Follow and Tweet MPs and Parliamentary Candidates, and use the power of Twitter to track UK politics, make your voice heard and conversations more open. You can take a back seat… or you can tweet.

I must say I really like the concept, despite it being a little utopian. A couple of weeks ago I facilitated a 2 hour seminar with 1styear students on Habermas and the concept of the public sphere, and the media. It was very interesting to hear students views on where they feel social media sits with political engagement. The message from the students was “I don’t understand politics”. Whereas I think tweetminster is a hopeful and positive idea, I wonder who it’s audience is at the moment? I fear it may be engaging the already engaged and wonder how it will tackle the disconnect between those it should be targeting and technological adoption rates. It raises all sorts of interesting questions about digital divides, technology and social inclusion.

I also came across?politics and the city?a website that aims to make politics stylish, founded by C4 presenter June Sarpong.

The site places political issues along side more light entertainment news, fashion, lifestyle, and celebrity gossip in order to try and capture it’s audience, young women. The site looks lovely, swish and sleek – but I struggled to find spaces of actual engagement.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6pbZLiLt30

The song makes me smile, and I think there’s something really endearing about it. For all that has been said by sectors of the UK government and popular media, about young people, street crime, hoodies, knives, gangs etc etc it’s pretty spesh to see a group of young people, well, just being a bit silly really and having a laugh. They’re funny and they’re cool.

Apparently

An estimated 1,700 fried chicken joints, with their white, red and blue regalia, currently line UK high streets, tiny bones scattered over the pavements outside.

You can read all about the creators Red Hot Entertainment in an interview with them here. Thing is I know SFC. I used to go to the one on Hackney road when I lived there. It was always a bit of a treat. Fried chicken and chips is a big thing in the East end. I’m not sure why it’s so popular, but its a massive thing and especially amongst the afrocarribean community. Infact Texas chicken a rival fried chuck joint, use images of a black family and a group of teenage boys wearing hoodies in their marketing . Also according to Mintel the heaviest users of chicken bars are younger, less affluent consumers mainly from the D and C socioeconomic groups. Another comment I found from a Guardian article last year quoted Paul Ricketts a black comic who said

“All black areas have loads of fried chicken outlets. It is a socio-economic thing…”

So I suppose what I’m saying is that the junior spesh video is a representation of culture. In a sense it’s a piece of ethnographic film making. For me Junior spesh provides a neat case study for anyone interested in cultural identity, and or subculture. On the one hand Red Hot Ents are drawing on connotations of mainstream representations of urban youth and street style. Particularly with the genre of the song (grime) and the way they’re dressed -- sweats, grime t-shirts baseballs caps, which one might normally expect to be a reference gang culture. In the UK we’re more used to reading these signifiers as negative representations of youth either as the object of fear or as an under-class. But these guys have really played with signification whilst staying true to themselves, beliefs and values. The result is an uplifting reclaiming of ideology. If hegemony is always on going process and culture a site of resistance, then hurray for Red Hot Ents -- who have won a small battle here as far as I’m concerned.

And god it’s catchy

j j junior spesh junior spesh, one pound and fiddy pence