Results tagged “media” from Eccentric Eclectica

I wanted to like the new version of The Prisoner on AMC but so far it’s been a failure.

A big part of the problem is the absence of Patrick McGoohan. He was the key to the success of the original series and Caviezel is an inadequate replacement. What made McGoohan so good was his anger and a sense of danger. You really felt like he wanted to destroy the whole village if he didn’t escape. Caviezel is upset but never really angry, he yells a bit but it doesn’t feel genuine. McGoohan’s anger was always on the knife edge of erupting in unexpected ways.

And consider the opening credit scenes. In the 1960s series McGoohan stalked down the hall and sped away in his sports car through the streets of London. In the 2000s series we get intercut visuals of Caviezel spraypainting “resign” across the windows of his office and blurry surveillance video. The former reeks of danger, risk, and spy games a la James Bond. The latter is corporate, the panopticon.

Perhaps it’s an indication of how spying has changed in our imaginations as well as reality. The glory days of the spy were the height of the Cold War; when the enemy was well-defined and the game had rules as portrayed in the works of Ian Fleming, John LeCarre, Alistair MacLean. McGoohan even played a role in a film of a McLean novel - Ice Station Zebra.

Today spying is pervasive. The city of London is constantly monitored by CCTV. No one is followed by a “tail”, instead it’s just recorded on video. We’re living in the Foucauldian panopticon where everyone is being watched. Spying and data-mining are a way of life, hidden beneath every thing we do in the West. It is the water we swim in. During the Cold War we could at least pretend that we were fighting for something else, fighting against the reds to be a free economy, fighting against becoming a number. Today the fight is mostly over. We’re all numbers now and either don’t know it or are resigned to it.

Perhaps that’s why the remake of The Prisoner feels so empty. This time around it’s less about finding the truth, if it’s really out there, then doing our time in purgatory.

I noticed a couple of reports over the last two weeks about the Morgan Stanley report by a 15-year-old intern about social media use among teenagers. I clicked through to the news article, read it quickly, and then just as quickly dismissed it.

Last week I read a post by Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen on the same story. Anderson contends that the incident is an example of a gate-keeping failure at Morgan Stanley.

For instance, they published the report “[w]ithout claiming representation or statistical accuracy,” yet felt it provided “one of the clearest and most thought provoking insights we have seen.”

How can it be non-representative and inaccurate, yet clear and thought-provoking?

Kent linked to a U.K. newspaper story at the Times Online that reveals how Matthew Robson got the job at Morgan Stanley.

Gaining a place at Morgan Stanley to explain teenage media consumption to the world required a little luck. It was not just what Matthew knew, but whom he knew, or rather, whom his dog, Rudolph, knew.

In January Rudolph, a three-year-old whippet, was being walked by Matthew’s mother in Greenwich Park when he became friendly with the dog of Patrick Wellington, a senior financial analyst at Morgan Stanley. His mother and Mr Wellington began chatting about her son’s struggles to get a work experience placement.

“We had tried many places, mainly in the local area,” said his mother. Matthew had written to local businesses, solicitors and banks including Lloyds TSB and all had turned him down.

So he wrote to Morgan Stanley, which offered him a two-week internship and two weeks ago on Monday he set off for the bank’s offices in Canary Wharf.

I don’t begrudge Matthew his chance to work at Morgan Stanley but the background on how he got the job makes me even less likely to credit anything he, or by extension Morgan Stanley, say about how the internet or social media really work. The whole story begins to smell link link-baiting or trolling from the start.

The problem is that it is these types of media hype stories that force me to reconsider all media stories. I can think of three possible explanations for the this story at Morgan Stanley

1. The analysts at Morgan Stanley were truly surprised by the things Robson said and wanted to publish them. From this I conclude that the analysts don’t know much about their subject if they are so easily amazed.
2. The folks and Morgan Stanley just wanted to give some props to a plucky teenager who displayed a bit of talent and drive. This is probably the most flattering interpretation of MS behavior, because then the media frenzy is not their fault.
3. Or the Morgan Stanley people deliberately promoted the story because they knew it had all the media hooks that would get it wide publicity: a young teenager telling his confused elders where to stick their vaunted expertise.

