Robert Sharp

This week, there has been a short online discussion about blogging on the (virtual pages) of The Guardian. Michael Billington asserted the need for professional, paper based reviewers, but I think some of his comments betray a patronising tone. He is simply wrong when he claims that

The critic, unlike the blogger, also has a duty to set any play or performance in its historical context.

… since blogs have the same responsibility if they want to be considered relevant (or simply, ‘good’). Billington is taken to task for this misunderstanding in the comments, and also for a misplaced nostalgia when he says:

The blog seems to me have supplanted the kind of prolonged argument about the arts that once took place in the correspondence columns of newspapers. Example: years ago, when I rashly suggested that Shaw was the best dramatist after Shakespeare, a considered, if heated, debate went on for weeks in the paper itself. Now such a suggestion would be a 48-hour wonder on the blog.

But that’s the point, says Ian Shuttleworth in the comments:

Blogs in this respect are filling a gap that has for some time and increasingly been left by editorial neglect in print publications.

Meanwhile, Lyn Gardner is a good deal more positive about the medium of blogging. It was her contribution which drew me to the debate, because last year I remember she used The Guardian’s theatre blog to publish a dissenting review of Katie Mitchell’s Waves, which had been panned by… none other than Michael Billington. Sadly, an online argument about Mitchell’s (admittedly divisve) work never materialised. This was a shame, since this sort of debate, between critics who care, is a feature which Billington himself misses. Blogs can complement theatre criticism, not challenge and marginalise it in the way that TV and film reviews have done.

Other writers also lament the absence of such robust industry. I am reminded of Michael Coveney’s essay in Prospect (November 2005). Here is a telling paragraph:

But the truth is that newspapers increasingly devote largely uncritical coverage to the latest product of the publicity machine … Previews and interviews now take precedence over critical responsibility. But the idea that they do so in order to meet a public demand is, I believe, false. Anyone under the age of 30 who wants to read about pop music, new film and reality television knows where to go. That place is not the broadsheets, but magazines and the internet. So the liberal, professional intelligentsia who read the broadsheets are confronted with coverage they don’t want and comment on “high culture” by people who often know less about it than they do.

The Guardian’s consideration of blogging is welcome, but ultimately, I cannot help but think that these critics are arriving late onto the scene, when they should have been in the vanguard. When Natasha Tripney writes

Bloggers are not constricted by word count or deadlines, and have free reign to write about what they want, when they want

or when Michael Billington types

critics are much more accountable for their opinions… the blog also gives a voice to the hitherto voiceless

we are reading insightless cliché - Many of us have been identifying these features for yonks! To paraphrase Michael Coveney, bloggers are being presented by comment on “blog culture” by people who often know less about it than they do.

Andrew Anthony, having a healthy online debate with Sunny Hundal:

Your post reminds me of Conor Foley’s first posting, insofar as they both seem primarily interested in proving their nuanced credentials

One feature of online discourse is that very little is taken for granted. A blogger (especially one on a highly trafficked site like Comment is Free) has to cater for all persuasions.

In practice, this means you have to add more information than is strictly necessary to advance your message. Either that, or risk getting lost in the minutae of a debate that distracts from the new and interesting point you were trying to make. I don’t think Sunny was trying to prove anything by citing his ‘credentials’. He was merely citing certain previous examples of his writing, in order to head off fairly the obvious counter-arguments.

By contrast, I think print newspaper columnists and authors have a general idea of who their audience might be, and write accordingly. If you can be sure that your readers all share certain values, and accept certain arguments, then you feel confident about jumping into the debate several conceptual steps down the line. This confidence is shattered when you enter a world where responses are immediate and unfiltered by a Letters Editor. Authors are left with the impression that the readers are impolite, uncouth and agressive.

I actually think a great deal of ‘fisking’ is redundant for the same reason. Since the blogger does not share the same world-view as the columnist the target, a line by line rebuttal never seems as effective as a stand-alone composition.

