This is very embarrassing. I'm about to write something of a defence of 'citizen journalism'.
It's embarrassing not least because 'citizen journalism' is a stupid coinage for a concept that has been kneaded and pummelled in so many directions that it is approximately meaningless. But it's even more embarrassing because I'm arguing against someone who is trying to champion a lost cause — what Chris Scanlon rails against will happen anyway; the cold water he attempts to pour upon it is like a raindrop falling upon the fourth ring of Hell.
But I'm an obstinate prick, and this is an opportunity to set out some ideas I hold dear. In today's Age, Scanlon has written an article called 'DIY journalism is not a real alternative'.
Like one who has learned his VCE English well, he begins with a dictionary definition:
"Citizen journalism" is a broad, loose term that encompasses everything from sending a photo or video to an established news organisation or posting comments on an online forum, to writing a blog or editing or writing for a collaborative online publishing venture.
This is not a bad definition — for a columnist in a wide-circulation newspaper. It's the very definition being promulgated by the press, because it works in their favour. Fairfax, in particular, has been big on the idea that if you send them your happy phone-snaps of the Burnley tunnel disaster, or the Moomba parade, or snowfalls in June, congratulations, you're a citizen journalist. Fairfax actually thinks its own blogs are citizen journalism too — the syrupy irony of chief Fairfax blogger James Farmer (who writes cute little rants against Connex) calling his blog 'Citizen' appears lost on them.
What this and most definitions of the concept egregiously labelled 'citizen journalism' get wrong is the emphasis: it's on the source. The source is important, and a journalist/columnist will always think it's pre-eminent, but there's actually a higher power when it comes to 21st century media in society: the consumer. Hang on, let's get another Scanlon quote, one that gets to the heart of his argument:
For example, when federal Communications Minister Helen Coonan needed to defend the Government's changes to the cross-media ownership laws, she reached for the hype surrounding citizen journalism. In a speech to the Millennium Forum in Sydney in October last year, Coonan claimed: "While traditional media are constantly on the lookout for new media to invest in — think Rupert Murdoch and MySpace or PBL in Australia with ninemsn and Channel Seven and Yahoo!'s recent partnering, the rise of citizen journalism is challenging even these evolved business models."
This is interesting, because we find ourselves wedged. Coonan is the strategist/figurehead in the war against traditional media diversity in Australia. Scanlon pits this putsch against Coonan's apparent advocation of citizen journalism.
I'm pretty sure that Coonan's understanding of this phenomenon is even more diaphanous than Scanlon's. But the typical argument against the blandification of Australia's mainstream media is that the consumer is left without a smorgasbord of viewpoints — that Rupert Murdoch (who hardly cares) or James Packer (who really doesn't give a shit) and their vassals (who we can assume do) will dictate what the good people of Australia think about taxes or land rights or industrial relations or Glenn McGrath's legacy or turkey slaps on Big Brother.
Assuming nobody but loonies have ever seriously read Green Left Weekly, it's arguable that an overflowing buffet ever existed before in the lucky country. Recently a sizeable chunk of Age journalists defected to the Hun — who noticed? Even Andrew Bolt, that dimply scourge of the hand-wringing left, began his career at The Age.
But if the smorgasbord wasn't being served up before, it is now. If there is an active issue that I care about, I read The Age and I read the Herald-Sun. Then, because I consider myself a humanist and often find myself slightly left-of-centre in political arguments, I read Larvatus Prodeo. I check in on Mr Spleen for a second, if usually somewhat rabid, opinion. Arguably the most reviled journalist [ie, in this sense, not-columnist] in Australia, Christian Kerr, writes deliciously polemical articles at Crikey — I agree with hardly anything he says, but his opinions are an important part of my media consumption. Oz Politics, with its wealth of polls analysis and reasonable balance of commentators, lets me drill down and make comparisons.
And if I need to know more about American politics, I favour Google News and The New York Times as a first port of call, but for deep analysis I move on to Daily Kos to get blue views and Real Clear Politics for red. I also quite enjoy Wonkette for DC news.
