Righto, I'm Alex Parsons, long ago I was a blogger and now having spend years not being, I have yonks of unwritten material waiting to get out and so my output is likely to be a little eclectic.

My main 'big' focus at the moment is looking at the varying success people are having in actively directing technology towards social change, looking especially at Wikileaks and Facebook. My starting point is the idea that both of these are projects that attempt to utilize the power of technology to create social change without the need for a large consensus in favour of that change, where Wikileaks uses technology as a distribution platform to transform and open up relationships within government, and Facebook attempts to interweave with and transform the relationships between people. Basically I want to take a look the occasionally overlapping but often competing philosophies that motivate the two and work out if it's right to talk about them in the same context.

We're also doubtlessly going to occasionally (and frequently) wander into the ever exciting world of democratic structures, electoral systems and reform, etc – which should be fun? In a completely different direction, I added the 'culture' tag to the sub-title so it's not a complete surprise when we start talking about cool things on the tube, possibly with a slight politicsy bend, like delving into how Game of Thrones deals with power, the many many ways the West Wing remains relevant to everything, or if the different styles of political comedy on either side of the Atlantic are deeply revealing of the underlying political culture, or if it’s all completely incidental, irrelevant and unworthy of comment. And sometimes maybe we’ll just be talking about ‘stuff that’s good’ without even trying to work out a politics hook. Who knows? That's the kind of edgy blogging uncertainty I’m going for here.

Edit: Danny has informed me that this introduction is incredibly boring  which sends me looking for aspects of my life that are even halfway interesting and shareable - I guess I also have pretensions of being a film-maker? Which depending on your view of things is possibly no more exciting. There's probably not a lot I can do for you in that case.