Archive for October 2008
We are the children of the revolution
Hyperion.
The last poem written by John Keats when he was about 24, just before he died, never completed. At such an incredibly young age (even for the 1800s), Keats was, albeit unbeknown to him, part of a revolution in literature which was sweeping across the globe. An old stuffy prescriptive style of poetry, known as Classicism, was being taken over by a bunch of passionate, idealistic young men, now known as the Romantics. Keats was part of the second wave of Romantics, along with Byron and Shelley, with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake preceeding him.
Hyperion, Keats’s second attempt at an epic poem (considered the height of poetic excellence) after the poorly received Endymion, focuses again on Greek mythology and in particular the fall of the Titans. The Titans, led by Saturn, have been overthrown by a new bright set of young gods, the Olympians, with Apollo at the helm. One famous scene from the poem is the opening image of Saturn in his sorry state – a decaying, decrepid, dying old man:
Degraded, cold, upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptered; and his realmless eyes were clos’d,
While his bow’d head seem’d listening to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.
Saturn wakes from his troubled sleep and says of his doomed kingdom:
Moan, brethren, moan; for we are swallow’d up
And buried from all godlike exercise
Of influence benign on planets pale
The Titans have put all their hope in Hyperion, the Sun God, to fight against Apollo. The poem is left unfinished just after we have met Hyperion, but the story goes that Hyperion fails and the Olympians take over.
How does the Romantic period, and Hyperion in particular, reflect anything to do with the online journalism? The comparision is not actually as crass as it might at first seem. The Augustan style of poetry (Classicist) was bent on sticking to rules, always wanting to give a realistic picture of nature in rigid ABAB rhyming pentameter. The Romantics wanted to push out of this stuck mould; even though it had had heroes like Pope, it had become boring, old, and restrictive. They clustered ideas and at first unconsciously developed a new style of poetry that was lyrical, experiemental and based on new revolutionary philosophies.
A new, young, hip, internet-savvy school of journalists are rising up like the Olympians. We are the Romantics of journalism, excited by new media tools, gadgets and the future. I have heard too many times about how ‘murky’ and ‘uncertain’ the future is for journalism - but this is coming from the old, dying, Saturns of the media: the old codgers who don’t understand online tools and feel they threaten their ‘godlike’ status and so condemn them. Traditional journalism has its fundamentals – which will always be carried through by the new models and forms, but the age of print media is dying and some of the old hacks will die out with it. This shouldn’t be terrifying – it is a fact of life to do with cultural change – new movements begin when a time or chapter is coming to a close. We are the sproggs of the technological age which has taken over from the industrial. Just like how 60s mini-skirts broke out of 50s domestic suffocation.
We don’t need to be preached to about the revolution in journalism – we are the ones creating it. We are the children of the revolution.
Keeping up with Joneses
Allow me to introduce my friends…
Mr Alun Michael, MP. Interview 28/10/08 at 1pm by phone.
Cllr Sophie Williams. Interview 29/10/08 at 2.30pm in North Meets South.
Kate Garner, Interview 28/10/08 at 4pm, Washington Galleries.
Cllr Janice Birch. Interview on 03/11/08 at 2.30pm at her home.
Jamie Hewlett hits the what’s on mags again
It was this July that Hewlett, well known now for his collaboration with Damon Albarn as illustrator for the Gorillaz, was commissioned to do three exclusive covers for the Radio Times, see my article.
It seems Hewlett has a panchant for what’s on magazines, as he has now done the same for Time Out magazine, with a pic of the famed Monkey atop Nelson’s Column, it was released today.
Hewlett’s fondness for what’s on rags is down to one simple factor – they are what he has read and been brought up reading on the ktichen table. I commend his support of local listing mags, and think Time Out are lucky to collaborate with such an astute and talented illustrator. Can we make Monkey and national treasure please?
The heart of a story
:What we can learn from multimedia and online journalism.
A reiteration of my last post: people love to tell stories. This is no ‘biggie’. But try telling self-professed dinosaurs that journalists are no longer the gatekeepers and you’ll see faces contort with fear and beads of sweat begin to drip down crinkled brows. Daniel Meadows, with his ‘Digital Stories’, is a pioneer of teaching Everyman to use digital media to tell their story:
Human beings are naturally creative and naturally inclined to tell stories.
Check out some of the best ones here. What Meadows demonstrates is that having an attitude of passing on what we know as journalists can help others to tell their story – and their personal insight is just the kind of thing people relate to and want to hear. So should we adopt this method, as I suggested before, with blogging and other online tools? This may solve the problem hotly debated amongst online journalists – how to control UGC – teach them how to do ‘proper’ journalism, ethics and all.
What strikes one first and foremost about Daniel’s Digital Stories is that they work best when there is a sense of nostalgia. Like John Gates’s Stitch Master. The still photographs are most effective when the story is about a past or childhood – when old-looking photographs are used. Check out Wyn Roberts’ Who Am I? This leaves me unsure as to how well digital stories told through stills would work for hard news. For something as immediate as news, it seems the best medium is video – with its immediacy and ability to get more of a message across in one frame.
Some more links can be made between digital stories, movements in technology and online journalism. The story had to be 2 minutes long, and limited to 250 words. Meadows said, like in a postcard, this limiting of what you can say refines the story – makes you think about which bits to cut out and which to keep, and how best to represent the meaning. Like any narrative, the editing required to make the story is what makes is a good story, and not a badly told one. This discipline crosses over most brands of writing – the same rules apply for essays and novels – but are more acute with stories limited to 500, 300 or even 140 words. The text message (right) 
might have been the first extreme version of communicating through a small number of characters (those of us who have not mastered the discipline still roll over into two or three messages), and then came along the blog and now the microblog. There is an art to this cutting, stripping, scrutinising of words to convey meaning – think of the poet with his relentless analysis of each word and its context in its environment - and how some poets have managed to sum up the world in a few syllables by their mastery of this skill.
