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.

I’ve been at the Frontline Club to listen to a World Press Freedom Day Debate: Are Governments at War Winning the Battle of Controlling the International Media?

Tim Unwin has done a good job of accurately reporting the proceedings. I think the debate will be online too.

My feeling is that the truth of the motion depends on what we include as “international media”. If we are talking just about established, authoratitive news outlets, then maybe the “ayes” have it. However, if we include bloggers and citizen journalists in the definition, then maybe the “noes” are closer to the truth.

There is also the distinction between “combat operations”, when real time reporting seems to go in favour of governments at war, and after the event reporting, when more facts and viewpoints emerge. The established news organisations have the edge in the heat of battle, and alternative, dissenting voices emerge only over time.

At the end, Joe Cullen from the Tavistock Institute urged caution regarding social networking and web 2.0 technologies. They are not changing the political landscape, he says, and most people’s experience of these new sources of information is filtered through the mainstream media, and whatever narrative it is currently perpetuating.

The question is, as always, in what direction are we travelling? I remain optimistic that as more people adopt new methods of communication and news sources, the credibility gap will close and the spectrum of opinion, and information available, will increase.

Almost as soon as I echo the question “who are you writing for” then a prime example appears in the pages of the Observer Woman magazine.  Rachel Cooke calls those obsessed with motherhood “boring, selfish, smug” and cites this piece of evidence:

Let me give you an example. The other morning, while I was thinking about writing this piece, I logged on to one of the dozens of websites now devoted to all things baby-related. The discussion subject of the day - email us! - was the funny ways kids mispronounce words. Really. To which I say: new mothers, by all means, tell your own parents, or a close friend, about how your son said the word “bottle” and made it sound like “bottom”. But don’t be incontinent. Don’t tell the entire world. Telling the entire world will make people, and not without reason, think that you have lost your mind.

Cooke’s false lemma here is to equate putting something on the internet, with, OMG, TELLING THE WORLD!  Confessing something in an Observer column could be described in that way.  Participating in an online discussion, while (technically) available for everyone to see, is something quite different.  It is participating in a community, based around a shared interest.  If the sites are appropriately labelled (and if they are called Alpha Mummy, Mumsnet, Babble, and MumsRock, then I would suggest that is the case) then the real mystery is why anyone without a child would go anywhere near them.  They are narrowcasting, not broadcasting, and joining a discussion there does not equate to “telling the world” or the self-centredness that Cooke implies.

The Internet, with its millions of users and trillions of pages, carries fan and hobby sites for absolutely any human activity one can imagine, including knitting, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and foot fetishists.  They might appear obsessed, but then any highly specialised conversation seems that way to an outsider.  Since we only come into contact with these people when we see them online, we do not credit them with any other interests, other than what we read of their online thoughts.  So it is with the parenting sites mentioned above:  They are populated by a self-selected group of people, with a narrow remit to talk about one subject.  They are not representative of a wider trend, any more than the so-called Dummy Mummies Cooke has apparently encountered at London social events.

Plenty of my friends now seem to use Facebook as a place to post pictures of their babies.  Does that mean that they are obsessed?  No more so than all my childless mates, who only ever post images from their holidays, or of weddings.  We choose to only record certain things, tiny slivers of our lives.  Thank God they don’t post pictures of themselves on the train, or worse, on the bog.

I’m proud to have been drafted in to help the Convention on Modern Liberty create a new design for their - our - WordPress website.The site will be updated  tomorrow to reflect the changes.

Another site to launch recently is LabourList, a party blog that has managed to draw many senior government and party figures to contribute. It went for a “soft launch” last week, and currently carries the notice

Beta Test Site - Official Launch 12th February 2009

However, that hasn’t stopped folk like Iain Dale writing reviews of the site, run by Derek Draper, pointing out its failings as a worthy challenger to ConservativeHome and its ilk on the political right.

As a director of Fifty Nine Productions, I was (until 2007) involved in many a theatrical production, ranging from site-specific work in Scotland to high-budget productions at the National Theatre and the London Coliseum.  With all these productions, it was standard practice to have one or more preview shows, effectively public dress rehearsals, where not only were creases ironed out of the staging, but often entire scenes were cut or reworked to make it more effective.  Beta-testing for live performance.  In each case, critics understand the fact that the previews do not necessarily represent the production in the way the director envisages.  They respect the effective embargo (to borrow a term from press releases) on reporting and reviewing the performance.  They wait until opening night.

