In my youth, I would go skydiving at weekends. My take-up of the sport was round about the time that digital video was coming onto the consumer market and into the world of freefall. Most electronics shops sold high-end mini-DV units for four figure sums alongside VHS camcorders. All units were relatively bulky and you required a homemade helmet with a camera-mount bracket on the front.
The films we produced then were rudimentary. They were washed out and a bit shaky, and any that were edited were typically very basic montages set to some kind of dance-music sound-track. Here’s an example I made earlier.
Compare that with this beautiful thing from design studio Betty Wants In, advertising a skydive centre in Melbourne. Its in a different league to what I saw being produced a decade ago, even from the professionals. Chief amongst its virtues is the focus on stillness and calm, and the relative stasis that you achieve in freefall (relative being the operative word). By contrast, when I was doing this sort of thing, the entire culture revolved around speed and the iconography was all cliched lightning bolts and flames. It shows how the practitioners of this relatively new genre have evolved, helped of course by the reduced price and size of HD video.
Category: Diary (Page 133 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
There are two items in the news today that demonstrate the way in which power corrupts. The first is that of Dominique Strauss-Khan, chair of the IMF, charged with attempting to rape a chamber-maid. It is one of those stories which, if true, show how those at the zenith of power come to believe that the normal rules of behaviour no longer apply to them.
The other story is of course the emerging scandal of UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne, alleged to have persuaded someone to take his speeding penalty points. A pathetic affair that, I think, falls into the category of The Cover Up Is Worse Than The Cock-up. A six month driving ban for speeding (not drink-driving or dangerous driving) would not harm a person’s electoral chances in the way that perverting the course of justice surely must.
Both cases are as yet unresolved, but if and when the accusations prove accurate, then the two men must of course shoulder the blame and take their punishment as appropriate. However, we should also pause to consider how such men are enabled in their corruption by those around them. In the case of Huhne, it looks like some star-struck aides agreed to go along with something they knew was wrong, in order to curry favour with a politician on the rise. In the much more serious case of DSK, it appears that the entire French political establishment chose to ignore this man’s appalling behaviour over many years.
This enabling is exactly what Dr Ricardo Blaug has been writing about in a pamphlet How Does Power Corrupt?, published last week by if:book and The Roundhouse Journal. Discussing elites and the citizens that they rule over, Blaug says:
Elites act with impunity; we work in hierarchic organisations and mostly do what we are told. If leaders are corrupted into tyrants, citizens are corrupted into blind obediance. It is therefore woth remembering – when we are ‘just doing our job’ or ignoring what elected leaders do in our name – that the most serious wrongs most of us ever commit are seemingly minor ‘crimes of obediance’. It is in this sense that we are all, and regularly, corrupted by power, either as power-holders or as subordinates, often as both, switch effortlessly between them as we turn from one person to another.
This reminds me of something that Lydia Cacho, the Mexican investigative journalist, said at the PEN Literary Cafe a couple of years ago:
A corrupt political system is only sustained by a corrupt and complicit culture.
Blaug, in his pamplet, discusses the need for citizens who are active in watching their leaders and calling them to account. “Once you have citizens, you have all you need” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau said. I see NGOs and single-issue pressure groups, such as one one I work for, as fulfilling this role on behalf of citizens. Its our remit to watch the politicians closely and stir-up a fuss whenever there is any hint that our elites might be straying from societies ideals (although that also leads to arguments over what those ideals actually are, but I think in the UK there is broad consensus, even if we differ in the details). In this sense we are a sort of professional ‘awkward squad’ that keeps politicians as honest as they can be. The more usual term for this is ‘civil society’.
However, civil society only flourishes when the citizens have time and money to devote to it. The same NGOs only survive because of donations from individuals. This can be sustained in the UK, because we are an affluent society compared to the rest of the world. We have a cognitive surplus, as Clay Shirky calls it, available to allocate to this civic task. Corruption is quicker and more egregious in societies with little material wealth, because they cannot finance the civil society institutions required to scrutinise their elites, and ensure that any corruption is caught early and often. Continue reading
Earlier this week I commented on that photo of Obama and his advisors in the Situation Room:
The image in question is particularly good because it seems to portray a very long moment. If Souza had been filming the scene we imagine that it would not have looked very different from the still photograph… apart from some blinking.
Via Matt Haughey, I’ve discovered From Me To You, the work of Jamie, a photographer who takes photos and adds a little bit of movement into them as animated GIFs. Its not clear at first glance that you’re looking at a manipulated photograph and not an actual movie.
