Only I’m bored of asking, and I really don’t think that any city should have its local council or municipal authority outsourcing the function to an under-funded quango whose remit is aimed at visitors to our city rather than the people who actually live in it.
Otherwise they wouldn’t be called Visit Cambridge – noting their What’s On page here
Pictured: The Trials of Democracy – could this be something they could explore in a workshop in 2025?
For years I’ve been calling for something that the Isle of Wight used to have, but no longer seems to – the old Events On The Wight having become something very different. So I went back to their old page via the Wayback Machine to pull out their old template. For me, it’s magnificent in its simplicity – and superbly designed in terms of functionality
Above – Events.OnTheWight from June 2012 via the Wayback Machine – have a browse
The information has been categorised to make it easy to identify a host of things such as:
- Place, date, and time
- Nature of the activity
- Theme that it falls within
If you only wanted to see events of specific themes, you’d click on the colour icon and that would filter things for you just as clicking on filters for dates, times, and geographical part of the island would.
Cambridge used to have a comprehensive events listings in the old Cambridge Evening News up until around the early Millennium
If you wanted to go out clubbing or to a disco, finding out what was on over the course of the week was relatively straight forward. The venues and promoters knew who to contact and with what information.
Above – Cambridge Evening News 27 Aug 1998 in the British Newspaper Archive
It’s strange to think that at the time us teenagers in Cambridge regularly complained about how rubbish the night club scene was in the city. Fast forward to today with the population having increased by 50%, tourist numbers by even more so, and now a large cohort of language school and private college students, and you’d have thought provision would have improved substantially. It hasn’t. I won’t go into the big picture detail, but in a nutshell our teenagers and young adults are being ill-served by our city’s economy.
Compared to the Cambridge Independent of today, which has a better-than-many culture and entertainments section every week (I get the paper version rather than subscribing to the online version) what it doesn’t have is the comprehensive listings of the titles its parent company once owned back in the day. Instead it concentrates on picking out a handful of highlights for each section/genre. Eg live music, comedy, art shows, and so on. In the 1990s they also had the features – not least because in those days with a very high readership, multiple daily editions, and specialist staff they could afford to do so. But the ‘pull out and keep’ guide would have a sort-of directory at the back that would list everything that was submitted to them irrespective of how high profile the acts were.
Above – the Sunday Night gig by the then up-and-coming Manchester band Oasis getting the same font size and type as the local legendary MJ Traynier’s Tribute to Elvis act at the long-since-demolished Fleur de Lys pub on Humberstone Road off Elizabeth Way.
Big social media firms could have provided such a function but instead followed the corporate dollar
The ability of people to list events and add them to their calendars both as reminders and also to enable them to see who of their friends were going, was one of the great things from the early days of what was social media, but now more anti-social media. The social benefits for individuals were huge, and also it enabled small up-and-coming acts to let their fan-bases (and their networks) know when and where they would be. Had this been allowed to flourish, this could have been a huge boost for the struggling sector in terms of bringing new audiences to venues, as well as supporting the arts generally. But instead the whole thing got monetised and captured as the big firms started making their platforms less interactive with each other. On top of this they gamed their algorithms promoting junk reels, clickb8 and the like. Thus any events list that come from them cannot be relied upon as being comprehensive.
Furthermore, we’ve lost the hashtag functions completely for things like live-tweeting events, and thus the ability for people following comments or streams remotely to table their questions to panelists, or comments on the back of live performances. This could have been a great thing for the arts sector but we’ve lost it and it’s hard to see how it will come back again. Hence why as I explained in my previous post, I have finished with Birdsite altogether. The things I was sharing were not getting much mileage and even fewer meaningful responses or conversations. Given my immobility, if there is one thing I really need from social media it’s the ability to interact with people who I will otherwise lose touch with, and lose friendship with. Which is what has happened sadly. That has been compounded by the inevitable distressing content that cannot be zapped or blocked.
At the moment I mainly use LinkedIn & Bluesky for what limited interactions there are in my spheres. But I’m under no illusions as to the bigger personal challenges and issues I have, and the much wider problems that Cambridge faces – neither of which are going to be solved by a new social media app.
If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:
- Follow me on BSky <- A critical mass of public policy people seem to have moved here (and we could do with more local Cambridge/Cambs people on there!)
- Like my Facebook page
- Consider a small donation to help fund my continued research and reporting on local democracy in and around Cambridge.
For those of you interested in running around Cambridge doing various fun things in April 2025, see the Rebel Badge Club’s Cambridge event which I wrote about here.
The Cambridge Town Owl 