91Èȱ¬

To mark 100 years of the 91Èȱ¬ in Wales, The Idea Debate: Are You Receiving Me? hears from a panel of speakers on the topic of how we communicate today. Here, you can read the transcripts of the talks given by the debate's three speakers:

Owen Williams – The Curious Case of Brad Pitt, Thomas Fuller and my mother-in-law
Professor David Turner – Embracing The Awkward
Yvonne Murphy – Thinking Inside The Box

Social media expert Owen Williams wants us to be more sceptical about what we see online, so that we don’t fall victim to fake news, deception and downright nonsense.

Hello, everyone, you all look lovely. We spent New Year in Ireland with my in laws. Now while enjoying the best of Irish hospitality. My mother in law, apropos of nothing holds up her mobile phone to me. On the screen there's a photograph of Brad Pitt, circa 2000.

She peers at me and she said, "Owen? Who's that?" And I said, "Well, that's Brad Pitt". And she went "no, it's not, it's his son". And I said, "No, it's not. It's Brad Pitt". And she went" no, no, look, it says it's Brad Pitt son underneath". "yes", I said laughing. "Yes. Yes. It's just nonsense. It looks exactly like Brad Pitt, because it is Brad Pitt". And she said, "How do you know?"

The question I've got for you is when did our society reach a point where we simply trust something random published online? What is it about a curious headline, from some arbitrary source that makes us blindly fall in line behind these supposed facts? And yes, I'm doing air quotes for the radio audience is "seeing really believing" ? The full quote, by the way is seeing really believing originally attributed to the scholar Thomas fuller is actually "seeing is believing. But feeling is the truth". In other words, believing and truth should be taken as two entirely separate matters.

Now, we are far too ready to accept what we see online and, counter- intuitively - when our trust in the fakery, propaganda and nonsense we perceive is eroded by truth, we suddenly question of trust in genuine news sources. I'm here today discussing this because I work in social media. Now I've dabbled in these dark arts since MySpace was a toddler, and I became 91Èȱ¬ Wales’s first ever social media lead over a decade ago.

It was at the 91Èȱ¬, specifically 91Èȱ¬ One, that I realized how powerful a turn of phrase could actually be. Now with 91Èȱ¬ Wales, I could command audiences of hundreds of 1000s, on Twitter and Facebook and wherever else, but on 91Èȱ¬ One I had audiences of millions all over the world, and in fact, one Facebook video of a tiny cat, a cat the size of your hand, purportedly, the deadliest cat in the entire world, has now been watched 190 million times, 190 million views across countless world nations.

The power and reach of Facebook as a platform, as a global content distribution platform, is absolutely staggering. And to turn back to news, Reuters digital news report 2022 states that in the UK 46% say they avoid the news sometimes or often. 46%. That's almost twice the level seen in 2016.

Now the truth is, when it comes to news on social media, we make snap value judgments. When we perceive content, we make immediate decisions based on, according to Reuters Institute's Trusted News research, five specific cues. Number one, pre existing beliefs about news in general, or about specific news brands. Number two, social cues from family and friends who share the item. Are they known to be trustworthy? Is Uncle Jack sharing yet again?

Number three, the tone and wording of headlines. Is it clickbait? Number four: visuals. Remember Thomas Fuller now, remember him, seeing is believing remember that. And number five, the presence of advertising. ie was the information sponsored or not?.

Now, those aged 24 or under have always known the world that's connected. For those born in the past quarter century, the internet has always existed. And for those aged 15, or under, so has mass social media. Now in an online world of misinformation and disinformation, it is so so difficult for people of any age to distinguish fact from fiction. But we don't, we don't as a general rule, do any kind of due diligence on the information with which we're presented, and what platforms and even some established news brands, hello Daily Mail, condition us to simply accept what we read and see, it is in the end on us.

We have a duty to ourselves, we have a duty to ourselves and each other to question. So next time, think, if you will, of Thomas Fuller: seeing may well nudge you to believing, but can you feel it? Can you experience it? Do you have the full facts at hand in order to experience it?