TS Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’
The final point that we can take from Daniel Meadows’s short stories is that people should always remain at the heart of a story. They can add a new familiar light to anything - like a map of London told through the eyes of someone who has lived in a particular borough for years. Meadows had a vision of the people in a story – and always drew out their particular slant on a place or an event. He encourages us to capture our vision, hold it to the light and promote it in everything we do.
Meadows's famous 1974 photograph of three boys and a pigeon
Industrialised gossip
Journalism is the industrialisation of gossip.
Andrew Marr said that, after he said “the impulse to tell stories is hard-wired and fundamental to being human,” My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism.
He makes the same point as Jeff Jarvis and Charlie Becker have made about Networked Journalism – it is no different from what has gone on before. We have always had the innate feeling of wanting to tell someone when something happens.
I was evacuated from Wales Willenium Stadium on Tuesday night in the middle of the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s three piece Stravinsky suite – just before the curtain rose for the last segment – we were told afterwards that it was down to a special effects machine setting off the fire alarm and usual procedure is to evacuate everybody. I was dying to tell someone when I got home. We have all experienced the need to tell people general news of our day to day lives. What’s more, all the doddery old ballet veterans in their fur coats, teetering on skyscraper heels outside the theatre, felt the urgent need to gabble and gossip about what was going on. There was a surreal titanic moment somewhere in the confusion - a steely British aversion to being told what to do and where to go, and a need to complain to anybody about the circumstances.
I nearly got out my phone to record some interviews with fellow BRB fans about how furious they were at being short-changed out of the last part (The Firebird, with all the principal dancers, was about to begin).
The shuddering cold ballet fanatics clustered together and created a conversation. It was based on two points of interest: ballet, and the current situation we found ourselves in (being evacuated from the auditorium.) This is a basic example of how networked journalism is just a fancy name for a basic human instinct to share, listen and talk about points of interest.
Online, users cluster around new points of interest, and this swarm can happen ever so quickly. Bloggers pounced on Robin Hamman’s snippet on the today programme about whether the blog is dead because it centred on a communal point of interest – blogging.
But what is more interesting, is that points of interest can quickly turn into what I think of as ‘buying into a brand’. You read Jemima Kiss’s twitter feeds, then her blog, as well as her articles for the Guardian, and before you know it I have bought into Brand Jemima. So it is no longer about crowding around big brands like the Guardian, or Apple. It’s about trying to get people to buy into BRAND ME.
If people start following me on Twitter, they might then come to this blog, they might see which other blogs I have an interest in, and look at those too. They might look at my Flickr photos, and add me on facebook to see who my friends are and what groups I’m in. If they add me on Mento they can follow what I’m reading online and which webpages I like. They can buy into brand me, and what is my point of interest becomes theirs. I become their guru of whatever they first spotted in me and found interesting.
Perhaps networked journalism will become a battle of the brands. News companies trying to convince consumers of online content to buy into their brands - or their writers. Or should we be aware of the danger of being too busy buying into other people that we end up forgetting what we represent ourselves?
There will only be gossip where a story is to be heard.
Blogging is dead?
The today programme has finally got round to discussing blogging and Twitter. Robin Hammam and Kate Bevan talked about it on the today programme this morning.
Robin Hammam said that tools such as Twitter are taking over the blogosphere because non-paid citizen journalists are fed up with the fact the blog has been taken over by the professionals. They have turned to Twitter to express short snippets of information, views and links instead of blogging about them because their blogs are no longer read as they have become swamped by the wealth of interesting material being churned out by those being paid for it.
But this wasn’t the entire gist of the debate, as it was conceeded that blogs will still generate online conversations and remain a popular medium for debating issues as more and more users come to understand the platform. It does suggest, however, that the orginial bloggers have become tired of written long blogs and are beginning to prefer the satiasfaction of a small soundbite.
It is nice that the today programme is catching up with pioneers of Web 2.0. Now my mum even knows what Twitter is, which means, as it did with facebook, a new media platform is due to spring up from the cyber-soil.
Journalists and Surgeons
One final point about UGC.
I’ve heard the comparison between journalists and surgeons batted around the media court in the last few days. Often this is to try and prove we are, or are not, a profession. Here are a few questions the comparison preposes.
Can the Editor’s Code be compared to the Hypocratic Oath?
Does the PCC reprimand bad conduct in journalism like the Government would for those working in the NHS?
Do journalists need qualifications like surgeons do? Do we save as many lives?
I am generally confused that the comparison is made at all. The likeness is similar to that of a mode of transport vs the air we breathe. Health is an essential part of life. And as I often find out when I go on holiday, news is not.
But if we let the comparison roll a bit further what happens when we get to user generated content?
Would the casualty ever be able to turn on the doctor and weild the scalpal? Could users of the NHS, with YouTube training, manage to reconnect all the fingers on someone’s hand?
No, is the answer. Although it is interesting that a new medical networking website has been launched to enable medical students to share teaching and information – with videos of surgical procedures and how to diagnose someone posted right up on the web by none other than UGC.
See www.meducation.net.
Could the use of UGC in medicine ever work beyond social networking sites such as meducation? I think most of us squirm at the thought of unqualified members of the public or med students being able to perform surgery on our lifeless limbs.
