Ideas


23
Dec 11

Christmas catchup of stuff I missed

This post just carries links to one or two pieces worth reading that I’ve missed or put to one side in the past few weeks.

  • I’ve been waiting for some time for a systematic, measured study of new media’s role in the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. This looks like the first such one (if you know of others I’ve missed, please tell me). It’s only about Twitter and really only about the networking aspects, when the real study needs to link and compare the use and consumption of every thing from satellite TV to Facebook and Twitter. But it’s a start and a fascinating one.
  • Second up is a piece by Clay Shirky about news institutions and the “crisis”. Above all this is a plea for experiments in news and a strongly made argument that, important as newspapers are as institutions, their adaptive capabilities really aren’t keeping up with what’s happening. Shirky’s piece also contains a link to an essay by Jonathan Stray on the digital public sphere which also looks excellent.
  • Last is the New York Times picture essay on 2011: a vivid way to recall what has been a truly unusual twelve months.

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10
Aug 11

UK riots: 4 fragments of wisdom

The leafy part of south-west London where this blog is often written has not yet been touched by rioting. But of course I’ve been watching the news, the tweets and reading the commentary.

What emerges most plainly from the coverage so far is bafflement. Journalists and wintnesses with memories long enough to recall past rioting in the UK (it’s not completely unprecedented) can see that this isn’t like riots of the past. But they still can’t quite grasp or label it.

Here are four pieces from different angles, all published in the last 24 hours which seem to me to get closest to doing so and to capture some of the sense, cause and effect of what’s happening on (some of) the streets of the capital.
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23
Jun 11

The filter bubble and public reason

I went today to listen to Eli Pariser, author of “The Filter Bubble: what the internet is hiding from you”. I wasn’t convinced, in several ways.

Pariser’s argument is that the world wide web isn’t what he thought it was. The search engines and social networks manipulate what you see in ways they don’t tell you about and which make them money. Algorithms which sift for “relevance” create a personal information world for you: a filter “bubble” screens you off from wider, richer possibilities. The new giants which dominate the information networks, such as Google and Facebook, should be regulated so that they can do better for society.

Pariser is right to draw attention to the major, barely-announced shift in the way that Google adjusts search results to suit an individual (although there’s dispute about the extent to which it happens). But his worry is the latest chapter in a long debate over the “echo chamber” effects of the internet. Does the availability of so much information deliver the paradox of people less well-informed because they can choose only to consume material which supports their existing beliefs and opinions? There is at least one piece of recent research which casts doubt on this widely-held belief.

My own sense, unsupported by scientific inquiry, is that “echo chamber” tendencies are probably more than offset by the internet’s ability to allow instant, rich, serendipitous exploration of the world’s digital library. When was the last time you sat down at the screen to check closing time at Waitrose and, before you knew where you were and after several sideways jumps, found yourself browsing, via a signpost in Arts & Letters Daily, a piece in Lapham’s Quarterly on diets which include earth, chalk and hair?

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5
Jan 11

Tony Judt: fine writing from the shadow of death

One of my sons gave me for Christmas Tony Judt’s last book, The Memory Chalet. His choice wasn’t a hard one: I’ve wittered on for years about Judt’s perceptive and eloquent writing. But even being a paid-up Judt fan didn’t quite prepare me for this small, posthumous book’s perfectly-formed qualities.

All Judt’s skills are on display as they were fondly listed by his friends and colleagues when he died in August last year. You are reminded of his wide, lightly-worn learning, his grasp of cause and effect in European culture and history, his preparedness to unpick lazy conventional wisdom and his skill at clinching an argument with a skillfully selected and vividly described example. All these qualities and more are discussed more fully in this review by Michael O’Donnell in the Washington Monthly.

But there’s something different about this book, most of which was published episodically by the New York Review of Books in the months when Judt knew he was dying and as his body gradually shut down. The something different is the prose.

Judt was always a good writer; in The Memory Chalet he rises to a new level altogether. He was composing from memory during wakeful, immobile nights and memory is a ruthless editor, pruning the inessential. The writing fuses the personal and the political in a way that is truly rare. It reveals Judt as a talented reporter: he had an eye and a memory for killer detail.