Morgan Stanley comes off looking poorly under all of these scenarios.

The media problem may be even more serious. The media moves so quickly from Michael Jackson to Walter Cronkite, and controls so much of our mental space for respect and reputation, so that the only lesson to be learned is to make a big splash with some confidently asserted thoughts and hope that the fame machine picks you up for a day or two.

It’s a crazy world and it just seems to grind talent up faster and faster.

I attended the fifth Social Media Breakfast at the Minneapolis Public library this morning.

Jon Gordon from FutureTense started things out with a Q&A about technology and media. Most of the questions surrounded the new NPR API and the social media activity at Minnesota Public Radio. He mentioned the changing attitudes among journalists about social media. Perceptions are shifting slowly from not letting media employees speak online to accepting off-the-record conversations about anything.

This reminded me of how I felt when I read or heard last year about journalists not voting in order to protect their impartiality. I thought then that the idea was stupid. I’d rather have a journalist vote and be upfront about his or her participation than someone who tries to hard to appear above the fray. The question is how much disclosure do we need or want? Does a journalist have a responsibility to tell the audience how she voted? What will happen when media organizations start publishing their raw interviews and material on the web for remixing and analysis?

Paul Saarinen (I would’ve gotten the spelling correct, it’s just like the architect Eero Saarinen, even if I’m not from the range) spoke about the parallels between social media and game playing. I remember first hearing this from Ed Vielmetti in 2005 when he compared Wikipedia to an MMORPG. Just like pornography leads the way in Lively so gaming leads the way in online social interactions. To the hippies who started the WELL and influenced the hacker movement this is probably no surprise.

Meg Canada and Jody Wurl finished the morning off by showing off how hip librarians are to social media and networking. I remember encountering a lot of librarians when I first started to read and write blogs five or six years ago. Jenny Levine at The Shifted Librarian has been blogging since 2002. Canada and Wurl toured some of the highlights on the social media booksphere LibraryThing and Bookspace. I was surprised at the low number of hands raised when we were asked if anyone was on LibraryThing. I guess I’m spoiled by the high ratio of superpatrons in Ann Arbor.

Almost everyone at the meeting was on Twitter during the meeting. A twitter search for smbmsp gives a good trace. To test the geek quotient of all those people I think we should setup an IRC channel next time and see how many people know what we are talking about.

So what went well at PublicRadioCamp last Saturday?

Back in February Dan Gillmor stopped by Minnesota Public Radio to talk about the future of journalism. The setup was standard interview fare - two people at microphones in front of a crowd sitting in an auditorium. The reaction to the event was immediately negative - people complained about the lack of interaction with the audience and the back channel chat on Twitter was devastating.

Last Saturday a smaller group of people met in the same location for Public Radio Camp. The setup was completely different. Butcher-block paper on the walls, ubiquitous wi-fi, tables, movable chairs, and about thirty people who were interested in improving media not just talking about it.

So which one of these events was more successful? As usual it depends on your goals, audience, and perspective.

I felt the Gillmor event covered material I already knew. There was minimal interaction with the audience in a conversation that was ostensibly about how the audience is becoming more powerful than journalists. The journalists in the audience seemed to mostly be fearful about the future of their profession.

At Public Radio Camp everything was turned around. People were enthusiastic about public radio and the information they hoped to get from it. They were interested in expanding participation and bringing more people into the conversation. Finally the format was based on open space and left people alone long enough to let them self-organize.

The people that brought us MinneBar hosted a Public Radio Barcamp at the offices of Minnesota Public Radio today. Bob Collins, one of MPR’s star bloggers, liveblogged the conference on News Cut. I won’t duplicated his efforts by describing what happened but it was an exciting experiment in opening the black box of journalism up for the public, or at least for those interested enough to act.

There was a lot of synergy between the two groups working on user-generated content and Nuevo Radio. So what I’d like to see next is another event like today’s. But instead of just brainstorming ideas we should get together to produce a news story.

