Monthly Archive for July, 2010

Untitled (After Adalbert Stifter)

When we see mankind in history approaching a great, eternal goal like a calm, silvery stream, then we sense the sublime, the especially epic quality. But as powerfully and capaciously as the tragic and the epic may affect us, excellent as they may be as levers in art, nevertheless it is mainly the ordinary, everyday, countlessly recurring actions of people in which this law most securely lies as a center of gravity, because these actions are the most enduring, constitutive ones as it were, the millions of rootlets of the tree of life.

[You are right, the living room of the beautiful museal house where I spend my Indian Summer of writing was crying out for a a bit of Adalbert Stifter, here from the Preface to Many-Coloured Stones.]

27/07/10
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Why Christopher Nolan tells you, my dear philosophers, you have work to do #inception


Definitely worth your attention: Inception. Your mind will come back fully stretched and blissful. Yes, there is intelligent action, and much like Total Recall it would only sound silly if you would recount it. I hereby congratulate Christopher Nolan not only for a good movie, but also for freeing us from what I would call ‘the one sentence business philosophy’. Good god, was that ever necessary.

You know what I mean: These days it doesn’t matter if you start up a business, apply for a PhD grant, or want to make a movie, your project must be decribed in one sentence. Meaning: If a project can’t be understood by a very dumb person, you’ll fail, no matter that there are 87% not very dumb persons left out there who would love it.

Next time someone asks you to follow that rule, you simply say: And the success of Inception? The plot of this movie is way to complex to fit in one, two, or even three sentences – and utterly successful. Each trailer sends you in wrong directions, trust me, Nolan is clearly revolting against this attitude. Lovely.

While some criticize the movie as being not emotionally involved enough (and I see what Mendelson means), I must admit that I might be spoiled simply because the movie evolves around a concept that gets me excited: the thesis that once you have an idea in your head, the world will never be what it was before. Whomever has experienced that, and I did a couple of times, knows the force I am talking about. It is as beautiful as shocking, a truly revolutionary experience (you might get hurt by your own conclusions).

The movie manages to put enough details around that concept to keep you busy, and they fit most of the time. From using dreams to forming a gang of crime to visually fold up Paris to Leonardo di Caprio’s furrow to Blade Runner unicorn like symbols and open endings, even if the James Bond everywhere around the globe setting isn’t even necessary; the concept of playing a game/dreaming a dream on different levels is so familiar by now.

Interesting, though, if it comes to the driving vision of the movie itself, we get lost in the maze of dreams.

While Total Recall was about starting a revolution on Mars to help the poor and the weak for a better living, the inception is needed because of private business interests, only slightly driven by the fact that the world needs to be saved from a new superpower this business organisation is going to be. In the end, all of this is rather irrelevant.

As movies are the subconscious of society, this tells us something about our dreams: Lost in complexity. Gone.

The driving force of Cobb/diCabrio is the love to his children. But is that enough for society? I don’t think so, and agree with PH, with whom I recently had an email debate on this. Having his head deeply in political philosophy, he expressed amazement about all those parents who think so long as they do it ‘for the children’ then anything goes, the most barbarous self-interest, the most naked class struggle is suddenly justified. So no, not enough.

See what I mean by intelligent action movie, as this is what the movie tells us: Can someone start planting an idea in our head again, please?

21/07/10
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After the paywall: On the state of online journalism today

When I opened my obligatory RSS reader yesterday morning, I found several articles focussing on the state of online journalism today. Well, that’s what you expect, isn’t it? The interesting thing: They all focussed on different aspects.

At the media blog Beehivecity former Times media correspondent Dan Sabbagh reported a rather low number of 15,000 paying after paywall subscribers. The iPad customers that bought the Times separate app, on the contrary, is rather impressive with 12.500 customers. This is causing Sabbagh to ask an interesting question: Will the future of newspapers like the future of the music industry: an Apple dominated digital paid-for business and an internet-free-for-all in which nobody pays?

If you look at the tremendous success of the Daily Mail you see quite a different picture. Last year still head to head with its competitors the Guardian and the Telegraph, it has a commanding lead by now. With 16 million unique browsers in the UK, 26.3 million in the rest of the world it begins to hint at a different league, reports Peter Preston for the Guardian, calculating roughly that advertising can bring in a round £20m to turn Mail red ink into deep black.

