Writing about the effect of digitalization on knowledge and how we all became experts via our new devices, I spent this morning researching the amazing medical apps from Epocrates to the Google Body browser. Body parts all over the place. Looking up from my British Library salad at lunch I suddenly face huge bared teeth in a camera picture across me. Person that is holding her teeth in front of my nose is excusing herself with her Blackberry. She said it has no mirror function, and she had something between her teeth, so she made a picture of them using the camera instead. Oh, this digital life.
This week when I went to Paris to teach a masterclass at the Science-Po School of Journalism, I watched French television. And I zapped. And then I watched German television. I shouldn’t have done this, but hindsight is easier than foresight.
While German television debated the female proportion at a talk show, Sarkozy faced a curated crowd representing ‘the French people’ on TF1 – among them a black female Professor of Economy, a young farmer with two kids, a female entrepreneur with four kids, a teacher who was formerly workless, and a male language student – note how the French slightly shift the stereotypes here?
Not so public German television at the talk show of Maybrit Illner. Now, I considered her to be one of the smarter people in dumb German TV, but what I saw simply made me angry. Yes, I have a problem with people talking nonsense, but I can stand dissension. Only that dissension means, that there are two sides. Two, like in: one, two.
Here, however, the way the debate was staged was clearly biased. Her crew had curated a bunch of conservative opinion leaders with a young inexperienced although brave sweetheart of The Green youth, and topped this with a stupid question: ‘Will my boss be a robot tomorrow?’ Women, of course. Same thing really, anyhow.
There was the conservative female Minister for Families (against), President of German Industry (against), a very eloquent publicist Brigitte Kelle (against), then the young female Green party member (for), and an actress (slightly for, but understood the other side as well). And there was, finally, the crowd clapping when it was said that females shouldn’t be preferred to males, and must feel the cold wind of a career, too.
How could it happen, that public German television staged a debate about the female proportion of executives without one? Eh?
None of these people have been treated with great politeness as an abnormality because of their gender – by males as well as females. None of these people ever had job interviews with chief executives that opened their generous talk with a technical discussion of cars. Their gender was never reason to be charmingly treated as an intruder. And none of them felt slightly weird being the only women among 18 male CEOs and editors-in-chief. You get it: you don’t belong here is what comes on top of the ‘cold wind’.
A debate on female proportion in management being used to whine about politics not caring enough about the female as a mother but only as an employee (for working females can’t be mothers, sure); a debate that is asking if the females lack enough will to make it, makes me angry.
Let’s have some fun! The official Talkshow Trailer:
As you can easily see in the comments on Maybrit Illner’s YouTube channel, this makes a lot of German men angry, too. This is biased, and structural sexism. It is also – excuse my French – utterly bullshit. Gender is, anyhow, not a female issue, but a human condition.
At least I am now sure of the following. As much as I wouldn’t like to live under the regime of Berlusconi, I am not going back to Germany. No way. Blame Maybrit Illner for it, or maybe a robot.
We interrupt this serious blog for two serious things: aesthetics & trying.
This video, ‘I try’, is utterly non-spectacular but impresses with a charming trick. It might idle around a bit too long in the beginning, but from 0:50 on what you see makes you hear better. And being able to hear better makes you able to see more, like how the process enters the product. Yes. Hello concept. I always was very fond of this song by Public Lover aka Bruno Pronsato feat. Ninca Leece, and once I found the video, even more. Please connect computer to good speakers.
And then there is this: The second James Blake video, ‘The Wilhelm Scream’ which is beautifully filmed by Alexander Brown, formerly at Goldsmiths College where James is now himself. The song is, of course, already amazing with the music slowly building up a dissonant cloud for you to hide in from your worries (if you can’t stand pathos, skip to 2.40). Yes, good speakers again, and must be watched in full screen mode, promise.
Oh. P says, I should add the following: if you wish by 1.12 they hadn’t styled James as a glossy pop icon and desperately wait for the Turner-ish blur to come back, you are not alone. If you wish to mess up his hair, too.
Watching Western media yesterday, the coverage of Egypt’s revolution was ruled by one question: the search for the leader. Isn’t it weird that we seem to rub our eyes in disbelief about the fact that obviously there can be political action without an agitator?
What we see down at Tharir square, however, is something new: We see people that fight to end the regime; they are revolting against a system, but they do not want to come into power. This revolution isn’t led by the opposition.
Now, I don’t think that technology is fully replacing the leader, but it might change what the political tasks are. Hence, our search for the leader seems to be old fashioned. It floats a bit out of position above Tharir square; above people’s heads that gather day after day impressively peaceful, facing the threat to get beaten up or even killed to protest for the end of a regime, above a mass that organises food and water, medicine and blankets, and keeps a spreadsheet of the one’s that were killed. Does this mass need a leader?
We all know that the political will is expressed. In the past, the leader did this for the mass, he or she was their medium. Today, however, our societies are organized by media – we life in a media society, we know that. How much work of the leader can be done by a mean of communication? Seriously, can parliamentary action, as the Egypt Blogger Sandmonkey proposed, be thought in a different, technological way?
How is media changing the politics of a society? And does the leader of the future have to lead, or to listen?
It looks like she is carrying her Blackberry, doesn’t it? 1860 this was barely the case, but we can already see that writing organises a society. I recently stumbled across it in Munich’s Neue Pinakothek. Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller had this girl carrying a catechism (I guess).
Back then people focused at it in order to concentrate themselves away from the wildness of nature and life. These days we see it the other way around, an upheaval of citizens who carry media with them to re-arrange order and introduce life back to government. Let’s hope that violence does not take over, may the force be with them.
Here in the Western world, it might be useful to ask ourselves what we can we learn from it. This for example: all of us have joked about blogging on cats or irrelevant messages on social media. Yes, the coffee is hot. Maybe that was wrong, and these messages were just there to test the canal in case of emergency.
We saw the emergency in the past weeks. Thanks to the new digital public we can hear a choir of voices, and most of them were, by the way, not fundamentalists – this upheaval of the people was not done by the opposition, but by the citizens themselves. Yes, social media does change politics.
Let’s hope that the narrative of violence, which always seems to justify dictatorship, does not take over.
