In anticipation of tonight’s debate around drinking culture and the UK psyche, here’s the latest Urbis Research Forum Podcast from September’s meeting – City Sites.

While the intention of the panel (which Curated Place was supposed to be sitting on) was to explore how the outputs of blogging, webzines and even Twitter help to create imagined and physical urban spaces, the debate that took shape focused more directly on the role and limits of local media in influencing policy, politics and legislation.

Panellists were Susie Stubbs (Creative Tourist), Julian Tait (Future Everything) and Marc Hudsion (Manchester Climate Fortnightly) who discussed the death of traditional journalism, the lack of transparency in local authorities and the financial problems faced by bloggers who are operating in period of flux.

A couple of interesting references came up from Marc:

On the changes in our collective attention spans:

Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains By Nicolas Carr

and on the business of disinformation:

Predictably Irrational By Dan Ariely

Subscriptions in iTunes can be found here. Click the iTunes link to the right of the page which will download all podcasts in the future automatically.