Caught in the Fashion Jungle – http://fromme-toyou.tumblr.com
It reminds me of some comments made by technology thinker Chris Heathcote, who has written on the development of outdoor electronic billboards. Hilariously, neither Chris nor I can locate the link to the post where he specificially discussed the idea that the best and most sophisticated use of moving images in billboards might be the most subtle. Barely perceptible movements, blinks or slight gestures, may actually grab the attention of the target audience in a way that horrible flashing banners may not. We know that modern brains can learn to mentally censor banner adverts and other obnoxious and ostentatious marketing. Chris points to this bus shelter advert as an example of best practice.
While the world turns and changes; while we thrill at global events; for some, life is in stasis.
Today, the Sri Lankan journalist Prageeth Ekneligoda will have been missing for 500 days. Ekneligoda was abducted on 24 January 2010 and has not been heard from since. There is still no news of his whereabouts or fate and his abductors are still at large. His wife Sandhya has been petitioning the Sri Lankan government to investigate the disappearance, but they have callously ignored her pleas. Ekneligoda had been a thorn in the side of the government, exposing crimes against humanity. From Sandhya’s incredibly moving letter to Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, about the case.
In late 2008, Prageeth produced conclusive evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Government forces against Tamil civilians in the North. Prageeth, who believed that such weapons were being used with the aim of annihilating the Tamil population living in LTTE controlled areas, dedicated his time and effort to gathering further evidence and to raising awareness regarding this issue at different forums both locally and internationally.
Ekneligoda is one of several independent journalists to have been disappeared or killed in recent years. Editor Lasantha Wickramatunga was one such writer, who predicted his own murder and wrote an editorial to be published posthumously. The Sri Lankan government always denies involvement in these most sinister of crimes, but it does nothing to stop this violence againsts its own citizens, which is an implicit endorsement and encourages further disappearances. It has allowed a horrible culture of fear and oppression to develop, one that shrinks civil society and ruins the lives of ordinary people. This, in a Commonwealth country that recently hosted the cricket world cup.
Sri Lanka also hosted the Galle Literary Festival in January, one of the few places where ideas of free speech and human rights can be discussed. Author and poet Minoli Salgado imagined what the festival might have been like. I recorded a podcast of Minoli reading it.
Continue reading
Was it last year, or 2009, or maybe 2008, that was branded “The Year of Twitter”? I am tempted to say that it’s an accolade deserved this year too. We’ve had the Arab Spring, the Japanese earthquake, the Royal Wedding and the death of Osama Bin Landen this year, and it’s only May. All these globally significant events have been defined and re-defined in the popular consciousness by the micro blogging site we have come to know and love. In the case of #OBL the event was actually live-tweeted by a Pakistani citizen journalist. 2011, the Year of Twitter again, right?
I think this misses the point. it’s better to say 2011 has already been an important year for events, and Twitter has both reflected and amplified those events.
It is also affecting more traditional news gathering too, so my claim (above) about “the popular consciousness” holds true even if not everyone uses Twitter. This critique by Felix Salmon of the New York Times‘ coverage (or rather, its coverage of it’s own coverage) shows how the organisation is in denial about how social networks affect it’s relevance and it’s reporting. Meanwhile, this article by Frédéric Filloux points to the wider evolution of news. This has a knock on effect for everyone.
In some cases, independent Twitter users are providing a crucial link in the news reporting chain. News editors have been fuming for years about super-injunctions, and their inability to mention gagging orders in their coverage. Meanwhile, Twitter regularly carries the names of those celebrities who have sought injunctions… So why has the main stream news media jumped on the story about one particular tweeter who has explicitly revealed the details of particular super-injunctions? The answer is of course that it provides an excuse for papers to reveal such details by other means.
In this story, apparently some of the tweets are actually inaccurate. Is this a fatal flaw, a reason for heavy censorship? Not really. As we saw earlier this week when a quote was misattributed to Martin Luther King Jnr, the same networks that propagate the inaccuracies are also the place to correct them. Social networks are surprisingly good at doing this. With the rise of the Internet, we have also seen the rise of new social norms and eittiquette. Forwarding on a false story is quite a major faux pas in the 21st century, perhaps more so than printing gossip, rumour and anonymous sources. The major reason for the New York Times’ loss of credibility in recent years was it’s failure to fact-check the anonymous government sources that told reporters that Saddam did have WMD. The paper was ruthlessly manipulated by the Bush Administration hawks, and yet does not seem contrite. If only Twitter had been around in 2002-03, we may have had the tools to more effectively call the news media, and through them, the US government, to account.