One Minute Wonder

I came across this fascinating blog yesterday.

It's called One Minute Writer. The aim is that each day a new topic is posted onto the blog. Contributors have 60 seconds to respond, thus keeping replies short and sweet. There's even a link to a You Tube 60 second countdown clock.

Anyway, as it happened, yesterday's topic was technology. I thought it would be interesting to try to compress my ideas, and get them written down in under a minute. What came out was a Haiku-esque poem.

I like the idea of enforced brevity, as someone prone to wanting to play with language and use more words than necessary, when given the opportunity.

One Minute Writer is a great concept, that challenges and embraces the data saturated world we inhabit. I recommend trying it out, or at the very least, having a browse through some of the entries.

Here was mine about technology:

Mobile phone, 

Tactile to touch, 

Brings Web to Palm, 

Fingers caress

While mind wanders.

 

Second Life, No second chances

Reality - Virtual - Reality - Virtual....

Mirror mirror on the wall, where the hell am I, dimensionally speaking?

This has to be one of the most bizarre stories about new media technology I have come across.

Here's the headline: boy meets girl in internet chatroom. Virtual chat leads to real relationship. They move in. Boy and girl create avatars (virtual egos) in the 3D online world, Second Life.

One day, girl wakes from a nap and finds real boy having virtual nookie with a virtual lady of the night. Virtual boy breaks up with virtual girl. But they still live together. For real.

Girl decides to test boy by hiring a virtual private eye to set a virtual honey-trap. Virtual boy, created by real boy, spends all night praising virtual girl. They get back together. Virtually. All is well.

Except, real boy gets real friendly with real girl from America. Just chatting using virtual alter egos. Apparently.

Now girl is divorcing boy. For real.

Read the full gory details here. 

On the one hand this is a desperately sad story, but on the other it goes to show that human social interaction is changing its rules and domains with alacrity.

Technological determinism suggests that at some critical tipping point new technology embeds itself, become the accepted norm, and then unduly influences audience responses. This sort of story seems to suggest that humans are remarkably able at disrupting intended uses, finding new ways of engaging with technology, and periodically throwing up the truly unexpected.

15 minutes of fame, a lifetime of misery

Today's media contained a few stories that point to an interesting change in the relationship between audiences, institutions, and the expectations that both sides have for each other.

First up was a report on Radio 4's Today programme, featuring Piers Morgan, one-time editor of the Daily Mirror, and now a judge on Britain's Got Talent, and a French astronaut. The topic under discussion was whether or not the media encourages young people today to focus too much on celebrity itself as a career path, rather than more noble aims such as pushing at the frontiers o science. 

Piers Morgan admitted that as his young sons grow older he feels more game keeper turned poacher, and now fears that the saturation of celebrity gossip flooding into our lives will be detrimental to the emotional and spiritual health of our youth. The astronaut, who was giving a talk about his life and work at a school in North London, explained the intrinsic joy and satisfaction that comes from a career devoted to the greater good of mankind.

It's a fascinating conversation, from which we can deduce that media institutions are sending out unbalanced messages, while seemingly feeling incapable of redressing the status quo.

You can read a transcript and listen to the extract here. 

Next up is a long article from Helen Boaden, the Director of BBC News. She's posted a keynote speech which she delivered at an e-democracy conference earlier in the week. In a nutshell, she argues that the rise of technological means for recording and distributing still and moving image content, coupled with a willingness of citizens to record events around them, and for broadcasters to take this information and process it, has led to an inevitable change in the way news outfits work.

She provides many fascinating facts: for example, the BBC now has a dedicated unit that ingests audience produced content, reviews it, and then distributes it around the mighty BBC news machine. On July 7th 2005, following the bombing of the London Underground, the BBC received more than a 1000 still and moving image submissions,  3000 texts and 20,000 emails.  What is termed 'Citizen Journalism' is rapidly becoming part of the news agenda. As Boaden herself writes, ordinary people are finding a voice and realising their everyday lives could be newsworthy. For the broadcasters, in a cash-strapped 24-hour transmission world, this development offers audience interaction and cheap programming. To them, it's a win-win situation. Maybe it is too for the audiences who contribute, and get a buzz from seeing their footage online and on TV.  However, Boaden conspicuously doesn't mention what the rest of us think. For that, you'll have to scroll down to read the mainly critical comments that follow. Of course, those who can be bothered to respond are often those who do not match the profile of the silent majority; so, using them as an accurate weather vane of public sentiment is an unproductive task.

Boaden concludes by celebrating the most successful blogs produced by BBC journalists. Justin Webb the BBC's North America editor, with whom I had the pleasure of working in the mid-nineties at BBC Breakfast News, received two and a half million hits to his blog in October. That's phenomenal! It does point, however, to the fact that audiences may well prefer the considered opinions of an expert, rather than a 'have-a-go-Joe.'

