Media
Media
…to wound the autumnal city
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/05/2008 - 09:38Thursday night, channeling Hiroaki Protagonist and perhaps a touch of Edward Murrow, I sat on my couch watching events unfold in St. Paul at the Republican National Convention.
Murrow started off in the old established media of the age, providing radio broadcasts from Europe during World War II. Yet many people remember him for his work in the new media, television, leading to the censure of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
So, like Hiro Protagonist, broke, but connected, I watched the old media, television this time. I’ve been television recording footage of the National Conventions for Remix America. Remix America provides the opportunity for participants to share footage, both old media television, as well as online videos from the new media, and mix them together to create an interesting and informative montage of country seen through various aspects of our media ecology. On the TV, and being recorded onto my hard disk, was Cindy Lou McCain , looking like the perfectly airbrushed Stepford wife talking about her life, a snapshot out of 1950s America.
At the same time, I was jacked into the new media. Across my screen Tweets from Twitter flickered. They provided information on the protests outside of the convention center, and links to live video of friends of mine citizen journalists, videographers, members of the new media, whatever you want to call it, as they tried to track the demonstrations and police response.
There were images of rows and rows of riot police, with their helmets, shields and batons, all looking the same, as if they were computer generated graphics of Star Wars Storm Troopers wearing black, or perhaps an outtake from the Matrix. There were reports of tear gas canisters exploding and protestors being rounded up. Friends huddled in their car as they gathered footage and tried to find a way to safety.
It was surreal; Cindy Lou, smiling inside the convention center and Chuckumentary being told by police to get out of the car and F**kin run. Images of Dhalgren came to mind.
This morning, I sit in my office in far away Woodbridge, Connecticut. It is sunny outside, but Weather.com shows a projected path of Tropical Storm headed towards the Carolinas for the weekend, with Hurricane Ike on a path to hit Florida in the middle of next week. Pandora.com has been playing a medley of Paul Simon tunes. ‘Mrs. Robinson’ fades into ‘American Tune’.
The old media makes no mention of the protests and the arrest of journalists, and it almost seems like a bad dream induced by reading too much science fiction, yet the footage remains.
Growing up, I learned that when you stage a coup, the first thing you do, is seize control of the media outlets. The corporate media has been consolidating, yet is it enough? People have commented that in 1960, Kennedy defeated Nixon through a better use of the emerging media, television, instead of relying on the fading old media of radio. Will the same happen this time with the Internet and television?
So, I write my blog post and head off “… to wound the autumnal city”.
Thinking about Citizen’s Journalism
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/17/2008 - 14:28Yesterday, Kim was out registering voters at the Milford Oyster festival. I stopped by and ran into Tessa Marquis and had an interesting talk about citizen journalism and I’d like to illustrate a few different points of this from recent events.
First, I’m no expert on journalism, so if what I’m suggesting doesn’t make sense, I apologize. However, it seems to me that there are three key aspects to any journalism endeavor. First, there is the gathering of information. Then, there is the ‘sense making’, finding a story line or narrative that is compelling, and then there is the distribution.
This gets to a key problem that live bloggers run into. Too often they are trying to gather information and make sense of what is going on all at the same time. This can draw them out of the moment, and they can miss important information.
So, when I am live blogging, or doing various forms of mobile social media, I try to simply gather information and get it distributed as quickly as possible. Then, when I get back home from an event, I can try to make sense, and write up a longer, more narratively interesting entry. What is nice about this approach is also the collaborative aspect. If people see my comments, photographs or listen to my audio posts, they can grab and do their own sense making out of it, even if the sense they make ends up much different than the sense I eventually make out of it.
My blog post yesterday is a good example of that. Local Politics is a picture that I took with my cellphone, which I added a small amount of text to and sent on to Flickr, which in turn posted it to my blog. Later, Mike Brown posted additional information about the candidates to help with the sense making process. When and if I get time, I hope to write up a more detailed post about the Oyster Festival, but the way things are piling up, that just may not happen.
So, if we break apart the information gathering part of the journalistic process from the sense making part, we may find that we want to apply the distribution to both the information gathering part of the process in addition to the sense making part.
As I have been working to get bloggers, delegates, and others going to Denver to submit their information via cellphones to sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and so on, I’ve also been working on the distribution channels of this raw information. The DemConvention Room on FriendFeed is set up to pull in information from many such sources so people can look at a fairly raw, unedited feed, and then decide what they want to use for their own sense making.
CSpan is getting into this game as well. They have just set up an account on Twitter and have additional plans in place for their website, which will include aggregating messages on Twitter flagged with the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags.
Here in Connecticut, Lon Seidman has set up http://ctgoestodenver.info/, a site that will have various content from the Connecticut Delegation in Denver.
As a final note, as I checked the DemConvention FriendFeed room, I saw a posting about one of the Denver bound bloggers who was in a serious accident.
Please do whatever you can to help the blogger and her family with the increased expenses this accident will add to their coverage of the convention.