As I've said, citizen journalism is a stupid term, and a better one, albeit more pretentious, is 'media triangulation'. By indulging in a variety of sources, we can more easily locate our own opinions. Traditional journalism places a great deal of emphasis on objectivity. This journalistic objectivity is generally interpreted as meaning 'both sides of the story'. In reality though, stories are usually lop-sided. To take a contemporaneous example, the mainstream Australian media has made a great fuss over big business' response to the ALP's proposed industrial relations reforms. But in the sphere of opinionation, most commentators have noted that it is something of a beat-up — business will always co-operate with the government of the day (because there's no margin in protestation), and there are few votes in appeasing BHP anyway — where are they gonna go?
Scanlon thinks that he can debunk these two new 'attacks' upon traditional media in one: by saying that Coonan's reforms are reliant on the rise of citizen journalism. The problem is, they're worlds apart. Yes, the assault on mainstream media diversity needs to be debated. But you can't do it by denying the potency of online media dissemination. If Coonan has genuinely attempted that diversion, Scanlon has totally fallen for it.
By aggregating opinions, by compiling subjective analyses, the opportunity for an enlightened understanding of the zeitgeist is greater now than ever before. That Crikey and Wonkette are privately owned, or that DailyKos and RCP are dripping-sleeve partisans, is beside the point. That a lot of valuable opinion is served up via Blogger, and therefore hosted by Google, is also irrelevant. Do you think any Google employee has ever read Ms Fits? If they had, and if they somehow took umbrage, would it matter? If she were uprooted, there are any number of places she could easily plant herself again. And if she were silenced, there's a hundred others (arguably not as humourous) we could read in her stead.
This is the brave new unstoppable world. If you care about an issue, you can feast on a hundred different views. You can consume as narrowly or as widely as you like. These sources are infiltrating the lives of everyday folk. At the moment you are at the forefront, but it will increasingly and inevitably become the norm. Every single Google/Yahoo/Live search brings it nearer. And it's a good thing. Embrace your agency. Happily ignore — or don't — Mr Scanlon. It's up to you.
Joseph | 7 May 2007 | 5 comments
I'll admit that when, two-and-a-bit years ago, I annotated the Poignant Guide with this:
how not to write a technical manual (please get to the point!)
... I didn't really 'get' why the lucky stiff.
And though I've been a regular reader of his Redhanded ever since, and though I've dabbled in a little hoodwink.ing, and though I've sat through such, well, mindfucks as Everyone Is Here In The Future and quite enjoyed the antics, and though I have myself sprouted similar (though less skillful and perplexing) philosophies, still I've never quite understood his motivation. I mean, he's kinda weird.
However, today he directed us to hackety.org, which supplants Redhanded and operates as something of a mouthpiece for his noble new project, Hackety-Hack.
On the about page he explains it:
I’m not so interested in acronyms and technobuzz. I’m more into how hacking weaves into life.
Think of how often ordinary people type
http://into a browser! That’s hacking, friends. It’s an obscure code that has found its way into the mainstream. Can’t you see the tremors of the infectious hacking spirits, breaking their way into everything??Anyway, along these lines: I try to abide the Hackety Manifesto.
Yeah, I think I get it now.
Joseph | 4 May 2007 | 0 comments
There's a lot I would like to say about Microsoft Silverlight, and I've had several weeks of having a lot to say in intra-office fulminating against Adobe Apollo, but it has already been said, and more efficiently. Still, I want to add my voice to the choir.
Proprietary software never really went away. But for something like the last two or three years, I haven't felt obliged to use it — and that has made computing, which I do most of the day, most of the year, a much less anxious activity. I don't mind proprietary software, I just try to avoid it.
Proprietary software development platforms are another matter entirely, and proprietary web runtimes are the worst of them. The desktop has largely been forsaken to proprietary platforms since their inception (due to the monolithic nature of operating system production), but the web has resisted them with remarkable durability. Flash might have gathered a large install base, but for making serious stuff, it hasn't really crossed over into mainstream respectability.
