Robert Sharp

Evenin’ all. I wanted to make a quick point about certain global news stories, and the relative amount of news coverage given to each.

Its fashionable, yet incredibly easy to complain that the Michael Jackson death has crowded out news of other more pressing matters. Shawn Micallef sounded an early word of warning about this attitude:

There is no need to compare MJ & Iran - completely dif, just intersect on same medium, not a social/moral lesson to be learned.

Then (again via Twitter, though the link is now lost in the maelstrom) I came across this MJ/Election mash-up, and it occurred to me that coverage (be it on Twitter, blogs or the international MSM) is not a zero-sum game, and that coverage of one piece of news could promote awareness of another.

If you consider Jackson’s output, there are actually loads of other songs that could fit a revolutionary template. Songs like “Heal The World” and “You Are Not Alone” seemed (to me) quite sanctimonious and irritating when they were released. But with the passing of Michael Jackson, the self-congratulatory element to those tracks seems to dissipate. They’re now ripe for the picking as a backing track to some feel-good montages of the peaceful demonstrations in Tehran. “Earth Song”, “Black or White” and (going back a little bit further) “Man in the Mirror” also carry that We-Are-The-World vibe… as does, of course, “We Are The World”! They could all fill the role of unofficial theme-tune to a non-violent protest movement.

Too cheesy? Not one bit of it: The “Yes We Can” generation of political campaigners are unafraid of such accusations. Meanwhile, tracks like “Beat It” could accompany comedic images of Ahmedinejad and Khameni and Keyboard Cat.

I meant to post this last week, so I feel sure I am behind the curve on this one. Yet a quick search through YouTube doesn’t yield further examples. Let us know your favourites, either in the comments, or via the tips form, and maybe we’ll do a round-up or something.

+posted at Liberal Conspiracy. Comment there.

Its frustrating to maintain a blog, yet fail to comment on some of the most potent stories of the moment.  Nothing doing here on the expenses row or the election of a new speaker.

Worse still, nothing on the ongoing protests and violence, following the recent disputed elections in Iran.  That’s not to say I’m not engaged with what is happening.  I’ve been following the pleas for help via the #iranelection tag on Twitter, and looking various photostreams on Flickr.

During the street protests that followed the Mumbai attacks, I said that social media has come of age.  But now, looking at the Iranian events, I worry about that.  First, we have seen that the network is still vulnerable to interference from governments.  And second, raising awareness of an event is not the same as establishing consensus, much less ensuring there is a critical mass of people for effective action.

I discussed this briefly in a post about the Burmese Monks protest (the short-lived “Saffron Revolution”) in September 2007.  Despite the use of the Internet as a co-ordination tool, it seems that critical mass - or, to be more precise, the right kind of critical mass - is still an elusive Pot of Gold.

The Apollo Plus 40 Twitter Feed reminds me of the Orwell Diaries project.  Each pulls a piece of history forward to the present day, where you can experience it in real-time. (via Kottke).

My inner autistic feels slightly uneasy about the the disparity between dates and day.  For example, The Eagle Lunar Module landed on the moon at just after 8pm EDT, on 20th July 1969, which was a Sunday evening (see Mark’s Livingston’s date-to-day converter).  However, I’ll presumably be reading a tweet announcing “the Eagle has landed” late on the evening of Monday 20th July 2009.  Sunday nights and Monday nights feel very different.

The BBC screened couple of TV programmes a few years ago, Dateline Jerusalem and Bethlehem Year Zero, that operated on a similar timeshift concept for the Easter and Christmas stories.  Not quite real-time, though.  It strikes me as a new way to consume other types of art too:  perhaps reading the entire oeuvre of a given writer by purchasing their books exactly 40, or 50, or a 100 years after the initial publication.  Hansard, the Houses of Parliament archive, would be the perfect resource for an extended “on this day” type feed.

What’s freaky about the Internet, or specifically, the Internet where everyone uses permalinks, is that everything is already pre-archived, ready for this kind of treatment at a moment’s notice.  Many is the time when I have accidentally thought that an archived news story is happening at that moment.  With TV, film and radio, there are certain giveaways like picture and sound quality, colour balance, or even accents and pronounciation, which date the archived item.  In print, the age of the page is easy to discern, by the graphic design style if not by the yellowing of the parchment.  Meanwhile, the division of design and content on the Internet means that old text is constantly inserted into modern designs.

I’m not sure which I like best - going back in time to experience the sights and sounds of a forgotten era; or having the old narratives brought forward into a twenty-first century setting.  There’s room for both, of course, but different approaches conjour different feelings, and teach us different lessons.

