I just emailed a friend who sits at a desk most of the day and said are you there? I wanted to phone and ask for opinions on some photographs I intend to try to have displayed in a gallery. I received an email back listing all the busy things that she was right in the middle of and what did I want?
I started to reply that “I wanted to call and if you have time….”
And then I thought FUCK IT! What is it these days that all I ever do is ask people “if they’re not too busy…”
Now in part this is because of my job. I am an IT auditor and so it is my job to ask questions and yet I realise that the people of whom I’m asking the questions obviously have things to do which from their perspective are more important.
However, when I consider many of my friends, they booked their lives like an aeroplane schedule. Last week I Emailed my friends and gave them two weeks notice that I was going to go out for a birthday drink. Many of them couldn’t make it because they were booked up.
I have a friend who arrives at work in London at about 8am and leaves at about 8pm. When he gets home he has numerous tasks to do related to raising six kids.
Kids are definitely part of the problems though not necessarily so. I have several friends with often I call them up and we chat and then the conversation takes some bizarre turn and I realise that, without a pause, they have started talking to one of the kids.
But it’s not only kids. At work it used to be possible to walk up to someone’s desk and talk to them but more and more people have become so obsessed that they require you to book a meeting for the most trivial things. We are becoming a society which values activity as a end in itself.
My own professional is IT and I recall that twenty years ago my day might consist of numerous activities: Writing code, running cables, checking logs, designing systems and cleaning the machine room.
All these activities have now been specialised and so we employ a group of individuals for all tasks. Once this is done it is possible to begin increasing their efficiency. We are becoming no better than the factory workers of the 19th century. We do not move from our desks. We have no change of task. The clean desk policy and the hot policy ensures that we have no personal relationship with our environment or the people sitting next to us.
Our politicians are obsessed with the idea that our schools and colleges should teach skills. They are no longer places for of learning, they are places for training. There is an important difference. Training is something one passively accepts without question. It is to enable one to be able to repeat a process like an automata. Dogs are trained to “stay”, soldiers are trained to kill. Learning is something that one does actively.
I heard a man on the radio say that Marx believed that capitalism survived because it was adept at producing goods but that this activity would eventually grind to a halt and communism would take over.
It certainly seems true that capitalism is better at innovation and production than communism and I myself had speculated that one day the inventions and efficiencies may grind to a halt. When we all have cars, flat screen TVs, iPods, hairdryers, toasters, sandwich makers and marble topped kitchens.
But it occurs to me that our society is moving into a new phase of production. We are now moving into production of virtualised goods. Music, movies, computers games etc. These are the stuff of leisure. If humanity had no need for work we would naturally make music, and sing songs, perform theatre and play games.
Work to Live
But now capitalism has industrialised our leisure time. It has taken our natural tendency toward leisure and play and forced us to pay for this. It has achieved this by dividing the production and consumption components.
Companies employ us to produce products which the marketing machine convinces are indispensable for leisure. At the same time that we must work to produce these products we must also work to buy the products. And of course a cut goes to the share holders.
I was discussing the undoubted increase in material wealth that has taken place in the UK over the past twenty years and a friend said that while it was true that the middle classes now took second cars for granted the real wealth and power stayed with the super rich the same as it always had.
There, I have just had an email back:
“Yes, yes. I started to go through all of your images to identify my favorites. In the middle of this my internet connection went out….. I have about 1/2 hour before I have to pick up my daughter ………..”
Forget Brave New World, forget 1984, what was it that King Crimson sang? “21st Century Schizoid Man”
Art Photography
Mainstream News vs The Blogosphere
Tags: advertising, amateurs, articles, blog, blogger, blogosphere, cheap writing, Comment Is Free, content, disruptive technology, editor, entrenched opinion, Facebook, fact check, filler, industrialisation, information bottleneck, journalism, journalist, Mainstream Press, News, news agenda, news feed, News Of The World, news wire, Newsnight Review, newspaper, ordinary people, Paul Morley, press, proof read, Reuters, Sean Parker, specialisation, standard truth, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Internet, Twitter, vested interest
Blog On
Earlier this month I watched Newsnight Review on BBC2 and saw Kirsty Wark and Paul Morley discussing the recent death of Christopher Hitchens. One comment of Mr. Morley’s rankled with me. He said “5000 bloggers are not worth one Christopher Hitchens”. “Hmph!”, I grunted and tweeted “…True, neither are 5000 TV critics in black polo neck sweaters”.
