“The press is our immune system. If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker and perhaps eczema.”
Jon Stewart
Monthly Archive for October, 2010
Being forced to stay in due to my cold instead of haunting Berlin, Mr. Bleed & me watched the Facebook movie yesterday, the Social Network. And well.. It’s okayish, but I predict it will be done again. The movie is told way too conventional and leaves lots of creative possibilities; something like Facebook asks for it, really. Isn’t the social THE story?
The chance was to turn the rise of a social relations network into a story of a new social narration itself, and to experiment with narration. The new social that unfolds with Facebook aks for a new, an own narration.
Instead we get the usual patterns. A frame setting of a not relevant love story; the boring initiations of college movies; the outsider pattern, here the nerd vs. the popular sporty rich twins; two not very exciting lawsuits, and Ex-Napster Shawn Fanning as a buying-rounds-of-greenish-cocktails-jackass. Oh, dear.
It’s okay, but this can be done better. The blueprint, which was the book “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook. A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”, is just too lost in clichées really, and no good ones. Take the disastrous role of females. None. At least Sorkin/Fincher didn’t focus on the fact that females have boobs and can kiss each other, which obviously is an important insight of the book.
So what do we learn? It’s better to write code than be an employee.
However, if you are a social autist people will still find you creepy even if you are a billionaire. You don’t need to be a coding brain to launch a disruptive business – for doing Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg just bought Perl for dummies. Finally, girls need to start coding when having a crush or being heartbroken.
By the way, this is Mark’s version of the story which he told about a year ago.
Today, UK’s chancellor George Osborne announces deep cuts to public service and welfare. To make cuts in this specific way isn’t a necessity, but unveils a new logic of capitalism. The central motive of this new capitalism is fear, mixed with hope that this cup passes from me. Cutting the universities budget is a good example.
A former British Petrol CEO, who’s cost-cutting policy is responsible for the Gulf oil spill, is imposing that funding for teaching will be cut by 80% to £3.2bn. That’s shocking. Maybe worse, it actually is embarrassing.
The British nation lets a former British Petrol CEO, Lord Browne, cut into the heart of its education system. Compared to France where millions of people are running up and down the streets because the government proposed they should work two silly years longer until the age of 62, one can say no one really seems to care. Universities? What was that again? One thing is certain, Google isn’t to blame for the rise of the stupid in the UK.
So who is to blame?
Surely, we can say Browne and the government, and feel good about ourselves. But actually I think this is about a bigger picture. It unveils how capitalism operates today, and we all are taking our part in here.
The situation with the university cuts is a good example. What can be done about it, or let me put it this way: why do we have the feeling nothing can be done about it?
Here in the UK, it was always the case that it’s universities are divided between the likes of Oxbridge and the rest. As if that wouldn’t be problematic enough, its departments have been made busy with competing.
This imposed structure, the competition of the departments within the universities, makes it impossible to speak, or even feel as one university. Everyone is haunted by a perverse logic that puts the survival of the own department first, instead of the idea of the university. As the Economist notes correctly, ‘funding for humanities and social-science subjects at universities will fall’ , hence it is the idea of the university that is at stake here.
Keep the fear alive!
This perverse logic can also be seen in the decision to cut the teaching funding by 80%. If the decision would have been 100%, all teachers would have felt disrespected. 80% leaves enough room for cheap hope: It won’t hit me. I am important enough, have children, or will be lucky. It will hit the others. Teachers who have to care about their family or mortgage won’t disobey anyhow. Understandable, isn’t it? Well, is it really?
Here, Stephen Colbert’s march to keep the fear alive is on its way, unfortunately without the march. Fear is ruling university, not knowledge. Don’t you think this politics must be opposed?
There is no necessity in cutting the university budget in this specific brutal way. There is no necessity in cutting the public budget in this specific brutal way.
If the budget has to be cut, it could have been done in another way; a way that is respectful, in the case of education to its teachers, and to the idea that knowledge is important for a society – you don’t let a British Petrol bloke do it; a way that tries to operate as just as it can to ensure that future students are bright heads, and not just rich kids, who have been born in the right class or region. Instead, here you see the rules of a new capitalistic logic.
The financial crisis: Good for capitalism, bad for you
Doesn’t it become apparent that the financial crisis isn’t a crisis of capitalism, but a crisis imposed by capitalism? The financial crisis increased the insecurity at the work place for every one of us. This insecurity – not knowing what happens to you – enforces a situation in which you better not question, or challenge the hierarchies. You obey the requirements.
A new, scheming capitalism is operating in a new, fascinating logic; fear is its essential motive. This is not a crisis of capitalism. This is capitalism pushing you into a crisis.
Start calculating: so what’s your role here?
Therefore everyone should be worried. This is not just news that will go away, and this is already way bigger than just hitting the education sector. We are changing our society at the moment, and we are all responsible for it. We shouldn’t feel helpless, but start to consider what can be done.