Until now, it seems. Following the mostly successful Web Standards backlash against the the legacy of the Browser Wars, we're starting to lean back on our laurels and wonder, just wonder, if proprietary ain't so bad. People as obviously clever as Dan Webb are putting down the healthy pint of beer (as in 'free as in beer'*), and drinking the Kool-Aid.
It's understandable — the web is built of constraints, and constraints by definition make it harder to express your creativity. But this is important: we have to call bullshit on the latest 'solutions'. These little magic boxes being hawked by the big end of town might seem attractive to you, the web professional, because they promise a cornucopia of super-slick animated transitions, or drag and drop, or offline sync, or whatever is currently not floating the boat you're developing.
But they are built to lock in some users (you being their primary target), and worse, to lock out others — like those brave pioneers out on the free software frontiers of Linux, BSD & etc. And what of accessibility? And what, without wanting to get too melodramatic, of the developing world? Big corporations who build stuff to make a buck have a habit of ignoring those without any. That's their choice, but is it yours? Will the hundred dollar laptop run Apollo and Silverlight?
'But Mister Pearson, are you saying I can't use Rich Internet Application frameworks because of the starving kids in Africa?' Well, that would be silly, and if you're asking that you've misinterpreted my argument. The Web, in its disarming technological simplicity, is a mostly level-playing field for participants — barriers to entry are assessed and adjusted down where possible. Platforms built on principles of exclusivity and opacity, principles of 'this is the majority slice of the market!' and 'we have to protect our IP!', invariably turn out to be bad for everyone. Why aren't you developing or using ActiveX anymore?
If there are tools missing from our toolbox, we should start preparing standards and joining open-source teams to build them. We should follow something closer to the Rails model of technology advances (open-source, but extracted from large-scale deployed applications, with heavy emphasis on pragmatism) rather than trying to be all things to all people. The mantra is not 'what we have now is good enough', though there are still many possibilities arising from enlightened JavaScript development that are unexplored, but that 'if we need it, we will build and distribute it freely.'
And for the record, "Cross-platform: Windows and Mac" is the web equivalent of "Oh, we got both kinds of music. We got country and western."
* Excuse my somewhat ham-fisted attempt at EFF-nerd humour.
Joseph | 3 May 2007 | 1 comment
Last Saturday began somewhat deflatedly, what with Kel and I recovering from our decadal (aluminium?) anniversary — where, between cocktails at Cavallero, whole bottles of wine to accompany kim-chi pancakes at Goshen, and a significant number of beers at the Tote, we had got somewhat schickered. And when I overdo it, I'm usually depressed as a bastard by the light of morning. It didn't help that a day of shopping chores loomed.
But despite this handicap, and despite several consumerist wild goose chases before noon, I achieved two things I'd never done before: I bought a refrigerator, and I got to ride in a big-ass tow truck when Kelly's ute broke down carrying it home.
I know that little red Datsun 1200 is much admired, so I can assure you it's back on the road, albeit with a disconcerting rattle in first gear.
Joseph | 30 Apr 2007 | 0 comments
A good idea, which is to say, an idea that makes your daily activities easier / better / more intelligible, usually finds its twelve apostles. These evangelists, not satisfied with having been improved by that good idea, perceive some sense of duty in promulgating the idea to others, so that more lives may be enriched in the manner of their own. So runs the argument from altruism.
In my workaday labours as a software inventor at Inventive Labs, one such good idea is Ruby, which is a programming language. I have been a professional programmer both without and with Ruby, and I inordinately prefer the latter.
An aside: this isn't a post about a programming language. Even if you are not a programmer, stick around. None of us, least of all me, knows where this is going – but at least you can see how long the scrollbar is.
Ruby, as anyone in this field will surely tell you, has its fair share of evangelists. I can't give you an exact number, but it is probably somewhere between twelve and 27,900. I don't think all of them are altruists. Many preach Ruby from their bloggerly pulpits because they find relief in the sensation of being participants; because if they are doing it, they'd rather not do it alone. Actually I wonder if it's a species of benign schadenfreude, that would be real schadenfreude if not for their belief that the good idea was, in fact, good. It's kind of hard to explain. This link may be relevant.
