The internet saved our culture of writing, it has often been claimed. The image saturation caused by television had, in this narrative, reached dangerous levels by the mid 1990s. Enter the commercial internet with email and the web. At the latest with web 2.0, everyone is writing all the time. Hurrah!
People like David McCandless bring a fresh approach to question this now received wisdom. By visualising data instead of just referring to them in text, modern infographics can be more enlightening than acres of text, not less:
I’ve spent the last year exploring the potential of information visualisation for my website and a book. I’ve taken loads of information and made it into simple, colourful and, hopefully, beautiful “visualisations” – bubble charts, concept maps, blueprints and diagrams – all with the minimum of text. I don’t just mean data and statistics. I love doing this with all kinds of information – ideas, issues, stories – and for all subjects from pop to philosophy to politics. Personally, I find visualisations great for helping me understand the world and for sifting the huge amounts of information that deluge me every day.
Information and data visualisation has come to seem increasingly important to me as I in the past few months have spent a lot of time on the topic of opening up data in government (project blog in Norwegian). Clearly, it’s possible to do harm with data, as it is with all kinds of information. But the solution in an open society cannot be to lock down government data. That’s why it’s so important to have an ongoing discussion about how data can be used to promote better understanding of society, like McCandless does with his infographics. That he helps to improve journalism at the same time, isn’t actually a drawback these days.
Starting with Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh, guardian.co.uk is planning to launch a local news project in a small number of locations. At the moment guardian.co.uk is looking for bloggers – with journalistic qualifications “desirable” – to help cover community news, and report on local developments. The project will emphasise local political decision-making, and is scheduled to go live next year.
Working from your home, or anywhere with WiFi, as a ‘beatblogger’ you will lead the Guardian’s innovative approach to community news coverage in Leeds. This will include reporting on local meetings and events with an emphasis on local political decision making, identifying issues of importance to local residents and signposting information and news provided via other sources. You will be willing to collaborate with others to create a vital resource for the city.
Monday next week, editors and journalists meet in Hamburg to agree on (they use “ratify” in the press release, ok) a new European charter for press freedom:
The charter formulates principles for the freedom of the press/media from government interference – in particular for their right to safety from surveillance, electronic eavesdropping and searches of editorial departments and computers, and unimpeded access for journalists and citizens to all domestic and foreign sources of information.
After having researched various national and European plans for online surveillance and data retention lately, I have to support this — though I think the media should fight for all citizens’ rights at the same time.
Journalists have to start taking encryption techniques and anonymity online seriously, to protect themselves and above all their sources. I wonder how many media people and news organizations have even thought about this yet.
All in all, thanks to today’s verdict – which I do hope would be overturned in higher courts – we should expect piracy to emerge as a full-fledged political issue, at least in Europe. This is no longer a debate about entertainment. As of today, it’s a debate about digital liberties. I think that the record industry does not fully grasp the level of political resistance it’s going to face from the young people in Europe and elsewhere. They remain ignorant at their peril.
I don’t see the resistance to and anger over the verdict turning into meaningful political action. Those defending “digital liberties” are unorganized, a very loose coalition without practical political experience. Of course, I hope I’m wrong…
We tend to assume that the proliferation of digital media must be coarsening American speech and behavior. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. The threat posed by video parodists appears to have turned public figures watchful and cautious, like people who affect polite reserve in crowds for fear of being mocked or mugged. In the midst of so much digital chicanery, celebrity comportment may grow steadily more formal.
Hence, Barack Obama’s team floods the web with perfectly produced videos that are hard to parody. But is it really so devastating to be remixed? Does it matter that much?
After almost five years of correcting and criticizing the Bild-Zeitung, and in the process becoming one of Germany’s most read blogs, Bildblog now announces a new policy: From now on the Bildbloggers will take on all German media.
Ideally there should be more media watchblogs of this kind, but I can see why they’re lacking. It takes a lot of time, effort and persistence to carry on such a demanding project for years. You can find some examples of what they’ve been doing in my previous posts about Bildblog.
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case. Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead. When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
For Americans aged 18-29, the internet and TV are now just as important as main sources for national and international news, a Pew survey finds. 59 percent of respondents chose these alternatives, while 28 percent cited newspapers as most important news source. In Sept 2007, 34 percent chose the internet (tip: Spiegel Online).
Among all age groups, the internet has overtaken newspapers for the first time (see chart).
The rise of the Net is of course the big tendency here, but newspapers holding their own or even gaining since September 2007 is also interesting to note. See the full report (pdf).
This job opening might be interesting for some Undercurrent readers. I just received it via email, and thought it relevant to post it in its entirety here (extended entry). The Crimes of War book and website is an indispensable resource and deserves more attention. The writer/editor could be based in the UK or US and will be responsible for the day-to-day work on the website.
Though the US presidential primaries have been covered more extensively than ever before in Europe — or so it seems, at least — the case can be made that important “campaign-technical” aspects have been less analyzed or commented on. This might have to do with the fascination of the duel between Obama and Clinton; a story that can be covered in the old-fashioned way, like a horserace. The connection described in the Slate video above between the Santos candidate in the West Wing series and Obama is entertaining stuff. But there are more substantial topics too tackle, as Martin Jönsson does by looking at the social media aspects (in Swedish). Some I have touched on also: Obama’s use of technology, his network’s fundraising and the “bittergate” story (in Norwegian).