The English PEN evening plenary was a fanastic way to round up the Convention on Modern Liberty.  For me, it was the writer and blogger Cory Doctorow’s contribution that really caught the imagination. With his laptop on his knee, he seemed to be pulling snippets and sound-bites from all corners of Teh Intertubes:

Later, the panel were asked what piece of art had inspired them to think about freedoms and liberty:

So here’s what’s really inspired me about our capacity as a society, to enforce (or rather, claim) the rights that are our due - not that the state gives us, but belong to us from the beginning: Its the rise of internet culture, and the rise, for all the bad and all the good, its the rise of a system in which we are all part of a single dialogue, in which we can make any kind of art, and in which any person can communicate with any other person, without any third party intervening, has given rise to a global dialogue that, I think, beggars the imagination of even the most optimistic philosophers of a generation ago. 

And I mean that literally - you read the science fiction of the 1960s and the closest they come is they think maybe we would have a really good video on demand service with some video-phone on the side.  No-one predicted just how, just, the fantastic Cambrian explosion of genres, of forms, of ideas, and of participation from every corner of the globe, that the Internet has enabled.  And that’s for me, why keeping the network free is the first step to keeping us all free.

Its better in video! Billy Bragg, Feargal Sharkey, Paul Gilroy, Henry Porter and English PEN’s President Lisa Appignanesi also answer:
(more…)

Gaurav Mishra supplies a useful model of social media (via Global Voices Advocacy).   His “4Cs” are

• Content
• Community
• Collaboration
• Collective Action

… each stage being progressively harder to achieve than the last.  He suggests measuring any given ’social media’ campaign against this framework.

I am reminded of an event run by the think tank Demos a few months ago, How To Make News And Influence People, chaired by Charlie Leadbeater.  I had refrained from writing up my thoughts until now, because I had hoped a podcast of the event would emerge.  No such luck.

The discussion centred almost entirely around using the web and other technologies for PR purposes.  We saw a fascinating presentation on how the photographs of James Nachtwey, winner of the 2007 TED Prize, were used to promote awareness of a new and extreme form of Tuberculosis, and the campaign to eradicate it at XDRTB.org.  My question (which I had vainly hoped, and hoped in vain, would be on a podcast) drew the distinction between raising awareness amongst the generally sympathetic public (is there anyone against TB?) and establishing a consensus on a political issue, where there wasn’t one before (gay marriage, and the legalisation of marijuana are two issues that spring to mind).  The multi-platform techniques described in the event seemed to be perfect for the former, but did not (to use Mishra’s analysis) harness a significant colelctive intelligence.

What was also noteworthy about the XDRTB campaign in particular, and about advocacy campaigns in general, is how they still rely on the mainstream media for traction.  Immigration Minister Phil Woolas gave into the demands of the ghurka campaign when it received significant celebrity-focussed media coverage.  My work at PEN has a large element of this too, where we arrange for our more famous members to speak out in favour of our campaign.  This has always been the way of traditional PR campaigns (c.f The Onion classic Rare Disease Nabs Big-Time Celebrity Spokesman).  This is entirely different from the highly connected campaigns such as #amazonfail and this week’s #fixreplies Twitter clusterfuck.  The celebrity-free, crowd-driven campaigns still seem to focus mainly on issues with a strong online or technological focus.

Yeah yeah, whatever.  100 “Single Ladies” in Picadilly Circus:

This is a mash-up to two 21st Century crazes, made possible by new technology. The first is the practice of making a tribute to a song you love, by lip-syncing to the track while parodying the video. Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies‘ is the current world leader in such pastiches. The second is the public Flash Mob (see Liverpool Street Station, or Antwerpen Centraal).  Combining the two phenomena would seem like an instant win, right?

Wrong.  Why?  Because both practices are entertaining because they are created by what we might call ‘normal’ people:  Volunteers, of all shapes, ages and sizes, not from central casting.  The Public.  The Users.  The People.  Meanwhile, the Single Ladies dancers in Picadilly Circus are an exclusive, homogenised clique of conventionally pretty people.  The overall effect lacks the surprise of the T-Mobile/Antwerp stunts, and the freedom we see in the home-made homages to Beyoncé.  It is less than the sum of its parts, and will never become part of digital folklore.

Update (30th April 2009)

According to Chris, there is going to be anopther flash mob tonight in Trafalgar Square.

This is precisely what Dan Hill was talking about.

Kottke writes in defence of Twitter and quotes Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG:

Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It’s a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.

Tee-hee.

Since I am finding my job particularly fascinating at the moment, I am using Twitter as an online diary of my work activities.  Meanwhile, my relentless, commentless blogging about Internet Philosophy was vindicated yesterday, when I was able to instantly call up several links for the gentleman running Livefiction.co.uk (which has obvious similarities to what we did with Sweet Fanny Adams).  For anyone who is not famous, and doesn’t have the time to make themselves famous (or infamous) online, I think blogging-as-scrapbook is probably the easiest way to justify an online presence.