There is a well known phenomena of bloggers suffering ennui with the medium, eighteen months or so after they begin. I am just emerging from just such an affliction now (although since I post at a relatively low frequency I doubt either of my readers would have noticed). I think much of this frustration is a result of never getting to the nub of the argument, never quite managing to debate the subtle point one wishes to make. Instead, the discussion is dominated by the clarification and vocalising of preconceptions and core values.

This worry passes, of course, since the core values are either reinforced or abandoned by the scrutiny. Blogging is a process of clarification as much as anything else.

Online writing has many advantages. It is immediate, and allows space for dissenting opinion where other media fail. It also provides a space to write without compromise. I think most bloggers (and blog commenters) would describe themselves as ‘uncompromising’, but often the rants are gratuitous, and serve no higher purpose other than a catharsis for the writer.

At other times, the shocking imagery is entirely appropriate, as in a post on Friday from Justin at Chicken Yoghurt, on the subject of teen killers and Rhys Jones:

If the author has any sense, he’ll be working on ‘101 Uses For A Dead Kid’ and make a fortune. The first use, I’d humbly suggest, is wedging a dead kid under the leg of a political party to stop it from wobbling, much as you would with a beer mat and a pub table. If that doesn’t work, take the corpse and beat your political opponent with it.
…
For years editors have found that if they suspend a dead child over the news desk, the resulting smell will attract hordes of readers seeking an emotional outpouring by proxy.

It is a sound point, but I doubt it would find its way into a newspaper. The satire is well placed, but it would be deemed too risky, and liable to being misunderstood. Journalists know this quite well, and self-censor as a result. Madeline Bunting also makes an important point in The Guardian today, but her article has a boilerplate feel to it, and lacks the impact of the Chicken Yoghurt piece.

Justin’s post prompted me to add a comment, which I may as well post here too.

It is notable that when an Islamic terrorist atrocity occurs, or a black child is murdered, the chat is all about how their culture is obviously flawed. Members of that ‘community’ must weed out the perpetrators and provide better role models.

Yet when an atrocity occurs within a predominantly white ‘community’, and the liberal left begin blaming the wider culture, the condemnations of wishy-washy self-hating political correctness are not far behind.

As part of the “We can’t turn them away” campaign, Dan Hardie has asked bloggers to post any responses they receive from MPs. Alistair Darling has replied to my letter… but only to say he will be investigating further, and will write again soon. When he does, I shall obviously post his response here.

The drive is an excellent example of Open Source Campaigning. ‘Open Source’ is a phrase taken from computer programming, where a group of programmers can all work on a project together. Tasks are itemised, and any programmer can take on an assignment from the list, complete it, and upload his code to the central source. Eventually a new version of the programme is available for release - usually for free.

The Iraqi asylum campaign fits the defintion for Open Source Campaigning for several reasons. It has a very specific policy objective, which lends itself very well to letter writing campaigns. The “list of tasks” does not even need to be written: Thanks to online tools such as WriteToThem.com and TheyWorkForYou.com we already have an available list of the MPs that need to be contacted. Individual bloggers and concerned citizens know exactly what is required of them, and the “ask” for each individual is actually very small - they just need to write a letter to their MP, and post the response. Those bloggers leading the campaign can take on the baton from there, calling to account any MPs who have given an ambiguous response, and lauding those MPs who have pledged their support to the campaign.

Meanwhile, Journalist Jay Rosen has been exploring the concept of Open Source Journalism. His recent article Blowback: The Journalism That Bloggers Actually Do has that meta-quality that I love. He has written a response to a curmugeonly article from Michael Skube in the LA Times, complaining that bloggers only give “opinion” and never do any fact finding. In response, Rosen lists many examples where bloggers have been fact-finders. Crucially (and here is the lovely ‘meta’ part) most of those examples were sent in by bloggers themselves.

Of course, most campaigns rely on some kind of public interaction to make them effective. I suppose what distinguishes an ‘appeal’ (such as the search for Madeline McGann, or a murder enquiry) is that not everyone can help with an ‘appeal’ as they can with an Open Source campaign. In the case of journalism, not everyone can provide researchers with an interesting story or case study for an article. But they can do a little piece of fact-finding research for an Open Source Article. All that is required is for the participants to care enough about the final outcome.

