While I certainly stand behind the broad message of my Oxford Union speech, it is only right to acknowledge that the subject of debate – the impact of social media on social activism – is a little more nuanced and complicated than my bolshy assertions would have you believe. It’s worth acknowledging some of the arguments in favour of the motion, and expanding on some of the issues I was only able to cruise by in my eight minutes at the despatch box.
First, I wrote down a phrase from Mark Pfeifle, where he described social media as enabling “the soft power of democracy”. I thought this was a persuasive point. My speech focused on social activism in the UK and the USA, where there is a long tradition of social activism, and therefore ‘reinventing’ such activism is a very tough proposition. By contrast, those countries plagued by dictatorship have a stunted tradition of social action, so any tool that enables any kind of activism might be seen as a ‘reinvention’.
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Category: Diary (Page 117 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Egypt, February 2011
On 31st May, I was delighted to be invited to the Oxford Union to debate the proposition This House Believes That Social Media has Successfully Reinvented Social Activism.
I chose to debate against the motion, and spoke last. Also speaking against the motion was Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Editor at The Daily Telegraph; Mark Kersten of the LSE; and Dr Christopher Carpenter from the University of Western Illinois. Speaking in favour was Senator David Vitter of Louisiana; Mark Pfeifle, National Security Advisor to President George W Bush; and Benjamin Cohen, the Channel 4 News Technology correspondent and founder of pinknews.co.uk. Ella Robertson of the Union opened the debate.
An iPhone recording of my speech is here, along with the transcript below. I shall write a follow up post with some nuanced thoughts on the debate, to balance the high flung rhetoric.
And for the record: Our side was successful. The motion was defeated!
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There has been much discussion over the past few days about the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Weekend. There were a lot of spectacles and public events to cover, and not everyone thinks Auntie Beeb got the coverage right.
Its now a fact that our observations of any big public event such as the #RoyalWedding or the Diamond Jubilee largely mediated by TV. This is also largely true even if you were there. Jumbo TV screens show you what’s happening a few hundred yards away.
@Cllr_MikeHarris: I’m one of hundreds of 1000s of Londoners witnessing the historic sight of the back of a slightly taller person’s head #Jubilee
In eras past, one assumes that very few people actually witnessed the big events they had come to watch. I expect that a large proportion of the people who claim to have lined the streets for the Queen’s coronation in 1953 saw very little, and their memories of being there are mingled with memories of watching subsequent footage of the coronation on all those newly purchased TVs.
The way events are covered therefore matters a great deal to the message that event carries.
Instead of criticizing the BBC, its worth simply comparing their coverage of the different Jubilee events on offer. The truly unique event was the water pageant. There has been nothing like this for centuries. What was unsurprising about the BBC’s coverage was that they chose to cover it like a sporting event where one doesn’t quite know what will happen, and therefore all angles had to be covered. (The irony is, of course, that sporting events are remarkably similar to one another, and most sporting coverage is actually false hyperbole, emphasizing a uniqueness that is often missing. This Mitchell & Webb sketch perfectly satirizes this tendency amongst the broadcasters).
Contrast with religious and State ceremonies, which are all about ritual. Their value lies precisely in their repetition. All you need here is a presenter telling us, “this is the bit where…”
The Queen is the only monarch to have reigned during the TV age, so we cannot compare here performance to that of other British monarchs. But my feeling is that the monarchy in general, and this Royal Family in particular, always seem to come across better in moments of ritual, when they stand outside the contemporary. If they have any value, then it lies in this. So I always find that images of the Royals (especially Heir-to-The-Throne Prince William) in photographs with celebrities to be particularly discordant. And it was positively ridiculous to see the Queen standing next to Cheryl Cole on the night of the Jubilee Concert at Buckingham Palace: The permanent icon of Britain, whose hairstyle has not changed in 60 years, alongside the perfect representative of intransigence and fleeting fame.
I think it is this clash which accounts for some of the dissatisfaction with the BBC’s Jubilee Coverage. It wasn’t that the broadcaster covered it particularly badly, it was just that some events lend themselves to dignified, ritualistic coverage, and some do not.
Here’s my speech at the British Future event on what makes Britain great. I was arguing for Literature as the greatest influence on British life.
There is feedback on this and the other pitches over at the British Future website. I was pleased that broadcaster Mark Easton and author Natasha Walter voted for my pitch, but it was actually Migration that got the most votes.
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The Vimeo Awards and Festival are coming up. I’m in London and the awards are in New York, so my participation is limited to watching some of the shortlisted films on Vimeo.
I think the above ‘Moments‘ video will begin a trend in both amateur and professional production. There is always something so unsatisfactory about the way a conventional video renders, especially camera phone videos. While the scene you are beholding is panoramic, the resulting shot is boxed and restrictive. Even panning doesn’t quite capture the expanse of the view provided by the human eye. Few of us have access to IMAX projection screens.
These Hockney like clips by Ian Gamester manage to capture a little bit more detail and are a little bit more like panoramas. I know that split screen effects have been around for generations, but these renderings feel very new (part of The New Aesthetic, even?) I think this is perhaps because the constituent shots are all filmed portrait (probably off an iPhone), which is unusual for video.
Most of my public filming these days is for literary events or family gatherings. I think this technique may just work for those kinds of documentation. I hope the guys at Fifty Nine Productions, who use multiple projection surfaces in much of their work, watch this too.