Incidentally, Today ran a piece last week about the possible demise of the Blog. Since I'm feeling mischievous I'll link to it here so that you can draw the conclusions that either (a) the BBC is contradicting itself or (b) one part of the BBC is wrong about the other. Go figure....

Finally, I read a tragic story about an obsessed fan of American Idol judge Paula Abdul. The woman, called Paula Goodspeed, had killed herself near the star's home in Los Angeles. Miss Goodspeed had appeared on a series of American Idol in series five. Her singing was criticised by Simon Cowell and the other judges. It's a terrible tale and one that should remind us all that the media is a construct and a re-presentation of one mediated version of reality. It is not an absolute yardstick against which we should judge our own successes or failures.

We each need to live our own realities. And for that no TV, games console, magazine, or MP3 player is needed.

Sticks and Stones can break my bones, but only words can hurt me

Today's media outrage involves award-winning TalkSport radio presenter Jon Gaunt.

During a recent broadcast Gaunt called a councillor a Nazi, during a heated live on-air debate about Redbridge council's plans to not allow smokers to foster children.

Gaunt had meant to call the interviewee a 'health nazi' apparently, and did apologise on-air.

However, the damage has been done and following complaints he has now been suspended, pending an investigation.

We spend a great deal of time in Media Studies deconstructing language and its uses. We examine how a range of texts, both word-based and moving image, can and might be interpreted or mis-construed by different audience segments.

The Gaunt saga is proof, if proof were needed, that the pen/spoken word/choice image will always be more powerful than the sword.

Broadcasters in particular are governed by more stringent laws regarding what can and can't be said. To break the rules of taste and decency, especially in an age of heightened sensitivity, seems to be leading to ever more severe consequences.

The libertarians, of course, find this a tricky one. We can keep arguing that the right to free speech means the right to say whatever the hell we like. Although, as MPs debated in Parliament yesterday, there needs to be some balance in British broadcasting between what is populist and what is gratuitous.

It's a never-ending merry-go-round of lunge and parry, as advocates on both sides of the debate aim to make their justifications, either for renewed censorship, or unrestricted freedom of expression.

The best way foward lies somewhere between the two. In the light of the whole Brand/Ross fiasco, it does seem like a sense of perspective has, perplexingly, been lost.

The new face of journalism...is well worn

Ok, so maybe I'm on a roll here, but it needs to be said.

Back in 1994, when the old guard at BBC news laughed, when I trundled off to learn how to be a videojournalist with Michael Rosenblum, news visionary extraordinaire, I felt like I was getting to live in the future, only now. If you see what I mean.

Reading the following entry about how the Society of Editors is up in arms, about the BBC's plans for national rollout of local VJs, to produce content for its website, I feel a warm schadenfreude-filled glow welling up inside me. Why? Because although I pity those struggling to make a living from a dying medium (and let's be honest, how often do you read a local paper?) it makes me smile to see the use of VJs under the spotlight once more, not this time because of the nature of the job, but because of the job itself.

No-one seems to be arguing that being a videojournalist is a bad idea. In fact, it's a great idea. What the news editors are angry about, gathered together at their annual conference in Bristol, is that the BBC is muscling in on their territory.

So, here is a radical idea...why don't we ditch the videojournalist tag, agree that content production and reporting skills/styles have changed forever, and just call these guys journalists? A journalist could be making audio, video, print, or graphic content. If we move beyond thinking that the medium is the message, as McLuhan postulated, and consider that the medium delivers multiple versions of the same message, then all of this nonsense could be resolved.

There is, of course, the issue of the BBC leveraging its behemoth like weight, aided and abetted by the billions of pounds raised in Licence fees, to distort commercial markets. On that score, the editors have a point, although the BBC's riposte that it is delivering on its Public Service Broadcasting remit, is an interesting one. Does video online count as broadcasting? Answers on a big postcard please....

Certainly, if you're in the newspaper business, and especially at the local end, now isn't the time for bleating or idle ideology. I'm lucky. I'm an educator these days, so I can sit on the sidelines and not worry about when and where the next commission might appear. If I were trying to make an honest buck in the current climate I'd be looking at integrating every which way. Link to Facebook, add audio, video, Twitter text, whatever you can imagine to make connections with an audience on the run from the product you've been touting for the last century.

For those of you in the business and thinking that maybe I'm shooting from the hip, without any backbone to support my argument, let me tell you something. The students I'm working with now, even aged 11, are making films and podcasts that I would have been proud to call my own a decade ago. They're moving into making their own motion gaphics and they are hungry for change.

Technology and rising media literacy means the next generation of paying subscribers will know the production tricks, will be able to deconstruct the machinery behind the content, and they'll be adept at making their own content too. Text on a page just ain't gonna cut it.

To conclude then, change must happen and it must take place fast. Strangely, I look at what's happening, remember the derision that greeted those of us who speculated a decade ago that this might be where we'd end up, and wonder why it all seems to have become so difficult?

Like I said at the start, it's the future waiting for now - but some of us were there yesterday.