Free Markets and Monocultures
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/17/2008 - 12:34(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)
Over the past few days, I’ve been getting into discussions with various conservatives comparing their concern about big government with liberals about their concern about big business. My primary concern is that centralized power, whether it be with big government or big businesses is not the best way of addressing the issues we face.
Some may note that these days the dividing line between big business and big government is becoming blurrier. Others may note that this discuss applies much more broadly and may talk about peer-to-peer networks as opposed to highly centralized networks. These are interesting topics worth exploring. However, today, I want to focus on the conservative response and what I think are some of the flaws.
The conservative response focuses on the free market, and their belief that free markets are the best ways of addressing problems. Some would argue that our markets are not really free, but that government policies particularly benefit big business. They would point to the vast sums that big business spends on lobbying. This argument has a lot of merit, but still, we need to dig deeper.
The free market enthusiasts all recognize the danger of monopolies. Monopolies prevent free markets from doing their magic. Yet they often look at monopolies in terms of whether there is a single corporation controlling the market, and over look the aspects of when several companies are virtually indistinguishable from one another and this group of similar companies controls the market.
This leads us to the key issue. Free markets are good at rewarding short-term profitability, short term profitability may not be the best way to address problems. If one company is very successful, other companies will imitate these companies and the largest companies end up being very similar, and we lose any sort of diversity. Personally, I don’t find a lot of difference between Burger King, Wendy’s or McDonald’s. I don’t see a lot of difference between Verizon and AT&T. I don’t see a lot of difference between ABC, NBC, and CBS. I don’t see a lot of difference between Borders and Barnes and Noble. I don’t see a lot of difference between Budweiser and Miller. I don’t see a lot of difference between Ford, GM and Dodge.
Essentially, free markets tend to create monocultures with minor differences between the brands. So, what is wrong with monocultures? Look at nineteenth century Ireland for the answer. Everyone was growing the same type of potatoes. It was the most profitable crop, at least in the short term, just as SUVs had been the most profitable vehicle in the United States for quite a while. However, when things changed, such as the potato blight in Ireland, or the steep increase in gasoline prices, the profitable crops and products rapidly became unprofitable and massive dislocations were created.
Those interested in longer term stability would do well to look beyond a simplistic view of free markets and think about how we can promote a better diversified economy.
Help Send Bloggers to Denver
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/15/2008 - 14:08I've been spending a lot of time talking with various bloggers going to Denver to cover the Democratic National Convention. It is expensive to get there, pay for food, housing, and whatever else. Many of the bloggers have set up 'ChipIn pages', so I've gathered several of these.
African American Political Pundit (AAPP)
There are also a few blogs that simply have PayPal links. These include:
Celtic Diva's Blue Oasis Paypal
Natchez Blog Paypal
Note: I'm told that Nachez has reached their fundraising goal, but I felt I should list them anyway.
I hope that you check out each of these blogs and then contribute what you can to help them get to Denver.
@noneck Deported
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/13/2008 - 18:49Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to get anyone going to Denver to start using mobile social media. I’ve spoken with delegates and bloggers about how to start using Twitter, how to send text, pictures and videos directly from their cellphones. We’ve talked on phones, IM, emails and podcasts. I’ve talked about the importance of getting the raw, unfiltered and unedited stories out there as quickly as possible.
Today, I came across a story that really ties it all together. Noel Hidalgo, Noneck on Twitter and numerous other sites was deported from China for live streaming a pro-Tibet rally. The story is rapidly spreading around Twitter and the blogs. Rahaf Harfoush has this exclusive interview with Noel. Laura Fitton highlights the story, and everyone is talking about it on Twitter.
Years ago, soon after I married my first wife, I dragged her to a polling place for some election in New York City. I went in and voted. When I came out, my wife went into vote, but the machine wasn’t working. She came out and explained the situation to the poll worker, who said that she had lost her vote by coming out of the booth the way she did.
This was soon after Ferdinand Marcos had been removed from power in the Philippines. I started arguing with the poll worker saying he could not disenfranchise my wife. I talked about people dying in the Philippines for the right to vote. A police officer came over, and then the moderator of the polling location. It was early in the day. Six people were listed as having voted. Yet the voting machine only showed five votes. It turned out that the poll worker had forgotten to press some button which would have enabled my wife to vote. The moderator addressed the situation and my wife received her chance to vote.
Yeah, there were differences between New York City and Manila. There will be differences between Beijing and Denver, but there are similarities. In the United States, we hold the right to vote and the freedom of the press as sacrosanct. Yet too often, we take it for granted. Yet one thing that is important about Sen. Obama’s campaign, is that it is reminding all of us about the importance of our vote, that our vote can make a difference.
Likewise, Noel’s experience in Beijing should be a reminder of the importance of a free press. I hope that everyone going to Denver will do their part to support a free press, especially by bringing their cellphones and posting from Denver as events happen.