Here’s how I think it could work.

Everyone arrives in the morning and things are setup as they were today, a bunch of white boards or paper on the walls, a few tables, and chairs. There’s a brief introduction where we explain what we’re going to do - create a news story in a day. For the first hour everyone brainstorms story ideas: who can we interview, what media do we want to use, how do we research the idea?

Then we divide the tasks up into teams and go out and do it.

This would work really well for a significant event, like the upcoming Republican National Convention. The drawback is that everyone else is going to be covering the convention. I don’t know if there is much more that an ad hoc group of citizen journalists will add to the cacophony.

An even better event might be the opening of the state legislative session in January.

Once we’ve pulled off a couple of citizen media camps then we can start looking for a permanent place to produce new media.

What I’d like to see in a half hour media news program, or even ten minute news program.

First, if the story is being reported on by any other major news outlet than we ignore it, for the most part. Fighting in Israel, earthquake in China, cyclone in Myanmar, are all stories we leave to others.

Second, focus on summarizing the international news for an American audience. What happened in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America today, each and every day. What are the big stories in India, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Philippines, Australia, etc.

Third, forget about scoops. Do the best with the resources we can get to. Rely on local coverage as much as possible to understand the situation.

Fourth, avoid the talking head roundtable. The News Hour is great but little television children die every time they cut away to another talking head roundtable of experts to explain what just happened.

Fifth, regular and consistent focus on science.

Sixth, no celebrity news. None, zip. Never.

I listened to your story about rising gas prices this afternoon and was disappointed by your coverage. It was filled with cliches and lack of creativity.

I have heard man-at-the-pump interviews for the past 6 months. It is time for journalists to come up with a new way of covering this story. Could you not interview an economist or some other expert? Hell, I’d even listen to a public relations person from an oil company if I could be guaranteed that I would not have to hear another man-at-the-pump interview.

This is lazy reporting. It fails to explain the issue it reports on, fails to give the public any additional information, and fails to delve into the very real economic issues that face America. To continue from this story to a report on the week in politics is the laziest form of reporting.

What I need to hear about is why gas prices are so high? Why has it taken so long for auto makers to produce efficient cars? Why has the government failed to invest in alternative energy, especially in comparison to the billions spent on war? So many question could be asked, but instead your correspondent and editors chose the easy way out.

I know journalism is hard. Time is short and deadlines are looming. But please take some time to plan out an investigation of the deeper issues that are causing Americans pain. Don’t tell us about the rise in gas prices every day or every week. Take a month to do a real in-depth story and then broadcast that story over days or weeks. And repeat the in-depth reporting if you have to. Just don’t be lazy.

I left off my NCMR coverage after yesterdays midday report. Saturday afternoon started off with my late entry to a history session looking back at some of the big media reform successes of the past.

Randall Pinkston talked about his rise to become the first black weekday anchor in the South during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They showed part of a documentary about the WLBT struggle, a lengthy effort to get the station’s license revoked by proving racial bias.

Nicholas Johnson, a FCC commissioner during the early 1970s, described his personal efforts to eliminate racial discrimination. He and George Stoney were pioneers in public access television.

Joe Bagent, Breaking the Beer Barrier

The author of Deer Hunting With Jesus stopped by to present an essay on Breaking the Beer Barrier.

Bagent’s key point in the book and his talk is the need for progressives to reach out to the working class, a group of people that have been getting the short end of the political stick for the past 40 years. In particular, poor white people have become Republicans by default because the leaders of the progressive movement either ignore them or talk down to them.

I liked his characterization of the working class as people who are unable to decide when, where, or how to work. They can’t decide when to take a vacation or go on break without getting permission. According to Bagent the working class includes 90 million Americans. The middle class, by contrast, is only 20% of workers.

Bagent’s presentation was witty and fun to watch. He’s getting to be an old man now and isn’t “trying to impress anyone to get laid.” So he speaks his mind, admits to being a commie and moves on.