It is perhaps a sign that the act of blogging is still in its immaturity, that the concept of holding off on judgement is not applied to the launch of blogs and websites, in the same way as it is for other forms of expression.

One of the presents in my stocking from Santa was The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I’ve long thought that his epics, The Baroque Cycle and especially Cryptonomicon address some of the fundamental issues of our age, especially the impact of technology on culture. This passage from The Diamond Age, published in the mid-1990s, seems prescient of our computer culture, our obsession with gagetry (”guilty, your honour”) and the vogue for cosmetic surgery. It also made me laugh:

You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud’s sound system lived in his eardrums. You toild even get telaesthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumoured that hackers for big companies had figured out a way to get through the dedenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who’d somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.

(Hat-tip to Roger M for the book recommendation).

If, like me, you have a knee-jerk reaction whenever anyone suggests regulating the Internet, this A List Apart article on captioning/subtitling of online videos is a challenging read. Joe Clark argues that the voluntary approach to developing a good, standardized captioning system has failed, and that only governments can enforce some sort of progress:

In short, disabled people’s right to be free of discrimination trumps the belief, however fallacious, that the internet cannot or should not be regulated.

Earlier this year, the Liberal Conspiracy take on Andy Burnham’s recommendations on Internet regulation, was that it was merely a sop to the powerful music lobby and their outdated business models.  Contrast this with the case of subtitling, where it is the lack of regulation which has allowed the studios and broadcasters to ignore their obligations to provide accessible content, in favour of greater profit margins.

It was the political concept of ‘accessibility’ that got me interested in web design, and fuels my current love of all things social networky. When we made The Unrecognized, I took particular pride in the subtitling, a project I worked on alone and probably took as long as the edit of the film itself. We were in a sense lucky that the film featured three languages, because it meant that a captioned video was the norm, as Joe Clark now recommends.

The internet can and should be an equalising force, yet for deaf people the online landscape is still an unwelcoming jungle.

News gatherers and citizen journalists in Mumbai, 28th November 2008. Photo by Vinu

The way in which 24 hour news channels have changed the way we learn about, and witness, global events has been well documented and discussed. We saw the twin towers fall, live on TV.  I think its astonishing that the image of one of these young terrorists could be pasted across my copy of the Metro, whilst he was still at large in India.

The latest terror induced crisis, in Mumbai, takes our participation in these events a stage further. These attacks, made with assault-rifles over several locations, was in many ways more confusing than Al-Qaeda’s grand gesture of 9/11. It says something about how technology has developed, that this story was relayed as much by connected individuals - the mass of citizen journalists - as by major news networks. Via Peter Bradwell at Demos, I’ve found a Twitter feed giving information on the attacks. In a mirror of the Election Twitter, which captured the global exhilaration of the Obama victory, this Mumbai twitter conveys something of the confusion caused by these attacks.  As well as learning about the events, and witnessing them, it has come to the stage where we are experiencing them too.  The epicentre of the attacks are in India, but we experience the reaction everywhere.

Meanwhile, high quality images are available via Flickr (including Vinu’s excellent shots, which I’ve used to illustrate this and the previous post).  In this case the static, but high-resolution photos beats low resolution YouTube.  Either way, social media sites have been promising to empower the citizen journalist, and to cut out the middle-man of the mainstream media.  And of course, they also make it harder for government’s to force a certain narrative onto us.  In 2008, with the Obama campaign and the Mumbai attacks, I would say that social media has come of age.

Chris at QWGHLM has created a mash-up of the bunker scene from Downfall.  It depicts Hitler as Nick Griffin, loser of membership lists. (via LibCon).  Godwin’s Law apparently does not apply.

It reminds me, loosely, of an article in Salon on the ICanHazCheeseburger? phenomenon, on the cartoonish nature of the images of cute and not-so-cute cats:

By articulating profound feelings through cats and marine mammals speaking garbled English, we’re able to shroud genuine emotions in pseudo-irony — which means those animals can evoke deeper emotions without fear of mockery or cheapness.

…

“The animals aren’t animals at all, they’re stand-ins,” explains Mankoff. “They’re hybrids we use as devices to talk about the feelings we can’t name in other ways.”