Interesting that the Mail not only runs newsroom operations totally separately, but also is a “different beast” not playing print’s little brother:

“The online market, like the print market, is beginning to set different rules for itself, to insist that quality and redtop and celeb can define different pitches (and appeals to advertisers) just as they do in the land of dead forests.”

Meanwhile, the NYTimes takes the working conditions of online journalists into account asking if online-journalism became the new assembly line. Instead of scoops these journalists are hunting down to enter the charts of the most-viewed articles with Bloomberg News andGawker Media paying writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles, editors checking upon how many articles journalists are writing a day.

Online journalism is a genre that is still making its way by walking it. Each brand has to re-invent itself anew in a digital environment. This is confusing, as well as challenging and exciting. One thing is certain, it is our future.

By now we know that producing online first was just the beginning as publishers also have to take a journalism into account that focusses on the long tail. Here, new forms have to be found quickly at least if we don’t want to give our traditional definatory power over contemporary history away to the likes of Demand Media.

Furthermore, the recent success of the iPad also showed that we have to understand our readership not anymore only in terms of target group, but also alongside reading situations.

Confusing, challenging and exciting, indeed. But well. We didn’t became journalists to sit back and relax.

20/07/10
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“What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea.”

Inception by Christopher Nolan

19/07/10
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See the digital at work (better than Berkeley)

Press play into the summer and see the digital at work staring Akzidenz-Grotesk & Brooklyn.

Oh, and don’t forget to have a look behind the screen of Greg Solenström to learn all about the pixel magic. Crack the city streets with your mouse, brush some motorcycles out of the way and learn that sometimes beauty is just a few pixels away.

18/07/10
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England vs. Facebook

Live from from the top of a power shift, see now the leader of the old nation meeting the leader of new nation on video. Could someone please start a discourse analysis here, apart from the fact that it looks a lot like ChatRoulette?

- TV camera angle vs. webcam
- “really excited about it” vs. 6 x “you guys”
- sending to vs. gratefully receiving
- make-up vs. “what the hell do I care how I look like”-authenticity

What else?

14/07/10
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Thx

It is important to dance on top of the world from time to time, and we planned on going that night. Now in London this is not so easy. Like for example Fabric might be a club with an amazing soundsystem, but lacks the creative roughness of a Berlin club. Yes, I know I am spoiled from living there fore too long. But Fabric is a professional entertainment stage there to produce your clinical entertainment event, and events don’t like to be staged, the less in a clinical environment. Events like to catch you off guard to take action, connect with a crowd, and deny to follow a plan. Here goes the Saturday night, good bye top of the world, was what I was thinking.

Moderat – Rusty Nails (Shackleton Remix) by Nialler9

Suddenly the sound became thick, dense, and dark making its way across the whole range of the soundsystem. Soon its complexity, the one that made us dance, curated the crowd, sorted it out until only those who know moved across the dancefloor to the straight dubstep, here and there broken by a soundwall that gave way to new fragments of the musical structure, cut by a sharp twisted snare or accompanied by poetry.

This music tried to break the conventional structure of electronic music, the loop. A bit like the tracks of James Blake, it seemed to be composed in a new style, its fragments diffunding, playing with each other, interacting, behaving more like a tag cloud. The elements of the live set were not shifting in the foreground and background like usually in electronic music. It was engineered in a different way. New. We were standing in the music, dancing, making way, moving through an annoying, complex, beautiful, aggressive and pure sound. The soundtrack of the 21st century.

Sometimes In Autumn (Shackleton Remix) by ishmo kayor

When Shackleton finished playing his two hour live set, the crowd applauded very long, then left immidiatly. On our way home through the morning light, I finally understood what had happened, when A. said the words to describe what was going on: “I am shocked.”, she said. We were, and still exchanging comments full of joy on the next day. Oh, music.





8/07/10
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What Eric Schmidt of Google revealed about the future

It has been a day. In fact, yesterday’s Guardian Activate Summit was inspiring, and not only because Alan Rusbridger engaged the grey haired, nice, shrewd koala lookalike Schmidt in a scintillating discussion. After asking Schmidt a question, I felt exited like a small girl on her first day of school. Finally allowed to talk to real adults. Yay!