Listening to him talk made me think about my personal class history. I’m only three generations away from immigrant great-grandparents. My grandfathers worked as a butcher and a fork lift driver. One owned a home and the other rented for most of his life, including a mobile home.

Some other points made by Bagent: why can’t beer and sports be part of a progressive political aesthetic, people in Belize will get together to watch sport championships so there’s no reason for anyone to look down on sports. His most subversive question to ask a poor white person: why are your kids teeth so bad?

Everyone has learned to become helpless. He once asked an audience of college students to stand up and then sit down when they had thought of something they could do after his talk to help another person. Many of them stood dumbly for a minute without thinking of anything. They’d rather listen to some “dumb redneck who has written a cheap book.”

Practical Tips for Building Effective Community Organizations

Michael Jacoby Brown led us through a couple of exercises and a short presentation on common issues faced by community organizations. How do you attract people, how do you stay motivated or deal with difficult personalities? His main message was that you need to talk one-on-one with the people you want to attract. Media messages won’t do it, they won’t get you committed people. The personal is key.

For me this is a difficult message. I’d rather focus on the technology and the media but it doesn’t finish the job. Finally he said that people will never join or donate if you don’t ask. And that may be the hardest part.

I think we are too easily seduced and brainwashed by the propaganda of self-reliance in America. For some this means thinking that they are in the top 20% of the income distribution when reality is much different. For others this means looking up information online before asking your neighbor for help.

Closing Keynote

The closers were a bunch of heavy hitters: Jonathan Adelstein, Louise Erdrich, Amy Goodman, and Van Jones.

I was especially impressed with Amy Goodman. Her story about being a reporter in East Timor and witnessing the massacre of 300 villagers was impressive. Sometimes the duty to report the truth really is a matter of life and death. So much so that you have to bury a newspaper in the back yard in order to keep yourself from being kidnapped by the security police. We need to go to where the silence is. Then we can return and tell it on the mountaintop.

Here are a few blog entries I found through Google Blog Search and Technorati.

Girlmedia Maven on Bill Moyers and the missing female voices and the power of collaboration.

Harold making fun of Bill O’Reilly at WetMachine.

Funferal on the keynote and grassroots organizing.

BitchPhD on copyright and fair use

LocalMN with some in-depth panel coverage.

PF Hyper covering Minneapolist WiFi and the opening

Listics with some short comments.

Uppity Wisconsin also has some interesting notes and praise for Bill Moyers.

Up early this morning to get into town in time for the 8a.m. plenary talk by Bill Moyers. Moyers has spoken at all four NCMRs to date, hosts a rocking show on PBS and spoke eloquently today about the abdication of responsibility by the dominant media over the last 8 years plus. Some great quotes: “the 4th estate has become a 5th column against democracy”; “capitalism breeds destruction unless tempered by an intuition of equality.” See this twitter update by kaeti - I totally agree.

Panel 1 - Precious Places, Public Platforms: Strategic Uses of Community Technology

This panel was filled with long-term activists, most of whom have been working in public access television for many years. Technologically it feels like a bit of throwback but as one person concluded - Web2.0 may be an answer to a lot of problems but we can’t forget to ask what is the question we are trying to answer. For the people in this room it was all about getting the stories of people out to the masses.

Louis Massiah started off by describing his work with the Scribe video center in Philadelphia and their project “Precious Places.” They have spent the last 4 years working with local filmmakers, scholars, and community members to create over 40 documentaries about neighborhoods in Philadelphia. He shared with us a portion of the prototype documentary about Francisville which was a really profoundly moving story of 1960s gang members being transformed into community activists. My favorite quote - “You could buy denim here [on main street] that would stay blue for 6 months.”

Peggy Berryhill of the Native Public Media provided another great quote “our lives are so labeled [1st generation urban Indian]…our lives are filled with anthropologists.” She reiterated the need for pride of place and community. Her group is working with 30+ native radio stations across the United States to build an infrastructure for Native American radio.

