ciaran ward

sluggerotoole.com — Western liberal democracies pride themselves on the right to freedom of expression. But social media has within the last decade or so had a profound impact on the possibilities of political expression.

sluggerotoole.com — Events of the past two years have demonstrated that thanks to modern technology and the increasingly individualistic nature of modern western society it's now perfectly possible, especially if you live in an urban area to go for days and even weeks on end without any meaningful contact with other human beings.

sluggerotoole.com — Back in the 1990s when I was a first-year student at Queen's I lodged in one of the brutalist Soviet-style 1960s tower blocks known as the Elms halls of residence located just off the leafy Malone Road.

sluggerotoole.com — The nostalgia industry has become something of a lucrative business. There are now entire TV channels dedicated to repeats of old shows where (if you have time on your hands) you can spend all day watching the likes of Columbo, Murder She Wrote, Kojak, Starsky & Hutch or The Sweeney.

sluggerotoole.com — As we're all too aware in our own small corner of the world, politics and sport can often be a toxic mix. But in the light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine the combustion of sporting and politico-economic interests was inevitable. George Orwell famously described sport as "war minus the shooting".

sluggerotoole.com — In the early 2000s, TV viewers were invited to see the funny side of the drudgery and monotony of the white-collar workplace.

sluggerotoole.com — I'm sure many of you have received an unsolicited phone call asking about that alleged car crash you were supposedly involved in (or Microsoft (allegedly) telling you you've got a bug on your PC that needs fixing) or an email from someone asking you to deposit a large sum of money into your account - or a message purporting to be from your bank, HMRC or Netflix - with numerous spelling and punctuation mistakes, upper and lower case letters in ...

sluggerotoole.com — Much has been written and debated about the impact of Brexit on the movement of people and goods. But relatively has been written about the flow of data post-Brexit. "Take back control" was a slogan used by the Leave campaign. But this apparently didn't include taking back control of one's own data.

sluggerotoole.com — "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." (British novelist LP Hartley, 1953) In the months following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, a whole new debate has opened up on how we should perceive the events and actors of the past.