Timeshifted Blogs

The Apollo Plus 40 Twitter Feed reminds me of the Orwell Diaries project.  Each pulls a piece of history forward to the present day, where you can experience it in real-time. (via Kottke).
My inner autistic feels slightly uneasy about the the disparity between dates and day.  For example, The Eagle Lunar Module landed on the moon at just after 8pm EDT, on 20th July 1969, which was a Sunday evening (see Mark’s Livingston’s date-to-day converter).  However, I’ll presumably be reading a tweet announcing “the Eagle has landed” late on the evening of Monday 20th July 2009.  Sunday nights and Monday nights feel very different.
The BBC screened couple of TV programmes a few years ago, Dateline Jerusalem and Bethlehem Year Zero, that operated on a similar timeshift concept for the Easter and Christmas stories.  Not quite real-time, though.  It strikes me as a new way to consume other types of art too:  perhaps reading the entire oeuvre of a given writer by purchasing their books exactly 40, or 50, or a 100 years after the initial publication.  Hansard, the Houses of Parliament archive, would be the perfect resource for an extended “on this day” type feed.
What’s freaky about the Internet, or specifically, the Internet where everyone uses permalinks, is that everything is already pre-archived, ready for this kind of treatment at a moment’s notice.  Many is the time when I have accidentally thought that an archived news story is happening at that moment.  With TV, film and radio, there are certain giveaways like picture and sound quality, colour balance, or even accents and pronounciation, which date the archived item.  In print, the age of the page is easy to discern, by the graphic design style if not by the yellowing of the parchment.  Meanwhile, the division of design and content on the Internet means that old text is constantly inserted into modern designs.
I’m not sure which I like best – going back in time to experience the sights and sounds of a forgotten era; or having the old narratives brought forward into a twenty-first century setting.  There’s room for both, of course, but different approaches conjour different feelings, and teach us different lessons.

Doctorow at the Convention on Modern Liberty

The English PEN evening plenary was a fanastic way to round up the Convention on Modern Liberty.  For me, it was the writer and blogger Cory Doctorow’s contribution that really caught the imagination. With his laptop on his knee, he seemed to be pulling snippets and sound-bites from all corners of Teh Intertubes:

Later, the panel were asked what piece of art had inspired them to think about freedoms and liberty:

So here’s what’s really inspired me about our capacity as a society, to enforce (or rather, claim) the rights that are our due – not that the state gives us, but belong to us from the beginning: Its the rise of internet culture, and the rise, for all the bad and all the good, its the rise of a system in which we are all part of a single dialogue, in which we can make any kind of art, and in which any person can communicate with any other person, without any third party intervening, has given rise to a global dialogue that, I think, beggars the imagination of even the most optimistic philosophers of a generation ago. 
And I mean that literally – you read the science fiction of the 1960s and the closest they come is they think maybe we would have a really good video on demand service with some video-phone on the side.  No-one predicted just how, just, the fantastic Cambrian explosion of genres, of forms, of ideas, and of participation from every corner of the globe, that the Internet has enabled.  And that’s for me, why keeping the network free is the first step to keeping us all free.

Its better in video! Billy Bragg, Feargal Sharkey, Paul Gilroy, Henry Porter and English PEN’s President Lisa Appignanesi also answer:
Continue reading “Doctorow at the Convention on Modern Liberty”

Awareness or Consensus?

Gaurav Mishra supplies a useful model of social media (via Global Voices Advocacy).   His “4Cs” are

  • Content
  • Community
  • Collaboration
  • Collective Action

… each stage being progressively harder to achieve than the last.  He suggests measuring any given ‘social media’ campaign against this framework.
I am reminded of an event run by the think tank Demos a few months ago, How To Make News And Influence People, chaired by Charlie Leadbeater.  I had refrained from writing up my thoughts until now, because I had hoped a podcast of the event would emerge.  No such luck.
The discussion centred almost entirely around using the web and other technologies for PR purposes.  We saw a fascinating presentation on how the photographs of James Nachtwey, winner of the 2007 TED Prize, were used to promote awareness of a new and extreme form of Tuberculosis, and the campaign to eradicate it at XDRTB.org.  My question (which I had vainly hoped, and hoped in vain, would be on a podcast) drew the distinction between raising awareness amongst the generally sympathetic public (is there anyone against TB?) and establishing a consensus on a political issue, where there wasn’t one before (gay marriage, and the legalisation of marijuana are two issues that spring to mind).  The multi-platform techniques described in the event seemed to be perfect for the former, but did not (to use Mishra’s analysis) harness a significant colelctive intelligence.

What was also noteworthy about the XDRTB campaign in particular, and about advocacy campaigns in general, is how they still rely on the mainstream media for traction.  Immigration Minister Phil Woolas gave into the demands of the ghurka campaign when it received significant celebrity-focussed media coverage.  My work at PEN has a large element of this too, where we arrange for our more famous members to speak out in favour of our campaign.  This has always been the way of traditional PR campaigns (c.f The Onion classic Rare Disease Nabs Big-Time Celebrity Spokesman).  This is entirely different from the highly connected campaigns such as #amazonfail and this week’s #fixreplies Twitter clusterfuck.  The celebrity-free, crowd-driven campaigns still seem to focus mainly on issues with a strong online or technological focus.

Star Trek, Reviewed on Twitter

Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Qunto as Spock
Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Qunto as Spock

Sometimes, you don’t need a long review to capture the essence of a movie.  In two tweets, I think MitchBenn gets the new Star Trek movie in a nutshell:
First:

Particularly impressed by Chris Pine in Star Trek. Gives it JUST enough Shatner without ever lapsing into Comedy Captain Kirk Mode

and then

Nice contrast between old & young Spock- Quinto all conflicted and tormented; Nimoy SO over all that crap.

What more do you need?

Ordinary People

Yeah yeah, whatever100 “Single Ladies” in Picadilly Circus:

This is a mash-up to two 21st Century crazes, made possible by new technology. The first is the practice of making a tribute to a song you love, by lip-syncing to the track while parodying the video. Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies‘ is the current world leader in such pastiches. The second is the public Flash Mob (see Liverpool Street Station, or Antwerpen Centraal).  Combining the two phenomena would seem like an instant win, right?
Wrong.  Why?  Because both practices are entertaining because they are created by what we might call ‘normal’ people:  Volunteers, of all shapes, ages and sizes, not from central casting.  The Public.  The Users.  The People.  Meanwhile, the Single Ladies dancers in Picadilly Circus are an exclusive, homogenised clique of conventionally pretty people.  The overall effect lacks the surprise of the T-Mobile/Antwerp stunts, and the freedom we see in the home-made homages to Beyoncé.  It is less than the sum of its parts, and will never become part of digital folklore.

Update (30th April 2009)

According to Chris, there is going to be anopther flash mob tonight in Trafalgar Square.