Lauren-Glenn Davitian from Vermont CCTV talked about the success that Vermont has had with public access television. There are 43 access channels in a state with only 600,000 people. Burlington, VT is building its own fiber optic network because the existing infrastructure monopolies, cable and telephone, can’t be trusted to protect the public interest or provide access to the public airwaves. We were lucky to get as much public access TV as we did in the 1970s and 1980s because cable companies are becoming much more stingy over time.

A bunch of cool community project were mentioned during the Q&A. KTNN, native american radio in Arizon, Thurston television center in Washington state, WOJB radio in Wisconsin, People TV from Atlanta, Deep Dish Network Waves of Change.

Panel 2 - Privacy in the Age of AT&T, Google, and the NSA

I thought this panel was going to focus on violations of information privacy by private companies but it ended up being more of a cross between private and governmental invasions of privacy. The central topic was the NSA wiretapping scandal and the complicity of telecom companies.

Lillie Coney from EPIC started out by describing some of the long history of surveillance cooperation between government and private industry, from communication intercepts during the Civil War, to Western Unions intercepting telegrams during WW2 and the Cold War, to the present day. It starts with a declaration of war and a climate of fear that ends up with a general walking into a CEOs office and demanding access to data “for the national interest.”

Tim Jones from EFF talked about their work on the NSA story and the facts they uncovered: domestic surveillance happened, it was a dragnet not a targeted search, and there were 15-20 telecom centers throughout the US that were turned into NSA branch offices. The FISA law was created to protect us because we’ve been down the surveillance road before - COINTELPRO, Church Committee, Project Shamrock at the NSA, Project Chaos at the CIA.

Marcy from Firedoglake described their research efforts surrounding the NSA wiretapping and the three prong strategy of research, education, and mobilization that led to some of the successes we’ve had to date preventing telecom immunity from passing.

Tim Sparapani from the ACLU brought the discussion back to what I thought it would be from the beginning by talking about the commercial data brokers who are creating a privatized dossier system by harvesting public and commercial data. I especially liked the strange loop that occurs as large data aggregators buy public information, like birth and death records, combine it private information about purchasing patterns and internet histories, and then sell that information back to public law enforcement at the state and federal levels. So we pay our taxes to collect this information twice, once as a public good and then again as a private aggregation. It’s another form of data enclosure. It has led to the creation of quasigovernmental companies who get the lucrative federal communications contracts and then give up private data when asked.

Bob Edgar from Common Cause sprinkled a bunch of quotations into his moderation but this one by Martin Luther King, Jr. was my favorite. He used part of this but the whole was too beautiful for me to pass up. The complete speech is here.

Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

I think all of this needs to go into an Openness Manifesto of some kind. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing open courseware, open education, open access, open source, open data, open Congress, open information, public access and more.

I went down to the Minneapolis Convention Center for day 1 of the National Conference on Media reform this afternoon. I skipped the Larry Lessig morning plenary and arrived at about 1 p.m. I wandered through the displays in the ballroom, ate half an over-priced burrito and then headed for the first afternoon panel session.

Panel 1 - Free Speech in the 21st Century

Josh Wolf kicked things off with his account of being imprisoned for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in 2006. Naturally he concluded his talk with a call to support a federal shield law protecting people who do journalism, not just people who are employed as journalists.

C. Edwin Baker made some short comments about First Amendment legal theory. The First Amendment only protects us from government interference with speech. If a corporation seeks to curtail free speech then you’re legally out of luck. Corporations also argue that the first amendment protects them from coercive legislation that might regulate their right to merge, etc. There are two clauses in the First Amendment: one protecting individual speech, the other protecting the institutions of the press.

Caroline Fredrickson spoke about the ACLU free speech campaigns. I was intrigued by the case of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act that is being promoted by Joe Lieberman. The bill attempts to prevent radical Muslim extremists from spreading their message in America. YouTube was asked to remove some videos as a result of this effort. Videos that violated the community terms of service were removed but others were not.

I was tempted to ask about the intersection/overlap between free speech and website terms of service. What is the case law on this issue? How easily can a website remove content that it deems inappropriate? Would this ever become a first amendment issue? If there are any constitutional lawyers who read this please feel free to leave a comment.