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31
Oct 10

How ideas travel

There’s a lot of discussion about how inventive new ideas move, mate and multiply. Journalists should be interested in this topic because so much (particularly local) journalism is going to need to be re-engineered to work in a world in which digital dominates print. The best lab conditions for growing new schemes will matter a lot in the next few years.

The subject came up today at the Battle of Ideas conference panel on “journalism in jeopardy”. You can get a taste of the discussion from this post by my fellow panellist Charlie Beckett.

All of which is why this piece from Saturday’s Financial Times is a must-read. Steven Johnson is both a science writer and entrepreneur; he manages to make a sometimes elusive subject enjoyable. Best piece of ideas journalism I read this weekend.

(Johnson speaks at the LSE in London on Tuesday November 2nd at 6.30pm. Details here).

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6
Oct 10

Lessig, El Pais, science reporting and Filloux

Occasionally I have to collect a series of bits and pieces into a roundup/catchup because I can’t find a thematic string on which I can thread the beads I’ve collected. This is one of those posts.

  • Of all the media stories across the globe in the past week, the hedge-fund pair who have taken a rescuing and controlling stake in the debt-crippled Prisa group, whose flagship is the Madrid daily El Pais and which operates throughout the Spanish-speaking world, look like the most important. The background history is here and a look at the new owners is here. “Industry agnostic” owners who don’t want to be media moguls have a mixed history with news media. They can be hands-off and allow the talent to flourish. But, because news media isn’t just another business like soap manufacture or semiconductors, hands-off can mean disconnected and under-informed. We’ll see.
  • Whether or not you see “The Social Network”, the movie about the creation (and subsequent lawsuits) of Facebook, read Lawrence Lessig’s reflection on the film.
  • I was on a panel a few months back with the science blogger Martin Robbins. Most of what he said seemed to make sense to me. The other day he wrote a blog post spoofing science reporting which deservedly went viral. This is his more serious – and more useful – follow-up.
  • There was a neatly-angled Monday Note this week from Frederic Filloux comparing the recent dealings of two papers, Le Monde and the Daily Telegraph, with their respective governments over leaks.
  • Lastly, a short shameless blast of the trumpet for my City University colleague Ann McFerran, who last night organised a panel discussion on the lessons of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. If you enjoy reading discussions reported in Twitter fragments, it’s here. Roy Greenslade has summarised the debate here. (Disclosure: both Greenslade and I teach at City).
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5
Oct 10

Wikileaks at City: last footnotes

The twitterstream arguing about Julian Assange’s appearance at City University is still active I see. So here are two footnote links, one from an Assange supporter GeorgieBC on the “new journalism“. That very phrase has of course been around a bit before now. I’m still not in sympathy in the least with the hacker outlook, but this is a calmer insight into a quite, entirely different philiosophy from journalism.

Second and last a post from Padraig Reidy of Index On Censorship on the the dilemmas which arranging Assange’s debate posed for an organisation devoted to open access. Even leakers want some media control.

Update 6/10/10: good post by Paul Prentice, one of the City University students who listened to Assange.

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2
Oct 10

Assange fans and the supercilious weasel

In my last post, I was drawing attention to the gulf which separates the core Wikileaks philosophy and its roots in computer hacking and the set of assumptions which have driven journalism for the last couple of centuries or so. It was this vast gap which struck me most forcibly when Wikileaks founder Julian Assange spoke London earlier this week.

I could not have looked for a better illustration of the distance between the two positions than the post-debate reaction of a couple of Assange’s fans. For Rixstep (“a constellation of programmers”), Assange is the Robin Hood who will help to dethrone the established media. It therefore follows that all that the established media write must be manipulative lies. Worse, as Rixstep wrote in a separate post, I’m defending “yesterday’s media” and don’t realise that its time is over. I am, “wittingly or not” an oppressor and part of a “power establishment”. (In real life, I’m a professor: see here).

A twitterer who enthusiastically agreed with Rixstep called me a “supercilious weasel” – I’m tempted to use that as the new name for this blog – and seemed very angry that some City University students didn’t think much of Julian Assange’s answers and had the temerity to say so. Naturally, they are dupes of The Establishment (me).

I rest my case.

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