People attempt to convert other people to ideas they believe 'good' not so much for a private beatitude, or to receive gratitude, as for intellectual creature comfort. It's not unreasonable to extend an evolutionary argument from this. There is also a matter of pride, and obviously 'being among the first' becomes statistically more assertable as the corpus of converts grows larger.
It is within this context that I would like to affix the much-observed and somewhat sudden phenomenon of atheist literature. There's a useful summary of it here. A loose band of heretics, often scientists railing against intelligent design, but sometimes politicos hoping to wet-blanket the so-called clash of civilisations, are arguing against the existence of any knowable higher power. I must admit that I am curious to read them. But peevishly I haven't; their enterprise bothers me. It seems like they want to convert the religiousi.
I have been an atheist since shortly after I realised I was not the Second Coming. Laugh, because that's amusing and only mildly true. Actually, though I descend from a line of devout Catholics, disbelief is something that came relatively easily to me. The agonism of atheism largely befell my parents' generation, and though I bear some grievances against the Baby Boomers, I have to respect them for this. The worst my atheism has had to endure is this perpetual recidivism into superstition; the challenge not to hope for something beyond, not to believe in something inexplicable that explains a lot of things, to reject a prophesied good that subsumes the weighty problems of my everyday. I strongly believe it is important too, as one of those lucky enough not to have suffered any great injustice, that I do not blow up these little things that get me down, that – and this really is the crux of it – that I choose to operate in a certain, certainly problematic this world rather than an uncertain, retributive promise of the next.
In short, atheism is, for me, a good idea. By forsaking any next world, my agency in this world is greater. I act now, because even less than oblivion confronts me. I will be good, at least as good as I can be, because to be good makes me feel like a better person, and that somewhat assuages my existential doubts. Only I determine what is good, ultimately, and it doesn't trouble me that the only real measure of my life will accompany me to my grave. A generous obit wouldn't go astray, don't get me wrong. But in fact, another aspect of my atheism that I am still learning is that it needn't be morbid.
There's a lot more I could say about my belieflessness, and if you buy me a beer I will, but other than to strongly deny that my life is meaningless, I won't go any further right now. And this is the point: I'm not trying to convert you. If you believe in one or many deities, I am fascinated by you and would love to compare notes. I don't scorn you, you are my equal, and what's more, strange to me. Perhaps there's something you know, or suspect, that I don't. Understand that I'm going to argue with you vigourously, but if you're converted, I'll be immensely disappointed.
Here is where the good idea gets skewed; the evangelists deny this position. They seem to try to prevent our conversation, for their own craven desire to be not alone. Ah, may they rot in hell.
Joseph | 23 Apr 2007 | 10 comments
Me (via text message): Any last minute tips on l'election for me?
Vincent: I have gone into my delphic trance and the only thing I can tell you is that according to le monde 3.3 million new voters have registered since 2002 (making the total 44.5 million, a peu pres). That's the young and ethnic minorities, and more than half of those registrations were made in the last quarter of '06, around the time most candidates were announced. Il semble qu'ils veulent prendre les choses en main.
Some things you should know about this:
a) Vincent is very often on the money.
b) But I didn't say I would be broadcasting his reply, so don't hold him to anything.
c) That is a ridiculously long text message.
(Postscript: Me: A-ha! Thanks. Il sera interessant s'ils font cela! ... croissant.
Vincent: Tres bien dit, mon vieux!
Can someone please translate? I don't speak French, Babelfish is spouting nonsense - have I committed a faux pas?)
Joseph | 22 Apr 2007
Dear ,
Many thanks for inviting me to your soirée with the hilarious theme of . It sure sounds like an interesting challenge. Unfortunately, I'm unable to attend, as I am old and curmudgeonly.