This sounds a bit embarrassing, but there is a good reason for this: Today, business corporations like Google and not academic institutions manage our knowledge. As knowledge is power, this will affect the structure of our society. We already know that the internet disrupts business. Up next? Politics. Exiting, eh?

When I was hanging around at the canal with the lovely witty programmers of the Guardian having Pimm’s and eating strawberries instead of dinner, we resumed what was said, but it was much later till I understood that the way technology is shaping knowledge at the moment is far more fundamental.

Alan Rusbridger is testing Google Goggles on Eric Schmidt

So let us quickly get through what Eric Schmidt actually said to concentrate on what he said by saying it.

For him mobile, cloud and network are shaping our future; Steve Jobs is a “friend”, “this might shock you”, but he is explicitly opposed to Apple’s closed version of the net; Google is sorry for the wifi-scandal, takes privacy serious, and there is a need for regulation; obviously there are plans for a Facebook-like “Google Me”, because Schmidt said (please follow me into the twisted logic of journalism) he wouldn’t announce a “possible future product” here or on Twitter, so with not denying its existence: “it sounds like yes,” as Alan Rusbridger concluded.

When we were talking about what’s next at the end of a highly inspiring day, there was suddenly this glimpse of a more fundamental shift. The internet will not be the “disruption” that everybody agrees upon by now. You wish! It will be a fundamental eruption of society. I am sure that Heidegger, if still alive, would immediately despise the word “disruption” argueing that it blocks our view.

Let me collect the bits and pieces of that day: The journey started with data.gov.uk, and Nigel Shadboldt presenting his fascinating project. He and the dad of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, are currently making the UK data accessible to the public. By now, people have developed apps for it, so you can find the next dentist or pharmacy, compare care homes, or get a panic attack over the density of minor incidents with the iPhone asborometer, as it helps you to learn about the anti social behaviour orders (asbo) in your neighborhood. Data.gov.uk and the US version presented by Beth Noveck, however, deal with an interesting challenge: Opening data to the public makes it accessible, but not available.

Let’s take this with us to the next chapter of my day. During lunch I had an interesting conversation with my former boss of MediaGuardian, Steve Busfield, about databases, statistics and journalism. Personally, I believe that there is a new journalism to evolve, journalism that is data driven, and will be published as apps and not as texts.

The Guardian is already doing that on the fantastic Datablog with good help of the lovely data visualisations of Information is beautiful. Steve and me brainstormed what that might mean for journalism, and I predicted that apps vs. text might be the next war after print vs. online. Funnily enough our little chat was simultaneously echoed by a tweet of the Guardians’ info architect Martin Belam. Sometimes things are all coming together for you to get it. Thank you things.

When I came home the things were still excited, not only because I had to prepare a radio feature on Eric Schmidt’s talk for the next morning. I went through my notes and the twitter feed, and when I came across a tweet of my colleague Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times, it hit me. As some of you might know, Google allows their employees to work on a project of their own one day a week, and Tim tweeted Schmidt’s answer on what he is doing in his 20% time:

Let me repeat that for you: “Tech is about to upend the way governments work.” Well. We already know that the internet is an effective tool for governments. With the Obama campaign we have seen that the internet can efficiently help politicians to organise people, connect them, and keep them up to date. It might be time to think about: designing crowds. ?

But upend how governments work? I admit, there is something going on, a database revolution happening at our fingertips. There is not only a debate on how power point interferes with politics and influences military strategies. As more and more data is open, gets uploaded and connected, designing statistics and building apps became in a certain way a political act. Surely the interface between the people and the politicians is about to change. But technology is political in itself. It will change, but not upend governments.

How democratic is crowd sourcing really? What were we asking for, and what is it we better don’t want to know? Can it ever be just “the algorithm”? And when do we get enough response, when are we only hearing the loud voices?

Winston Churchill said once “the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself”, and now the statistics get democratised. However, today you don’t even need to falsify anything, you simply make some data visible, while you let other figures sink deep down to the bottom of the information overload.

These are just some thoughts, fairly rough. But why this is so important to me: I think we need to start a debate on how technology is disrupting politics. Organising statistics and publishing knowledge is a political act. Knowledge is more power than ever. And journalism needs to find a new role in here.

2/07/10
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