Now come to think of it, Thomas fuller is also purported to have said words are like wind, but seeing is believing. So perhaps a 17th century English clergyman isn't the best fount of knowledge in the 21st century, particularly because Thomas Fuller and never encountered Brad Pitt, my mother in law, or the Taboola Outbrain clickbait portals that crowbar utter, utter nonsense into little boxes at the bottom of news websites, thereby perpetuating the complete erosion of trust between publisher and public, maybe.

Mind you that cat video post in 2018 is still doing really big numbers. So we're I suspect it will cross 200 million views by the time we get to this day and with this programme, so that's that.

Professor David Turner from Swansea University says it’s time to stop being embarrassed by disability and to start treating disabled people with openness and respect.

Disability is not a dirty word, but it seems that many people find it hard to talk openly about it. A report published in 2014 by the charity Scope claimed that two thirds of non disabled Britons are awkward around disabled people and fear doing or saying the wrong thing. This fear stemmed from lack of understanding and from not knowing disabled people, as friends, family members, or workmates.

Has it always been this way?. As a historian I'm interested in how attitudes towards disability have changed over time. Disability does not exist across time and space as a neutral, unchanging category. For much of British history, there has been no umbrella term to describe the many states of bodily and intellectual impairment experienced by our ancestors. Today, the Equality Act describes someone as disabled if they have a physical or mental impairment, which has a quote a substantial and long term adverse effect on his or her ability to carry out normal day to day activities.

However, during the Industrial Revolution, the word disabled had a more specific meaning. It referred to a person's inability to contribute usefully to society through paid work. Impaired people were everywhere in industrial Wales. When a correspondent from the London newspaper The Morning Chronicle visited Merthyr Tydfil in 1849, he was shocked by the number of amputees he encountered in the streets. “I believe there are in Merthyr more men with wooden legs than are to be found in any town of the kingdom, having four times its population”, he wrote.

Many were victims of accidents in the towns Ironworks and coal mines. But these people would not necessarily have been considered disabled. In industrial Britain, people with long term health conditions and impairments were expected to work if they were capable of doing so. And many of them did.

Among them was John Thomas, age 32, who worked in the glazing room at Swansea pottery. We know about him because he was mentioned in a Royal Commission report on work conditions published in 1842. Commissioner Rhys William Jones described him in these words: John was I quote, "very much stunted in growth, and was quite an imbecile".

Reading such objectifying language in a government report is shocking. The words are a vivid reminder that a term still often thrown around as a casual insult today was once a medical category used to describe and to devalue, people with learning disabilities. The word is undoubtedly stigmatising, but the context in which was used presents a more complicated picture of disabled people's social position. John was not an outcast. He was accepted by his workmates, although he was paid less than they were.

However, by the start of the 20th century, people like John Thomas were increasingly segregated. Under the pseudo science of racial improvements, known as eugenics. People, labelled as so-called imbeciles, idiots or feeble minded were seen as unfit people who presented a danger to society. The 1913 mental deficiency Act, the most eugenic law in British history, allowed for people with learning disabilities to be held in institutions against their will.

By the 1930s, one and a half million people were detained in longstay hospitals, many would never leave. In the 1960s and 70s, the disabled people's movement began to challenge institutionalisation. It also condemned the demeaning ways in which disabled people were spoken about in the media. In the early 1990s, the disabled people's Direct Action Network protested against ITV's telethon fundraiser for portraying disability as pitiable and tragic, disabled people needed rights, not charity.

In 1995, the Disability Discrimination Act finally provided legally enforceable rights of access to public buildings. Although the law did not go as far as activists wanted.

Communication is important because it shapes the way in which we think about disability. While there must be no return to the demeaning language of the past, we should be open in talking about disability and avoid cringe worthy euphemisms such as special needs, differently abled, unless a disabled person refers to themselves that way, or, God forbid, “handicapable”.

In response to its survey that found that so many people were uncomfortable around disabled people, Scope launched a campaign called "end the awkward" with short videos providing tips on how to speak to and behave around disabled people. We should try to get our communication right about disability. But we shouldn't reduce disability inclusion to a question of good manners. In fact, change has happened through disabled people being prepared to be awkward by challenging stereotypes and saying things that others might find unpopular in the wake of a pandemic that has setback disabled people's rights, and amidst a cost of living crisis that's hitting disabled people, disproportionately hard, we need uncomfortable truths to be told more than ever. Perhaps instead of ending the awkward, we should be embracing it.