This is all old ground of course.  And Orwell would have had a blog.

In last month’s Prospect, David Goldblatt gave a couple of interesting statistics about Golf:

you have a global [golf] industry worth around $350bn. This is roughly the same as the GDP of Belgium, which coincidentally covers about the same land area as the world’s golf courses.

I was reminded of this just now, when I read a couple of statistics in the Shift Happens presentation by Karl Fisch.

1. Nintendo invests double the US government in R&D (slides 31-32)
2. If MySpace were a country, it would be the 11th Largest in the World (slide 35)

These are further examples of how companies and communities are now operating on a scale that dwarves the efforts of some nation states.  As I said in my notes on the Clay Shirky’s ‘Hello Everybody’ Demos podcast that accompanies his book, I find it fascinating that the nation state might wither in the face of alternative communal bonds:

However, I wonder whether the most profound shift might come when people transcend ethnicity as well as geography. With people spending so much time, and actually making money in worlds like Second Life, or building large guilds of allegiences in Eve Online or WarCraft, perhaps those bonds could be the basis for some other kind of nation or ‘polity’ with real power and relevance.

To Be Continued, I’m sure.

Here’s a post I’ve just had published over at Comment is Free.  Later, I will post a selection of the comments I’ve received there.

Credit where its due: The Way of the Blogs is hardly a new idea.  It was much discussed back in the ‘04 when people in the UK were starting to take notice of online debate.  More recently, it was discussed at one of English PEN’s round-tables that we held as part of our ongoing inquiry into UK libel laws.

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There was some depressing news from Geneva last week, as the UN Human Rights Council voted to adopt a resolution on “defamation of religions”. Although the resolution is non-binding, and does not compel any state to change its laws, it does lend authority to those in countries around the world who wish to clamp down on criticism of religion.

Here in the UK, English PEN’s No Offence campaign in 2005 successfully ensured that religious defamation laws remained off the statute books, and that blasphemy laws are a thing of the past (thank God). Such laws are bad for freedom of expression, of course, but in seeking to shield adherents from criticism of their faith, they ultimately weaken religion, too.

However, when religion comes under attack, the alienation and marginalisation felt by believers is real. How can they achieve redress for a perceived offence, without resorting to censorship, or its kid brother, the boycott?

I think there is a lesson to be learnt from blogs. Despite the robust nature of much of the debate online, I do perceive a sort of online Omerta, a Way of the Blogs. This states that if you have been offended or disrespected online, you can always fight your corner by setting up a counter-blog somewhere else. The idea is that you do not attempt to suppress the offensive material, legally or otherwise, but instead use the same medium to counter and debunk it.

Offline, a recent example from the US, shows this spirit in action. The Jewish organisation Theatre J, based in Washington DC, has been staging readings of Caryl Churchill’s controversial Seven Jewish Children, despite many people branding the play anti-semitic (Comment is Free has already discussed this point at length). Director Ari Roth says he doesn’t endorse the play, but feels the playwright’s language has some resonance: “So many of the lines resonate not with the language of hate, but with the language of perception.”

Roth denies that he is engaging in a form of self-flagellation, because Theatre J’s staging was not done so uncritically. He commissioned two new pieces that engage with Churchill’s text, entitled Seven Palestinian Children and The Eighth Child. Ultimately, what Theatre J has done is to appropriate Churchill’s play. They have mirrored its style in new works, subverting it in order to advance an alternative world view. The quick and impromptu way they have done so seems to me to be very much a 21st century act, reminiscent of the mash-ups, parodies and rebuttals at which internet culture excels. Not so different from The Way of the Blogs after all.

So, staging someone’s play, singing their song, or telling their story, is not necessarily an act of endorsement. Sometimes it can be a broadside attack on a particular orthodoxy. Appropriation and mutilation of art is an act of rebellion, a well-established weapon of the disenfranchised. To give two other examples: I am reminded of Angela Carter’s feminist reworking of traditional fairy tales; and the sampling and looping that is an inherent feature of urban music such as hip-hop. Those who found Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behzti offensive, or those who were upset by Jyllands-Posten’s provocative Mohammed cartoons, could and should have responded in a similar manner. New digital technology makes this cheap and easy.

But why engage? Why should religious communities have to dignify such attacks from a secular majority that is intent on insulting them at every turn? The answer is simple: art and culture evolves through conflict. Failure to engage leads a culture to stagnation, irrelevance, and finally, death. Religious defamation laws will strangle the very communities they seek to protect. Only raw and offensive free expression can offer salvation.

(Comment at Comment is Free)