Panel 2 - Legislation 2.0: Self-Governance and Policy on the Open Internet

This panel was even better. Right in my personal bailiwick: open-government and all other open knowledge endeavors.

Micha Sifry kicked things off with a short movie showing a nifty use of Google Earth to display congressional earmarks for the defense industry. This was just the beginning of the cool stuff the Sunlight Foundation is doing.

Andre Banks began by describing his project Color of Change which was formed after Katrina to improve the presence of the progressive black population in government. He described the case of the Jena 6 as the perfect storm for online activism. From there Color of Change has made great strides to intervene in the criminal justice system on behalf of the black population.

Matt Stoller went next and talked about a blogging project that took place a year or two ago. Senator Dick Durbin agreed to participate in an online forum around a bill under consideration in Congress. I forget the topic of the bill but the upshot was that new internet tools could penetrate the conversation in Washington D.C. with enough work and persistence.

Russell Newman, a former staffer for Senator Durbin, recounted his experience with the public conversation about the bill from inside the sausage factory. He concluded by emphasizing the banality of policy making: it really is all about access, and a common sense evaluation of legitimacy.

Micha Sifry mentioned a few other projects of interest including qik for streaming video from a cell phone and Open Congress for tracking bills before Congress.

In the Q&A I asked about the sustainability of a project like Open Congress and the transfer of tools like it to the local level. The software that runs Open Congress is open source so it’s available for people to setup on a state or local level. I smell yet another potential project. Long-term sustainability is still up in the air.

One of the most interesting questions from the audience was about dividing resources between old and new institutions. Sifry responded that he would give most of the funding to new institutions. Liberals need to be more adventurous and stop giving to institutions because of sentimentality or past achievements. Others on the panel disagreed and discussion ensued.

One-on-one brainstorming

Instead of going to the Minnesota caucus I met with James O. in an ad-hoc session to discuss his ideas about communicating liberal ideas to the mainstream. He was full of very interesting proposals and thoughts, ranging from recasting the Superman story, creating a new form of found political poetry based on haiku, starting a new political party, and forming a new 24/7 news channel. It was a fun and interesting conversation. I showed him a couple of social software tools like delicious and Twitter. I wish him the best of luck.

Two ideas I really liked were doing a children’s book based on Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. I replied that it would be great to make it into a stop motion animated video. I encouraged James to think more about cultural peer production as a method to get his ideas into the world. Perhaps we will work on it together.

I made the mistake of watching Hell’s Kitchen last night and the image and sound of Gordon Ramsey swearing for half-an-hour is now etched in my mind. It’s amazing they can put that amount of blasphemy on the air. Of course they bleep it out but that doesn’t fool anyone, not even children.

What made me remember the experience, aside from having a strange Ramsey-like figure haunting my dreams last night, was the shamelessness of the affective appeals to the audience. The whole show is one long exercise in schadenfreude.

We watch just to see the next person start to cry or completely lose track of the orders coming into the kitchen. These people are chumps I thought to myself. Of course I was an even bigger chump to keep watching. But the disaster was just too big to avoid. I was like a deer in the headlights waiting for the car to crash into me.

I’ve never been a fan of reality television for precisely these reasons. Reality television is all affective-crack, all the time. It doesn’t end.

A few weeks ago I was making dinner while my mom watched Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in the other room. They blew up a house. But first they had the build up, a fridge, a couch, some other miscellaneous items. Then came the house. When the editors saw the footage they must have felt like porn producers who had captured the money shot of the decade. The host screamed at the same time as the house blew up on camera. And they showed it over and over. They must have cut the explosion down to three seconds and repeated it over a dozen times.

Normal dramatic television is different in degree but not in kind. Even news television relies on the same formula of repetition.

I thought McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cold media might help to explain this difference. But I always get the two confused. Watching Hell’s Kitchen felt like a hot experience. According to McLuhan a hot medium is exclusive and highly defined, like radio. A cool medium is participatory and low definition, like television. The only way this fits is if you view emotional appeals as a form of participation and I’m not sure I do.