror their children exactly. I don’t think the implication is that it’s all the parents’ fault: it’s that the evil shown by the children, their capacity to inflict pain and even death, is elemental and not exceptional (rather like Lord of the Flies).

Judging from iMDB, the ending caused problems for many viewers. There is no redemption, no nemesis for the evil doers. The clear implication is that the adults are going to kill the surviving heroine to cover up the crimes of their children and in revenge for the fact that she has killed two of them (in desperation, including the youngest who is killed at the moment he appears to be trying to make things better – the film is morally unflinching). It’s a great ending, refusing as I mentioned above the facile revenge fantasies of a typical Hollywood survival film, but it also left me thinking “ah they won’t get away with it – there are too many bodies, too many questions to answer – the ringleader will get his comeuppance.” This is probably normal, but it is curious. It shows the way stories suck us in, and cause us to develop a sense of the narrative beyond the events we are shown. Reality is in the hands of the storyteller.

Strictly speaking the story of Eden Lake ends without resolution. We are simply not told about the future fate of some of the people we have been watching, and it would be legitimate for the writer to say that he or she does not know what “happened” beyond the ending, because of course none of this actually happened in the first place. The story ends where it ends.

This illustrates the futility of the notion of alternative endings – a problem with the whole notion of interactive narrative. Stories impress us because we are not in control. Eden Lake might have made us feel comforted if the protagonists had survived and the wrong doers were punished, but its grimmer ending is intellectually more satisfying, and paradoxically makes the film more enjoyable.