2008 definitely is the first real web election, the first time we can really begin to appreciate how web-based services and behaviour is woven into society at so many levels. This doesn’t mean that all old-fashioned skills become obsolete — just look at the enduring importance of the political speech. To be continued!
What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog-also with comments-would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.
The BBC is on to something very important with the season of programmes and debates called “White – is white working class Britain becoming invisible?”. Not only because of the topic, clearly important and controversial, and hence exactly the kind of material that public broadcasters should be concerned with. But also in the way it is done, as a series of originally produced documentaries on TV complemented with debate programmes also on TV and on the web, a website rich in material and also programmes from the archive on radio and TV. Using all the guns at its disposal simultaneously, a broadcaster can have an impact on society — dominate the public sphere, as it were — in a way that’s otherwise almost impossible in today’s fragmented society. Of course, that kind of power places a heavy responsibility on the producers. Here’s how they present “White”.
Accompanying the series is a fancy flash presentation of the debate. You have to click on the banner at the starting page to see it. Not sure if this really works in the context, but it looks good (tip: mymarkup.)
Nicholson Baker’s The Charms of Wikipedia (actually a book review) is probably the best article on Wikipedia I have ever read; funny, enlightening and with numerous tips and ideas. Having contributed only sporadically to the encyclopedia myself, I wasn’t aware, for example, how fierce the deletion vs. inclusion battles have become. Phew.
An announcement from the BBC World Service: Shortwave transmissions of the radio service to Europe closed for good yesterday. Powerful images are triggered. Back in the 70s, the World Service and other radio transmitters over shortwave was the only broadcasting alternative available if you were tired of the one – 1 – radio channel and one – 1 – TV channel of the Norwegian state broadcaster. On World Service you could hear live commentary of English football matches on Saturdays and of midweek evening action. That is, if the weather permitted, often the noise made it quite hard to discern if Peter Lorimer had scored or missed the big opportunity. And then, on Saturdays at 6 PM local time, James Alexander Gordon presented the official — classified — football results. It was amazing to discover the other day that he is still doing this. Like the shortwave noise, hearing him pronouncing the team names and scores brings back the media world of the 70s. Tune in to the BBC on web radio next Saturday and experience a living media legend.
So Search Wikia in alpha version is up. Jimmy Wales is right in pointing out this: “I think it is unhealthy for the citizens of the world that so much of our information is controlled by such a small number of players, behind closed doors.” But will a transparent search engine work, is it possible? Will it be good enough? Exciting times ahead. Meanwhile, there will be tests and opinions. Techcrunch says it’s horrible. Interestingly, Wales replies in the comments, and defends himself well.
German magazine Stern has tested the German language version of Wikipedia against the online version (for subscribers) of the encyclopedia Brockhaus. 50 random words were picked from a range of topics and a professional research agency evaluated the entries. Wikipedia came out on top in no less than 43 of the 50 words.
The whole 13-page (!) article is not online, but Wikipedistik (in German) has more details. The criteria were: accuracy (weight 40 percent), completeness (30), topicality/up to date (20), intelligibility/easy to understand (10). Out of this notes were constructed, and Wikipedia received on average 1,7, Brockhaus 2,7 (on a scale from 1 to 6 where 1 is best). (via the Wikimedia fundraising blog).
UPDATE after reading the whole article:
The only criteria where Brockhaus became a better note was for “Verständlichkeit” — i.e. how easy the text is to understand. That is of course a structural problem for Wikipedia that has been noted by many. Articles tend to suffer from a lack of editing. They are often too long, some aspects are described in too much detail, there is no real narrative flow. Theoretically this should improve over time. If it really is true that Wikipedia will run out of new topics, contributors could spend time on improving editing, adding references etc to existing articles. However, the big encouragement that (German) Wikipedians must bring with them from this test is that their articles got the excellent note 1,6 on accuracy (Brockhaus: 2,3). That really is impressive.
On December 14 Creative Commons celebrates five years already (parties in Berlin and San Francisco. So German public service broadcaster NDR has the timing right, last week they started an experiment that should be followed by many: they have Creative Commons-licensed material from two TV shows. Although the presentation isn’t as good as it could be, it’s exciting to read comments like this from a broadcasting director:
The content we provide on the web has been paid by our visitors via the licence fee already. Since we mainly reach a younger audience on the web, the use of a creative commons license is especially interesting for us.
It’s deja vu: At conferences and in other settings where democracy, free speech, the media etc are discussed, it’s so healthy to put people from different continents and countries side by side. Typically a participant from a Western country will lament the erosion of democracy and standards of journalism, the commercialisation of the media. All important enough. Then someone from China, Russia, Thailand or any other country where freedom of the press must be fought for and defended every day, often with bitter defeat, will just talk about their experiences — and the perspective changes completely (another example, in Norwegian). When you happen to be in a place where democracy does not exist, or if you have experienced that condition, that’s when you can write like Sokwanele. Or like Ory Okolloh:
You couldn’t dare criticise the President or the government – the repercussions were harsh and most of Kenya’s intelligentsia went into exile. But the activists perserved and slowly change came to Kenya, culminating in the historic 2002 elections when Kenyans finally said “No” to Moi and his appointed successor. Today, I have free! I can write and say what I want about the government or the President without fear. I can work on projects that shine a spotlight on the performance of Kenyan politicians without a shred of concern about my safety. I have a plethora of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and TV stations where I can obtain information. Hell, I can surf the net freely. It’s easy to take these freedoms for granted once you have them…the events in Myanmar have reminded me to appreciate them and to not take democracy for granted.