It is commonplace for the mainstream media to denigrate bloggers and attention is usually drawn to the mediums very real failings: Blogs can be abusive, poorly thought through, dreadfully worded, awfully spelt and the facts are rarely checked. Many blogs have all these failings and more but professional journalists whining about bloggers are a little like aristocrats sneering at working class speech.
If we invert the failings attributed to blogs we get the strengths of the mainstream media. Like all large organisations, newspapers divide work into specialisations. They have specialist proof readers, specialists fact checkers and specialist editors. Given this production line approach it is not surprising that the BBC scores higher than most amateurs when it comes to “production values”.
Should we, then, ignore blogs? Should we limit our reading to the mainstream press? We may as well ask if we should ignore Rock and Roll. Like Hollywood the mainstream news media are very adept at the techniques of their profession but the industrial approach can produced results which seem contrived and predictable. If blogging has any advantage it is authenticity.
Prior to the printing press most people would have been unable to read and public discourse would have been dependent on numerous personal interactions. A discerning individual would have given less credence to the boor and more to the wit but the onus on differentiating would be down to the individual.
With the arrival of newspapers in the 17th century the news began to coalesce around a standard version of the truth. In the 19th century wire services such as Reuters further accelerated standardisation by providing identical information to its customers. The style or opinions became what differentiated one publication from another.
For as long as I can remember The News Of The World had been full of gossip to be taken with a pinch of salt while broadsheets cultivated a reputation for more accurate reporting. As readers we learned the difference but though the style varied the agenda remained broadly the same.
As with much of our corporate 21st Century, the mainstream news media has come to resemble a cartel. If we visit the web sites of the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, BBC News we see that the agenda is very similar. While they report different viewpoints, they still represent a bottleneck for ideas and information and are effectively setting a standard news agenda at least at a national level.
The Internet is challenging this status quo as was shown dramatically with The Arab Spring and the Occupy Protests. Ordinary people are setting their own agenda and even have their own news wire in the form of twitter. As events unfold in real time the mainstream media are forced to play catch up. It’s messy and difficult but there are as many opinions as there are individuals and the blogosphere merely reflects this reality.
An article in The Economist (December 31st 2011) stated “..it is hard to argue that the internet has cheapened the global conversation about economics. On the contrary, it has improved it.” and went on to say “…blogs have brought experts … out of the shadows.”
The mainstream news media have become a vested interest and, as with lawyers or gas fitters, they scorn the idea that anybody else could do their job. They do this by raising themselves up as gurus and denigrating those who threaten to replace them as incompetent. The mainstream media still provide better standards of quality control but, if all they do is package news and disseminate it through web sites and apps then they are not much different from a blog. The difference is further burred by sites such as The Huffington Post or the Guardian’s Comment Is Free which feed articles written by bloggers into a more professional looking framework.
Certainly the writings of Christpher Hitchens were superior to most amateur blogs but then Mr. Hitchens did not have the encumbrance of earning a living in a different field. One reason that mainstream journalists are competent is that they have spent their professional lives honing their competence. Some, like Mr. Hitchens, may rise further by dint of personal attributes such as individualism, iconoclasm and determination. Others cling to the technical paraphernalia of their profession to distinguish themselves from the amateur. As the mediocre artist relies on dressing in black and a well groomed 5 O’clock shadow so the mediocre journalist relies on grammatical pedantry.
Like any other profession the real threat to journalists lies, not with amateurs, but with industrialisation. Companies are now emerging such as Wordsofworth and Vivatic which outsource article writing and proof reading to individuals via The Internet. Their business model is to source articles from competent but cheap writers and flog them on to multiple sites which use them to pad out advertising. These sites are not looking for inspiration or controversy, they are looking for “content” and they effectively reduce the value of articles to that of filler.
The hope is that new media will provide greater access to public debate and challenge entrenched opinions though this is by no means certain. As some bloggers gain credibility, some journalists will find themselves paid peanuts to write 500 words on cup cakes. Sean Parker, founder of Napster and Facebook’s founding president has said “What we don’t have are good organising tools so that institutions, which have hierarchy which have management, can actually leverage the power of social media to get things done in a consistent and sustainable way”. Presumably Mr. Parker is now developing tools to enable power to be leveraged by consistent and hierarchical management.
We may be living through an interregnum. The Internet is a disruptive technology but its long term effect on public discourse may be to just shake out the chaff. If the mainstream media want to remain relevant they need to focus on nurturing thoughtful journalists who produce pungent and insightful articles. In this respect the blogosphere may be a much needed kick up the arse.
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