- Joseph
Joseph | 20 Apr 2007 | 0 comments
To an amateur psephologist, like for instance me, aught-seven is an interesting year. As we speak there's a democratic disturbance in the world's newest republic. From this distance, and with the level of ignorance I have in Timorese history, it's a lesson in how difficult it is to establish a democracy, even when the people are willing. Next week there is the muddied water of Sarko v Sego, a much-anticipated clash you'd be a brave one to call. Numerous upstarts threaten to steal the thunder of one or the other.
Against all this is the pop and crackle of next year's US presidential primaries, sounding much louder this time than in aught-three, not least because there's twice as many of them. I'm on firmer ground in my knowledge of these running battles than East Timor or France, but the pace of change and paucity of empirical data here still leaves me dizzy. I wonder whether by early next year McCain will even be in the running -- his latest misadventures in an Iraqi marketplace reinforcing the impression that this septagenarian has lost his bead on sound political judgement. Plus he's a creationist homophobe all of a sudden. On the blue side it's all about Hilary and Obama, or so it seems from 16696km away. However, don't discount John Edwards' ability to split the middle. People will start to whisper that he could carry the South. I suspect it won't be Hilary v Obama by next March.
But what I'm following closest is this year's Australian federal election, presumably to be held in October. It's eleven years since Howard and his cohorts came to power. In that time, and especially since the start of his second term, his government has piled ignominies upon those of us who want this nation to be an independent citizen of the world, a real middle power, not just respecting basic principles of human rights, but upholding and proselytising them. Now, for the first time, there seems to be a mood in the bunker to be rid of him. Or is it the first time? In April 2001, Bomber Beazley was a shoo-in. And do we really want to dethrone him? Well I do, but across the 20 million of us there may be a different story. This graph tells a tale:
Chart courtesy of OzPolitics.
If — and this 'if' is statistically improbable — that green line has its head above water in September, then we can contemplate donning the red shoes and singing ding dong, the witch is dead.
But even then a thought troubles me: if somehow we are celebrating the demise of the Wicked Witch of Bennelong in October, how many months further down the yellow brick road will we be pulling aside Rudd's curtain, to discover a man who can give this cowardly lion of a nation no heart?
Joseph | 12 Apr 2007 | 0 comments
I'm good thanks. You might've heard I'm living by myself now, in a loft above my office in the dusty heart of Collingwood, where I feel oddly at home for an Essendon supporter. My goldfish are in the kitchen and I have a pair of quail out back, pecking at a creaky chicken-wire aviary I built one Saturday afternoon.
Life and I are actually in furious agreement these days. It's almost embarrassing. I want of nothing so much as a little more time.
So I don't think of you that often, and when I do I wonder why. I must admit I don't read books like I used to. I hardly ever write at all. Perhaps it's true that my life was once richer, that these greys would have once seemed black or white. But certainly it was a greater torture, those valleys were abysmal and there seemed to be a lot more rain back then. I can't imagine my old bones are up for that again.
I went for a walk the other day, a bursting blue-green day, when I accidentally found a waterfall. In my own suburb, in dirty urban Collingwood. Actually it's a man-made and quite well-known waterfall. Still, new to me and I was impressed. A week or two later a body in a bag was found at that waterfall, but this is Collingwood after all.
I didn't do it, for the record.
I have become addicted to sport, no matter the kind. I discovered peer-to-peer television recently, and followed the Women's Curling World Championships in March quite fervently. My money was on Canada, who were basically unstoppable, but I was quietly rooting for Denmark. It occurs to me that sport, or more specifically spectating, is an early-onset indicator of boredom. Furthermore I suspect some correlation between my reduced interest in literature and this new compulsion for observing human competition. I think I want more stories without plots, more narratives whose endings I cannot guess. A little less predetermination, a little more happy entropy.
Ah but look at this: I've gone on too long. I promised myself that if I spoke to you again I would be the soul of brevity.
Yeah, I'm good thanks. How the hell are you?
Joseph | 8 Apr 2007 | 1 comment
Topographic view
The qualifier
Two weeks with the apple and the lone star (illustrated).