Pupil Barrister
Seventh volley, Harrington vs Anderson (12th Oct 2007)
The buoyancy of the President’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, at the inauguration yesterday, was refreshing and delightful. Its fashionable to lament the fact that children “grow up too quickly these days.” Its becoming equally fashionable to note the innocence of the Obama girls in the midst of the overwhelming pomp of campaign, transition, and inauguration.
Malia gets her own snaps for the family album (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
The clamour for the photo (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
And that, I suppose, is the answer. Contrary to what the reporters at E! Magazine might hope, Malia’s photos are not for public consumption. They are a personal aide memoir (much like this blog). The camera-phone photos, poor quality, though they may be, server as a document to one’s presence of the event, a self-generated certificate of attendance. The grainier the better, to the extent that poor picture quality actually becomes a mark of authenticity.
ChicagoSuz, a commenter at Huffington post:
Weegee (my favorite photographer) would go to a fire and while all the other photogs were taking pictures of the flames, he would take pictures of the fire’s victims watching their homes burn. That seems to be what Malia is doing. While the media focuses on her Dad, she seems to be focusing on the people who came to see him. It’s a whole different perspective.
Here’s the sort of image I mean. The glow from the digital camera screens looks like fireflies:
President and First Lady at the Washington Hilton. Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com
Welcome, President Obama.
To mark the inauguration, and let us hope a more nuanced and optimistic USA, here’s a strangemap of America’s state mottos:
Clay Shirky at Demos, 14 July 2008. Photo by Lloyd Davis
If you’re making a web documentary about the future of the web, you can open it up for digital production. You can say, “make a video of yourself, talking about what you think the future will be like, or show me what you are doing, document this somehow, and send this to me as raw material.”
You can harness people for the outlet: “I’m doing a video documentary on the web and we’re going to launch it on One Web Day (or some such event), and we’re going to host virtual salons where people are going to get together to view this thing” and you can find the audience [via the web].
But the really interesting bit I think is this sort of ‘A&R plus Remix’, which is: how many versions of a documentary could there be? Because the choice for all of this stuff is, “here’s the main thread, right” but then there’s always going to be people who want more of X and less of Y. Is there a way to let people who are interested in, say, the change in music culture, have a documentary that, while keeping true to the through-line, has more of that aspect? And then for people form whom transformation of the political environment [is most interesting], you have more of that aspect instead.
And so that, it seems to me, is the really interesting thing – looking at essentially raw material; discovery; production; and distribution… and figuring our whether you can use the web at all of those touch-points.
I know the Convention on Modern Liberty will be extensively filmed. All the plenaries and breakouts will be recorded and podcast, and the main speeches will be streamed live. Some of the keynote speakers have already recorded their own thoughts in short pieces-to-camera, and the organisers have invited the public to post video responses.
Moreover, the range of freedoms under threat, and indeed the number of competing definitions of what “Modern Liberty” actually means, suggest to me that the Convention is a ripe subject for a Documentary-Plus-Remix, along the lines Shirky describes above.
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