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It’s life long learning. Who needs an education?

Over 50,000 students all over from the UK came to march the streets of London to protest against the cuts in higher education, far more than the 24,000 expected – I already blogged about the disgusting situation this imposes upon humans here.

To quiesce the university i.e. smart people there seems to be several tactics at work nowadays.

The German one can be described as ‘divide at impera’, divide and rule: While some universities and departments are awarded as a ‘cluster of excellence’ to be showered with money, most others are force into third-party funding which means no thinking but a lot of administration. Two days ago an email of my friend B informed me that Austria is also planning deep cuts in its research funding.

Hence, shutting down higher education seems to be not just an UK issue, but in general a European thing; if so the question must be asked is what this logic of capitalism is that we can here see at work.

Clearly, the cuts put a lot of pressure on humanities and arts, fear is that they will become a preserve for the most privileged students while medicine and engineering is likely to be protected.

One could state the obvious, the cuts are imposed to shut down the centres of critical thinking. However, this argument feels sort of shallow, like an imposed distraction, apart from being quite arrogant against the other faculties – I know that there is also critical thinking within mathematics, medicine, or even management studies. I am not buying it.

I wonder. Why are we hindering the departments where students are explicitly supposed to learn a thinking that doesn’t behave in the supposed way, and why are we doing this in a moment when the computers/networks/algorithms start to be able to do skilled work, and the automatization of knowledge in this post-Google world is about to come of age?

From this arrises the next question: Why is it more important for capitalism to give people a fierce lesson that they need to adapt to the job market?

… to be continued.

10/11/10
. 1 Comment

When the world turns into objects #GracefulAlienation

Too many thoughts are waiting to be developed and spin in my head, among them such different things as muses (why is there no version for females?), paywalls (TimesOnline just posted their 50,000 monthly subscriber figure), and ‘we-goverments’ (an up and coming thing). However, let’s turn to music for a minute.

It’s worth it.

Ever since I stumbled across James Blake’s way of composing electronic tracks his music has fascinated me. He has developed this new way of taking musical elements apart; he pushes, transforms and changes the single parts carefully a bit, until they become their own objects which he sets together anew in an abstract and wonderful way. I barely ever came across such a graceful way of alienating something.

Take ‘Limit to your love’: A beautiful video by Martin de Thurah, a calm song that gives you lots of room, room that gets even wider when a bass wall sets in at minute 0.55 to add another layer. Yes. Music. Isn’t it an amazing thing? Make sure you are connected to a good stereo, or use your headphones, otherwise you wouldn’t get what I mean.

2/11/10
. 5 Comments

Does an award make you feel old, or push you forward?

As you can easily see by it’s charming ugliness, this is a real award. It’s ancestral line is actually quite impressive, maybe suppressive: It was given to heavy weights such as the anchor Sabine Christiansen or TV historian Guido Knopp.

This only unsettles me a bit. I am sure I owe half of it to the internet – thank you internet! -, and the other half for having the ability of stubbornly insisting to kill a hostile environment with charm, which is apart from love and respect for technology the fundamental feature you need to have if you are into digital journalism. It can be very exhausting, ask my friends. But I don’t want to whine at all. The question ‘What are you actually doing here?’ is obviously very dear to me; I guess without it I would feel utterly bored.

What else do we learn? Humans have understood that the internet won’t go away. Good. And: I am getting old. The week the journalist committee DFJV told me I will be awarded, I got translated from English to German by someone else. Well, I’ll try to get over it, and cling to the sentence that Holm Friebe handed me in his truly lovely laudatio: ‘Il faut être absolutement modern.’ That’s a priceless remark; and why not.

1/11/10
. 2 Comments

“The press is our immune system. If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker and perhaps eczema.”
Jon Stewart

31/10/10
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How to tell a Facebook story?

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.

30/10/10
. 1 Comment

In the UK, Google is making no one stupid. Instead, the government is taking care of that

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.

20/10/10
. 8 Comments

Where will search take journalism?

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

19/10/10
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The romantic side of technology

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.

8/10/10
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Will there be a murder in the media thriller, or just a threat?

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.