The next task for the “We Can’t Turn Them Away” campaign will be a honing excercise. Of all the MPs in the House of Commons, it is especially important to get comments and messages of support from those who have army regiments based in their constituency. The hive-mind needs to itemise every regiment who has worked in Basra (and therefore benefited from the local Iraqi workforce in some way), and then identify the relevant MP. For starters, it happens that none-other than Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague is the MP for the huge Catterick Garrison. Armed Forces Bill Committee Member and Home Affairs Committee Member Bob Russell is the MP for Colchester, another big army town. Have they been approached yet?

Jeremy Vine tells a story about watching someone get beaten up on a tube train:

I chose to sit there and watch. And I’ve replayed it many many times. I’m very unhappy that I did that, and I now have sort of resolved that if I see a similar kind of situation where I see someone being attacked like that, I will intervene with unmitigated ferocity.

A few months ago I experience a “lite” version of the incident Vine described. Two young whippersnappers were refusing to pay for their journey, or get off the train, causing a rather loud argument with the ticket inspector. It was initially just a verbal affair, until the guard threatened to call the police. They made a quick exit, and shoved him as they disembarked (the cowards). I never thought about getting involved physically, or indeed joining the argument, but I do remember being irritated that my mobile phone had run out of batteries. Rather than resolving to respond with “unmitigated ferocity”, I instead resolved to be quick to film any further incidents I might happen upon.

In late June, Edinburgh’s Pilrig Park hosted the Pride Scotia event. Marquees were erected on the field a few days before. Walking through the park one evening, I spotted a group of hooligans in a pitched battle with some security guards. Remembering my earlier vow, I whipped out my Nokia and began filming the incident for the police and posterity. We can’t be having that sort of homophobia in Edinburgh, not on my patch, no way.

The responses of the young tear-aways was varied and noteworthy. Some of them immediately realised the implications of being caught doing naughtiness on low-resolution video. They covered their faces and made a prompt exit, as illustrated below:

Ah, digital technology! The citizen’s non-intrusive weapon against Anti-Social Behaviour…

Meanwhile, one fool became rather irritated with my brazen filming. His anger became directed at me, throwing a bottle and a punch in my direction (as illustrated below).

The fact that he stayed behind to throw stuff at me proved his undoing of course, because the police arrived shortly after.

“They’re making it all up!” said the kid, when asked to account for the multiple assaults of which he stood accused.

“Well, we do actually have you on film, assaulting people…” replied the officer. The accused kept quiet after that.

Meanwhile, I was getting an earful from my girlfriend, who had not appreciated me provoking the scallywag to further violence with my rampant phone-filming. I could have been seriously hurt. She also accused me of only capturing the footage only so that I could put it into some kind of blog post afterwards. I assured her that this was not my intention, and that I could hardly stand by while bullies made threats. She pointed out that I had, effectively, filmed my own Happy-Slapping, and there was nothing brave or noble about that.

At the time, I was perfectly sure of my actions, but now the correct course is much less clear. I think the problem lies in the act of making a ‘resolution’ to act, in advance of an incident actually occurring. I pulled out my camera-phone without thinking, and my proximity to the action made things worse. Perhaps I should have found a safe vantage point, and got ready to run away if someone approached me. Jeremy Vine resolves to respond with “unmitigated ferocity”, but that might not be the most appropriate action during the next tube-based assault he witnesses. He may end up making a fight worse, and end up beign assaulted himself. Worse, he may end up doing so much damage to the assailant, that he himself becomes culpable, and others have to intervene to stop him.

Each call to violence should be judged on its own merits, at the time. No two conflicts are alike, and intervention in one instance should not endorse similar actions at some other time. If you resolve in advance to go to war, or to get into a fight on a train, then the best outcome is unlikely to emerge.

Clive Thompson in Wired, on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense:

Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter is cumulative. … When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

Twitter is a kind of mini-blogging, where you can post message via text message. Thompson predicts that this feature will be incorporated into other applications… and indeed, a similar feature exists in Facebook, which incorporates a “status” field that you can fill in with whatever you wish.