Theatre director Yvonne Murphy thinks understanding how democracy works is reserved for a privileged few. She says that must change – so more of us can participate at every level.

Let me tell you about a 19 year old woman I met, she had voted once. And she said she would never vote again. She said there was no point, nothing would change, and her vote was meaningless. And this made her angry and upset. And when I probed a little, it became clear that her frustration was actually with our voting systems, and specifically, with the use of first past the post in general elections. But she didn't have that language. So I really quickly gave a one minute basic explainer of the difference between the two voting systems, and how they both have pros and cons. And then she was really angry that no one had told her this before.

So my question to you all tonight, is can we truly claim to live in a democratic country, if large numbers of people don't understand how our democracy actually works? Because today in Wales, and the UK, many people, possibly the majority, do not have a strong basic understanding of our democracy, such as the difference between local government, devolved government and UK Government.

So in my research over the last five years interviewing and doing workshops with hundreds of people and 1000s of people in the talking shop, I have found that most people don't know who their counsellors are, or what a counsellor actually does, what devolution is, or who represents them in the Senedd, and how to get their voices heard beyond the ballot box. Now, this doesn't mean that they don't want to know.

A frenzied focus on elections is also not helping - the cycle of wall to wall election coverage, followed by Tumbleweed in between elections, leads to people feeling powerless and excluded. And my research suggests that the focus on elections and getting people to vote is at best, ineffective, and at worst, may actually be contributing to our record low levels of voter turnout. Because why would you want to vote in a system when no one has bothered to explain that system to you, unless you belong to a minority who were lucky enough to learn about it around the kitchen table.

And this is what has led me to create The Talking Shop, a democratic and cultural information centre, which I'm trialling in towns across Wales, as I try to work out how to replicate that kitchen table, and dining room table for everybody. It's a shop, which sells nothing, and where ideas, information and conversation are free. And so is the tea. It's an open and safe space for the public and creatives to come together to inform themselves as citizens, and collide converse, connect, collude, and create.

So I piloted it in 2019 in Cardiff, in an empty shop opposite the castle. And the response was overwhelming, with visitors aged two to 92. And they told a story about what we have lost: our forums for debate, our public spaces to gather and connect. And what was said to me time and time again was "can you just show me somewhere on my phone, where I can find all that information that you've just told me about our democracy and how it all works and fits together?"

And I couldn't, I couldn't find one place that explained our whole UK democracy simply. So thanks to some grants from Clwstr, a higher education and media innovation partnership, I was able to begin to recruit a team of young co-creators, and I created The Democracy Box.

My starting point was to write the democracy box story of our UK democracy that every citizen should know, in seven very short chapters, and you can find it online. And it's a downloadable PDF and it starts with these words. "This story is your story. It's our story, written by all who went before us, all of us now, and all of those yet to come".

And the Democracy Box story is the basis for all the democracy box prototypes.

The public information prototype is the story being creatively retold by young people all over Wales, aged 16 to 26. They are paid as young co-creators and they share the story in person and via content across multimedia platforms with branding and illustrations that they have created themselves. And at the same time, I created the democracy box programme for schools where children aged 7 to 16 all become young co-creators in the pilot with 15 schools, pupils created videogames, puppet shows art, poetry, music, and drama to tell the story to the year below. Imagine if that was rolled out across Wales, so that no young person ever leaves school again, without a basic understanding of our UK democracy.

Interestingly, many young people told me that as well as digital information and the information in schools, they also want this information in person face to face. So I came full circle back to the Talking Shop that I had created. And I put the Democracy Box inside, on the walls, on screens and in bilingual booklets that you can take away with you. So I aim to finish the Talking Shop proof of concept this summer with further trials in Conway and Blaenau Gwent. And there I’ll also test the concept of the talking shop on Tour. So that wherever people are, the Talking Shop, will provide a safe space for people to learn about democracy, and where unexpected, and open conversations can begin. And I believe that investing in these and other digital tools could be a game changer for our Welsh democracy, and radically increase democratic participation both at and beyond the ballot box.