1/10/10
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The rise of collaborative journalism – 5 points on how social media changed the news

About five years after it took the internet by storm, it is apparent that social media has changed how we do journalism. At the Guardian, CNN and soon the NYTimes, a collaborative journalism of a whole new kind has emerged

It wasn’t love at first sight, but finally news organisations learned to embrace social media. Facebook was launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006. Today, both tools are heavily used by nearly all media organisations.

Currently there are five different ways in which journalists use social media. It all started with distribution and feedback; from there new forms of collaborative journalism emerged with crowd sourcing, or the integration of the users in an investigation – the most experience news outlet here is clearly the Guardian who had great results with Investigate your MP’s expenses, and recently launched the World Government Data platform.

The latest turn is the use of friends or followers as content curators. It seems like with Twitter, interesting Twitter users became the new editors. It is of no wonder that the New York Times is about to launch a social news platform called news.me.

The NYTimes is one of the news outlets that understood the social aspect of news most profoundly. Already two years ago they’ve launched their own Facebook-like platform TimesPeople, and recently integrated a Facebook box on their frontpage informing you what NYTimes articles your friends have liked or commented.

Editorial judgment vs. social curating? Why not both

With news.me later to be launched that year, the NYTimes obviously isn’t afraid to accept that beside the editorial judgement of their journalists their users like to know what their friends, or the people that they find interesting and follow on Twitter, are reading. Services like Paper.li or Twittertim.es show, there is a new editorial judgement out there.

News.Me is developed by their Research & Development team, and albeit the NYTimes hasn’t revealed any details, one can expect it to aggregate of information from several platforms, preferably the NYTimes. Controlling a service like this would gives the NYTimes the chance to go social while at the same time push their own news in a prominent place.

Behind a paywall but still on social media?

Another topic is social media and the paywall. Using social media for distribution and spreading the news is widely common, it will be interesting how news organisations that are fully or partly moving behind a paywall like Rupert Murdoch’s Times, and in early 2011 the NYTimes will deal with that issue.

Will they leave social media? Post a link, and he or she has to pay for the full story? Or will articles posted on social media be fully available? As journalism becomes more collaborative and it is important to engage with the reader, this is a crucial decision.

Due to social media, a new collaborative journalism is on the rise

Investigative reporters like the Guardian’s Paul Lewis are using social media as part of their investigation, for example asking people to help with their knowledge or filmed material; prominent example is the research of the death of Ian Tomlinson for which Paul won a British Press Award.

Furthermore, crowd sourced approaches help to evaluate a situation better as CNN proved with the Haiti earthquake or the recent New York storm, and data journalism asks the reader for help – investigate the MP expenses or the COIN budget data wouldn’t have been possible for the Guardian without the help of its readers.

Social media surely isn’t representative, but it enables journalists to get access to “a wider range of opinion, and gives them access to a whole range of voices” as BBC World Service director Peter Horrocks once put it.

The statistical truth

Finally, social media changed how journalism understands the role of a ’source’. Today, social media gives journalists a chance to reach out to the people more easily, and that changes the role of a source. As the media expert Dan Gilmore explains correctly each single source within social media can’t be checked, and doesn’t need to be.

Like in a mosaic, a single tweet might be wrong but that doesn’t mean that we don’t get the whole picture. In recent years, thanks to social media we saw a new form of journalistic truth rising: the statistical truth.

From mass to source

Slowly the feedback is turning into a dialogue. In most news organisations, journalists are still busy with getting used to the fact that readers comment, correct their pieces, and talk back, but the next step is to turn the feedback into a useful dialogue. Here, CNN is the news organisation that has taken it to a new level.

The CNN iReport isn’t just prominently integrated into their iPhone app. User that register are asked for their detailed contacts. This isn’t done, however, to target them with advertising, but to allows CNN’s editors to contact them.

Like the Guardian, CNN is leaves the notion of the viewer/user as a passive mass behind. With iReport, they activate the mass and turn the users into reliable sources. As we have seen with the Haiti earthquake, the results for their coverage used in web and for their TV reporting were impressive.

From newspapers to radio and television broadcasting, we have seen that each media creates its own form of journalism. The chance of social media is to turn the users into active sources. As two heads are better than one, it could make journalism more reliable than ever.