One feature of the Facebook feature is that the site automatically adds the word “is” to the start of the sentence (i.e. “Robert is…”). This can be frustrating when one’s status (whatever it may be) does not lend itself well to an “is”. I have to write “Robert is wanting…” instead of “Robert wants…”, and “Robert is thinking…” instead of “Robert thinks…”

Some people have been agitating to have this little quirk removed from the site. However, I think this would be a mistake. Sometimes, real creativity arises when one has to overcome constraints. Some of the best Facebook statuses (stati?) I’ve seen, have caused the obligatory “is” to be integral. When you realise that the first two words of a sentence are mandatory, a cliche suddenly seems inspired.

My recent favourites are both very much the epitome of 21st century urban life:

Gill is like, so, whatever.

and

Mike is just popping out to the shops, do you want anything?

Reading old articles, in which a journalist enthuses about a technology that is now obsolete, is always fun. Reading Jim Fallows, writing in 1982, describe what it is like Living With a Computer is no exception (via Daily Dish). There is plenty of discussion of how much memory to fork out for, and whether to buy a tape or floppy drive.

The system prints about thirty characters per second, which means it takes less than a minute per double-spaced page. When it has completed its work, I take the manuscript and start working it over with a pencil, just as I did in days of old. The difference is that after I’ve made my changes, I have only to type in the changes I have made and start the printer up again—rather than retype the whole mess.

This passage is echoed in an article by Umberto Eco, discussing how the process of drafting has changed with the advent of computers. Before, writers would compose one discrete draft after another until the thing was complete. Jim Fallows was following this same process in 1982. In these cases, the earlier drafts were actually on paper and might not be thrown away, leaving a resource for the author and researchers if required. Eco points out that these days, there are an indeterminate number of drafts and sub-drafts - “ghost drafts” he calls them - which are lost to the world.

It could be the case, though rare, that the author - narcissistic and fanatical about his own changes, and using some kind of special computer program - has kept somewhere, inside the memory of the machine, all these intermediate changes. But usually this does not happen. Those “ghost” copies have vanished; they are erased as soon as the work is finished.

And so the work of the philologists of the future will be based on conjecture, on what those “ghost” copies might have contained - and who knows how many great texts and other erudite publications will be born from that conjecture? To outsiders, they might seem like problems suited only for college exams. But the discussion shows that the use of mechanical systems for writing doesn’t necessarily simplify and thereby mechanise the creative activity, but rather can make it that much more shaded and complex.

Whenever I’m working on something creative, I do periodically make a copy of the document, especially when I’ve decided to purge a few paragraphs of verbosity. I don’t think this is particularly narcissistic, as Eco has it. It is just an insurance against changing your mind. Those thoughts that don’t make the cut might be useful for something else, later.

Update, 27th August

Matthew Kirschenbaum expands on this theme in The Chronicle Review.

What if we could use machine-learning algorithms to sift through vast textual archives and draw our attention to a portion of a manuscript manifesting an especially rich and unusual pattern of activity, the multiple layers of revision captured in different versions of the file creating a three-dimensional portrait of the writing process? What if these revisions could in turn be correlated with the content of a Web site that someone in the author’s MySpace network had blogged?

One thing I have witnessed “first hand” is the anxiety - nay, terror - induced by the shocking MTAS system for appointing junior doctors. Various aspects of the mis-management continue to be discussed in the blogs and in newspapers, including the dumbing-down of the profession and the fact that some people are having to take on lower grade positions.

So, while I can concede that there are dozens of political groups that I could campaign for, I’ve lent my support to the junior doctors at Remedy Scotland by setting up a campaign blog for them. They have quite a focused campaign, with an achievable reform agenda, in a single policy area, so I am hoping that it can be quite incisive. Since so many people in Scotland will be affeced, a fairly disparate group of people will need to be mobilised. I am planning to utilise the full arsenal of Web 2.0 technologies to help spread the message. Expect blog buttons and such things very soon.

Do please visit the site and sign the petition. There is also a protest march planned for mid-July, in Glasgow.

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Another odd aspect of social networking sites, is the lack of control over how you actually do the networking.  As soon as anything to do with your real life is represented or linked to online, you surrender full control over that new identity. 

