To escape the Box of current cultural assumptions and political practice, we must explore how uncover how these political and cultural processes work today. Perhaps then PASCAL and the Observatory can work more ‘with the grain’ to get results.
What is transparent to everyone, and what is a mystery to ordinary citizens? What is the immediate, the short-term, and the deeper impact and power of the social media; of older media; of lobbyists and ‘captains of industry’, of trans-media ‘press barons’? Does one medium and political channel trump the others? Is ‘civil society’ an engine or a sop? Are the new social media, often on social issues, of twitter and blog, the real game-changers?
How is civil society at it most effective? We ought also to consider whether anyone outside the PASCAL and PAC box listens to our discourse about learning and learning cities, then acts on what it says? Is this action when it occurs – maybe local, piecemeal and gradualistic – of a kind that becomes a critical mass, helping a cultural paradigm shift so that as citizens and governing classes we see and act on our world differently?
A future contribution to this Theme Forum will look at what David Marquand’s powerful recent book has to say about this in the UK context.
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