Links
- TimesPeople
- Twittertim.es
- Paper.li
- Betaworks and The Times plan a social news service, The NYTimes
- News.Me

- BBC news staff told to embrace social media
- How investigative reporting makes use of social media, The Guardian
- Special Projects Editor Paul Lewis on a) the Guardian and b) Twitter
- Investigate your MP expenses, The Guardian
- the World Government Data platform, The Guardian
- The budget database – what the experts think & search it yourself, The Guardian
- CNN iReport

20/09/10
. 8 Comments

>Fuck everyone else. The world wants us to be happy. And I trust the stars. The stars ain’t never gonna leave us.

Sometimes film, fashion, and shattered dreams cross. Then they create grace. Here, Harmony Korine casts the spell by directing a bunch of teenage girls through a rotten US town, capturing the coolness, the rage and fragility of the uncool and forgotten.

Some scenes are especially powerful: The girls beating gently and pointlessy with thin wooden planks against thick black old tyres. An empty playground behind a fence, fixed to it a balloon, blue as the sky. The girls sleeping on the pavement of a parking lot, a tableau vivant.

Korine films the pictures with care. Aesthetically set somewhere between Blissfully Yours of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and David Simon’s last Post-Katrina New Orleans serie Tremé, he films hand-held, and takes this even further by re-filming them which makes him able to tip them a bit over. They stay indecisive – are we looking at an old photo or reality?

Doing short films for fashion brands recently became fancy among directors. Obviously, it is a quick way to make some extra money, or is there another reason why Kenneth Anger is pointlessly blurring up Missoni, and Martin Scorsese isn’t much of an inspiration either with Chanel? Outstanding exception so far is Chris Cunningham for Gucci, of course. Now, four minutes of Harmony Korine for the New York Label Proenza Schouler of the designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. Fashion and film, both worth it.

- Thx to Justin for sharing your excellent taste with me.
- Proenza Schouler directed by Harmony Korine
- FLora of Gucci directed by Chris Cunningham
- Missoni directed by Kenneth Anger
- Bleu de Chanel directed by Martin Scorsese

10/09/10
. 1 Comment

If I may quote Andre here: “London, you late capitalist bitch”

For the first time in our relationship I am mad at London. It’s been over a year now, and we’ve been really happy with each other. But one thing keeps on coming up: It doesn’t like me hanging around with my friends. so it makes them move away.

Very early in our relationship I decided to confront that problem rather radical, and denied to become friends with new Germans. I preferred British people. I was told this is racist, of course, and ‘you can’t do this’, so I made a few exceptions. It was in vain anyhow. Lately, London has send C to Graz, S to Pasadena, A to Hamburg, and is even threatening to send my best friend A, British, to Africa. By now I stop finding it funny, or losing people an interesting challenge to coup with. I simply pout.

Everyone who has been longer in London knows that here “flexible capitalism” can still be observed in its natural surrounding, and more directly than in every other European city. It comes as no surprise that Marx wrote the Manifest of the Communist Party in London, in which he was taken away by the crassness of capitalism. Also Darwin developed parts of his evolutionary theory on the survival of the fittest after being back to London from the Beagle; less known, he also wrote about the survival of the prettiest, for which I am convinced he travelled secretly into the year 2010 to study the Hackney hipsters on Broadway Market. (This part of the book is also known as the bible of Shoreditch.)

Finally, after London already killed lots of productive debates that can only badly be replaced by a glass of vine on Skype, and drove the test objects of my wild assumptions into exil, this late capitalist bitch of a city, as my friend Andre likes to say, decided to steal one of my flatmates. I am not amused.

In Germany, you only live with flatmates when you are a student and can’t afford a flat on your own. In London, the housing situation is different. Everyone is quite focused on work all the time, plus transport is so slow that they ask you to top up your patience if you buy a ticket, and friends live far away as the city is huge. Here, flatmates are a wonderful social condition of their own. Necessary, good, comforting, a bit like having brothers and sisters living with you, being in a certain way very close, albeit independent beings with different interests.

They are not friends – I wouldn’t like to live with my best friend, I rather keep him as a best friend – but in a certain way you feel as close as you share the bathroom, meet late at night in the kitchen and know each other with swollen morning eyes. They are an important part of your life. Good flatmates are a gift. Mazen, we miss you.

- Hackney Hipster Hate
- Winfried Menninghaus: The promise of beauty

24/08/10
. 2 Comments