Politicians and the internet

Only this morning did I get around to watching Sunday evening's edition of neues from 3Sat. I can't read or watch everything at once! A large part of the programme was reporting on the use of the internet by politicians and political parties during the election campaign in NRW. Sunday was election day and the result would not have pleased the CDU. I can't say I was excited by this election but the reporting on the use of blogs, Twitter, etc. was interesting.

The interviews with the candidates were brief and did not go into their political views. There were also interviews with young people who expressed views about the lack of opportunity to interact with the politicians. This is all good listening material and there were also some journalistic blogs mentioned that have a definite regional emphasis. To understand the German speaking world (DACH as it's sometimes called. Work it out - Germany, Austria, Switzerland) you sometimes have to get down to regional level or even more local. Identity and culture have great variation and richness.

Politiker im Online Wahlkampf gives written comment from neues and you can view a short video report on the same page. Some YouTube links you might like to follow are: Die Macht der Blogs and Interview mit Alfons Pieper.  You can also download the whole half hour video

24 x Deutschland

Making sense of German political structures is a little bit easier thanks to a set of 24 articles with accompanying diagrams.

To see the accompanying article visit Bund, Länder und Kommunen and to access the others go to 24 x Deutschland The images are published under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence.

Computers, Internet and Politics

I still have my first computer bought in 1980 and stored in the attic. With only 16KB of RAM (yes, KB) and the only storage a built in cassette tape recorder it took ages to do anything. There really wasn't much software around and I ended up writing my own programs. Try writing a compiler in just 16K! Things have moved on amazingly and I can barely keep track of progress, though I do try.

Sometimes I manage to link my interest in computers with learning German. One source of information is 3Sat neues and I subscribe to the RSS feed so I can watch their video podcasts Das Computermagazin. There's also the neues.blog

I've only just caught up with the last two episodes. The first of the year included an interview with a blogger called Markus Beckedahl. This is a really massive blog that can help you keep up with what's happening on the internet and political responses to the net. I'm now following netzpolitik.org and the quote below is from its Über dieses Blog page

netzpolitik.org ist ein Blog und eine politische Plattform für Freiheit und Offenheit im digitalen Zeitalter. Thema sind die wichtigen Fragestellungen der digitalen Welt und wir zeigen Wege auf, wie man sich selbst mit Hilfes des Netzes für digitale Freiheiten engagieren kann. netzpolitik.org wurde in einer Vorläuferversion 2002 gestartet und ist seit 2004 in der jetzigen Form online. Alles andere erschliesst sich aus dem Inhalt.