The first step is not to accept this as given, or a necessity. From there we need to get our head around it, a cool head. Start to talk with our friends, parents, neighbors and superiors. Try to understand the bigger picture, write, analyse and tweet about it. Use newspaper articles, blogposts, or university courses to dig deep and debate what is going on. Start data journalism to report the figures. Get on the nerves of politicians. Record who must be hold responsible for that mess, including quotes. Ask the IT people for help to get organised and spread information. This is the birth of a new capitalism, and we can do some live reporting.
The cost of the British Petrol oil spill is $20bn in compensation for ruining nature and life with pollution. As nobel-prize winner Joseph Stiglitz wrote yesterday in the Guardian, this time it is about ruining a society, and we all are taking part. Start calculating.
PS: As my friend AS remarked correctly, the £1bn cut from research funding have been spared in the end; but as we all know this isn’t about the numbers anyhow, but about the discourse.
These days, we journalists find ourselves in a funny situation. Google is partly doing our job – giving people the current information they are looking for, and partly we do our job better with Google. No one would deny by now that ‘to google something’ is a basic part of our work.
Can we think of ’search’ as the new reading, a fundamental way to get knowledge? To debate what’s going on with search is essential, and it was great that the information architect of the Guardian, Martin Belham, and Tyler Tate of Enterprise Search London, gave people a chance to discuss what’s going on yesterday at the Guardian. It is about high time that journalists, or basically all the people that deal with content get their head around what’s happening here.
News organizations, on the transition to become knowledge organizations, have a hard time catching up; mostly for technical reasons, but also because they don’t put enough working hours into their search. As Martin addressed it once, we live in the age of the tyranny of chronology. For sure, journalists need to be more aware what is currently going on, not only because ‘to search for knowledge’ is what journalism is all about.
There is also another moment lying ahead, and we need to be more aware of this. Digital search will soon come of age, meaning that we don’t simply get back search results anymore. Search will soon become a knowledge product.
A knowledge product- what does it mean?
What we get back when we search, is soon becoming more complex – like a text of a journalist. Algorithms will process search results further, re-calculate and sort them out to deliver search results on a higher level like with Guardian/Zeitgeist. Programmed by Dan Catt, Guardian/Zeitgeist is one such thing – get a first glimpse of what will happen as search is coming of age. It will automize knowledge, and transfer it to a new level.
Here, to open your API for everyone to build applications and news products like the Guardian did, is a crucial thing to do. However, where is the role of the journalists in here? One thing is sure, if you are a journalist, you better buy some chocolate to make friends with our local IT person. Or buy pizza, and there is a 85% chance that this will be the start of a new great friendship.
- Usefull summary of the Event News&Search by Martin Belham
- Guardian Zeitgeist
- The Guardian Open Platform
N. is standing in the kitchen with a mixer, and is reading the recipe for baking chocolate cake for her boyfriends birthday from her iPad. S. is working at his desk and thinks his phone is ringing, but it is just his body that is vibrating; and M. knows that the email, he is waiting for, was send to the other mail account, which doesn’t exist, of course.
There is this passage in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, where the beautifully lovestruck Levin reads the change in Kitty’s face after they were ice skating in the park, and at the time when I read it I caught myself thinking: this is like wondering about a text message you get.
Technology might have changed where romance is happening, it might even have changed how romance is happening, but it didn’t change the inner logic of romance. Hence, sometimes romance forces it’s own logic upon technology, and your unconscious is inventing communication where there is none. Any more stories? Please share.
News organisations stumble, the solid mass of TV is about to explode, and magazines are nervously re-inventing themselves digitally for the iPad.
Working in media is living inside a thriller, was what the Deputy Production Editor of Guardian Weekly Neil Willis and me agreed upon recently. The only problem is, he said, we can’t skip to the end. Well, but the good thing is, it makes life sort of exciting.
Personally I think it is a development we all should be aware of. Journalism always had an important political role within the system of our modern societies. It was the battle ground of an impartial point of view. Objectivity is a core value of journalism. “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil”, the marvellous Walter Lippmann once put this dictum. With digitalisation this impartial point of view also gets re-invented.
In the current battle about the impartial point of view, journalism is still important but in the future it won’t rule the scene anymore. With digitalization everything is fragmented and split into pieces, and objectivity won’t be excepted.
While we debate what happens to journalism, we rarely get our head around who the new players are, and what role they play. It’s Google, Facebook and Apple, plus maybe a bit of Twitter. As much as journalism they shape what the public is today.
Much like journalism, they only want to be impartial platforms, and much like journalism, they must be understood as part of our political system. Don’t you think?
Okay, I need to stop here. On my way to the British Library, I have now to ponder the question, how to think a fragmented objectivity or truth that still can be called objectivity, or truth. Because I definitely don’t wanna be called a cultural pessimist who whines about the fact that everything is falling apart. Is there such thing? How can it be thought? Oh, dear. New century, lots of work to do. Sigh.