On Facebook, for example, you may have chosen a particular profile photograph which conveys a certain image.  It a version of yourself, which you choose to present.  And it is a version that is totally undermined when, say, your friends and family start tagging photographs of you dressed as a ballerina at a fancy-dress party.

Duncan O’Leary from Demos mused on the implications of this for job-seekers, late last year.  He pointed out that an employer can Google all the applicants for a job, unearthing all manner of embarrasment.  Think of the 19 year-old Scottish Parliamentary candidate, whose friends posted pictures of him drunk on various websites.  In such cases, the Internet is an annoyingly efficient conduit of information over which you have no control, but the cause and effect are both offline occurrences.   

But for an increasing number of people, the online community itself becomes part of who they are.  Participating on a forum, or writing a blog, is a leisure activity, Something That They Do.  With the coming of the Age of the Internet, we herald an era where we can create idealised versions of ourselves, identities that we can slip into, so we may relax and flourish (indeed, one correspondent of mine claims to have three or four different blog identities).  But it seems that this is only possible if one makes a clean break with reality, denying all contact with your offline self, your past.  Will the fact that I have an eponymous blog cause trouble for me one day? 

As soon as aspects your real life are represented online, that carefully crafted New You is undermined.  At the very least, deciding what parts of the Old You are represented online, should be a choice for the individual.  It should not be the choice of the individual’s girlfriend’s sister’s flatmate, who stole an impromptu snapshot in that bar, that one time.

The issue at stake here is, I think, starkly illustrated by the story of 13 year-old Casey Knibbs, who committed suicide after being bullied online.  If the Internet allows you to create and control the spaces you use for recreation and interaction, how on earth did bullies get in there?  Or rather, why was he not able to simply disable (or ‘Plonk’) their comments.  It is like being bullied by an imagninary friend. 

A couple of my mates use the social networking site Facebook to keep in touch. Like MySpace and others, you can create your own profile page, post messages and photos, and link your profile to other ‘friends’ (real, virtual, or merely imagined) on the network.

I think half the fun of these sites, is spending a little while following the forking paths of links, from a friend, to a friend’s friend, to a friend of a friend of a friend. Suddenly you find yourself browsing a page or two of photos, of a fancy dress party you did not attend, populated by people you don’t know. There’s a similarity to all these pictures – guys and girls lean in, drink in hand, for the pose. The snap shot is taken in haste: It is poorly composed; the automatic flash invariably over-lights the moment; and the subjects strike a ‘wacky’ pose, with tongues out and peace V-signs galore. I’ve taken dozens of pictures like this myself over the years. Its fun to wait a few extra seconds, to see how long the poseurs can maintain their, erm, posture.

One noteworthy aspect of these Facebook profiles is the choice the users make for their profile picture. Bizarrely, hundreds of people choose just such a party shot as their ‘face’, invariably one which includes other people as well. How are visitors supposed to know which face belongs to the profile they are reading, and which is that of some random punter who happened to fit their gurn into the shot as well?

I know there is a wealth of psychological extrapolations to be made from examining different people’s choice of avatar or profile picture. It is a chance to portray an aspect of yourself to the world. I notice a good proportion of bloggers keep their mug-shot off their site. Others, in common with those Facebook users, choose an impromptu snap, which suggests they wish to convey a modest yet carefree attitude – any old picture will do. But what does it say about a person when they add other people to their profile photo? Are they lacking a coherent identity of their own? Or merely showing us that they are so goddamned popular, that they cannot even find a picture of themselves that does not include some other fawning reveller.

I suppose the choice to portray yourself in a certain way is influenced by the tone of the site itself. In contrast to the naïf choices made by many Facebook users, the images displayed on the American site Spring Street Personals (which powers The Onion Personals) are all carefully chosen. Each is carefully cropped and displays a good looking young person who effortlessly exudes that counter-culture cool, which is central to the website’s brand. When similar images appear on Facebook, however, they seem arrogant and misplaced. And as with online virtual spaces, so it is in the real world. Design (whether graphic, interior, or fashion) frames the way we see ourselves, and how we interact with others.