How does this relate to Hitler and making fun of the BNP?  Well, only in that Chris’ mash-up is essentially a one-panel cartoon in YouTube form.  Like a one-panel cartoon, its actually a one note joke.  Put an emotion or context you want to mock into a preposterously stretched yet analagous situation, et voila!  Mirth ensues.

As I’ve said before, we live in the age of the remix, the mash-up, so its only natural that our humour should be of this form too.  Pick two ideas, any two ideas, and put them in a blender.  Corporate Pie-Charts vs Commercial Pop Music, for example.   Or another, which rather brings this post to a full, zen-like circle: Cats and Hitler:

A Kitler, from catsthatlooklikehitler.com

With the exception of the truly extraordinary image above, I would suggest that another feature of this kind of humour is its rather transient nature.  Over at the Liberal Conspiracy, Unity may indeed be ROTFLHFAO just now, but when the news story fades it is unlikely to be quite so hilarious.  It is certainly true of the GraphJam site (which is in desperate need of an editor).  Anything that includes the word’s “Sarah” and “Palin” now seems very passe.

Interestingly, the one-panel joke lends itself very well to a cross-over into the print world.  Nowadays, publishing an annual ‘best-of’ book allows these site owners to monetize their humour.  The Onion AV Club has a run-down of 27 Popular Websites That Became Books.  LOLCats is at Number 1, obv.  More on them another time…

The Sun crows over the Shannon Matthews case:

The prosecutor said cops recovered at [Michael] Donovan’s flat a copy of The Sun from March 11, with the headline: “£50,000 for Shannon. Sun ups reward to find lost girl.”

Police also discovered a copy of the Daily Mirror which had been ripped up and dumped in a bin.

Its bizarre that The Sun should choose to delight in this little factoid, because it draws attention to a few rather negative interpretations:

• “The Sun is paper of choice for evil scheming child abductors”
• “The Sun falls for trap set by evil scheming child abductors”

or worse

• “The Sun’s dubious track record inspires evil scheming child abductors”

Karen Matthews and Craig Meehan pose with a 'Sun' branded reward poster, February 2008

Now the paper’s editors will no doubt suggest that by offering their reward, they were merely acting as good citizens who just wanted to see Shannon found safely.  However, the crass branding of the reward poster, which they gleefully reproduced in today’s paper, shows that their motives were altogether more commercial.  Not content with merely reporting the story, they insisted on influencing it.  They delighted then, and they still delight, in the part they played.  But the shocking truth is, by quickly fulfilling the plotters’ prophecy and advertising a reward, they inspired the kidnappers to keep Shannon hidden for longer, thus prolonging her ordeal.

Of course, if Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan are found guilty, then they will be rightly condemned for their actions.  They have free will.  However, blame is not a zero sum game.  We do not live in a vacuum, and the media can send signals which inspire others to act in negative ways.  Usually, violent films, rap artists, or computer game producers shoulder the criticism.  When they are put in the spot-light, these groups usually cite free-will, but also agree that they should act responsibly, that they should add caveats and warnings to their art, and that it should not be marketed to the vulnerable or easily impressed.

I note that this contrite and defensive attitude is nowhere to be found on the pages of The Sun.  They have fuelled this case, sparked a sales bonanza, and will surely do it again the moment they are given another opportunity.

And next time - mark my words, there is always a next time! - it is likely that the disappearance will be genuine.  Another pair of worried parents, bamboozled into supporting “The Sun’s Campaign” to find their child, followed by a period where they themselves come under suspicion.  Its a winning formula for The Sun, and not one politician will call them on it.

Cross-posted at the Liberal Conspiracy, please comment there.

This weekend’s story about Peter Mandelson and Oleg Deripaska demonstrates and interesting example of media short-hand:

Sunday Telegraph 26th October 2008

Ever since Roman Abramovich bought his way into the British consciousness, the word ‘oligarch’ has been used to describe Russian Billionaires. It is used erroneously: Oligarch means a ruler of sorts, but Abramovich, Deripaska and Usmanov are not members of the Russian Government. Instead, they are businessmen, and now the word has become a shorthand for a particular cliche, one that hints at post-KGB gangsterism. All the papers choose to link Peter Mandelson and George Osborne to an ‘oligarch’, not a ‘businessman’, because the former casts Oleg Deripaska in a more sinister light. Its a better news story as a result, but its also a twisting of language, I reckon.

It reminds me of the ‘radical’ Shia Cleric, Moqtadr Al-Sadr.

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