Category: Media and News

Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult

The Guardian online has a story about how novelist Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult. According to the story by Alison Flood (Monday 26th of October, 2009),

He said it was “the print that’s the problem, it’s the book, the object itself”. “To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities,” he said.

I wonder if it true that screens take less concentration than books. I can believe it about television, but not about doing things on the screen like programming or even playing a console game. I can finish most books much faster and with less hard work than playing a console game (which may say something about my gaming skills.) Is it really the form of the object (screen vs book) or the content (typical TV show vs difficult novel)?

Canada 3.0 Forum: Stratford Declaration

Ian Wilson of the new U Waterloo Stratford Institute talked to the York/Peking Symposium on the Canada 3.0 Forum among other things. He talked about the Stratford Declaration (reproduced below) that emerged. It is a national declaration that calls for a Canadian project.

Canada 3.0 – The Stratford Declaration June 22, 2009

On June 8-9, 2009, over 1500 people interested in the digital economy gathered in Stratford, Ontario to review and debate the opportunities and challenges for Canada’s future. Canada 3.0 brought together industry, government and academia in workshops and discussions all focused on Canada’s digital future.

Recognizing the need for urgent attention to the issues of digital media, the participants in the Canada 3.0 Conference agreed to the Stratford Declaration:

• Success in digital media will be central to national prosperity in the 21st century. This fast growing field is producing jobs, ideas, products, services, companies and opportunities at a rapid pace – but Canada is not yet a world leader.
• Canada has the potential to be internationally competitive in this field on a sustained and focused basis, but it will not get there based on current trends.
• The foundations of Canada’s digital economy and society are not yet strong and stable. Significant upgrades are required to the digital infrastructure, including both the technological infrastructure and made-in-Canada digital content.
• Consistent accomplishment in the digital economy will require collaboration, partnership and collective action on an unprecedented national and cross-sectoral scale. Canada must use the digital revolution to reinvent the manner in which this country trains, educates, creates new businesses, cooperates, serves the population and views its collective future.
• Canada’s competitive advantage lies in its ability to bridge the technological and content fields, and to thereby produce and deliver internationally competitive products and services. The creative talents of this country must be connected to the technological potential of this age.
• Canada must become a global test-bed for new digital products and services and must be seen as a new economy incubator where consumers, governments and companies are known for embracing digital innovation.
• Canada needs to produce a regulatory and legal environment attuned to the 21st century and needs to use these arrangements to propel the nation into a position of global leadership in digital rights management.
• The digital ecology produces global competition for talent, ideas, patents and emerging companies. Canadians need to make a strong commitment to the country as a place to train, innovate, work and prosper if the digital economy is to flourish.
• There is an urgent need for a national project of such scale, scope and impact that Canadians come to understand the potential of the digital economy and that produces the collaboration, cooperation and cross-country engagement necessary for international digital leadership.
• Canada must set an ambitious target – to become the first truly digital nation in the world – and must move with urgency and determination toward this goal.

Canada 3.0 – La Déclaration de Stratford Le 22 juin 2009

Les 8 et 9 juin 2009, la ville de Stratford, en Ontario, a accueilli plus de 1 500 intéressés qui se sont penchés sur le dossier de l’économie numérique et ont débattu les possibilités et défis qui se dessinent pour le Canada de demain. Réunissant des délégués de l’industrie, des gouvernements et du monde universitaire, la conférence Canada 3.0 a été le théâtre d’ateliers et d’échanges portant sur l’avenir numérique du Canada.

Conscients de la nécessité de porter une attention immédiate aux enjeux liés aux médias numériques, les participants de la conférence ont entériné la Déclaration de Stratford :
• Au 21e siècle, la réussite des médias numériques sera au cœur de la prospérité du pays. Emplois, idées, produits, services, entreprises et débouchés se multiplient à un rythme effréné dans ce domaine en plein essor. Cependant, le Canada n’y occupe pas encore une position de chef de file mondial.
• Le Canada possède tous les atouts requis pour affronter de façon durable et ciblée la concurrence internationale dans le domaine. Cependant, ce potentiel ne se réalisera jamais à moins que le pays ne change de cap.
• Le Canada ne dispose pas encore d’assises stables et solides en ce qui touche l’économie et la société numériques. L’infrastructure numérique doit faire l’objet d’améliorations marquées, notamment sur le plan de l’infrastructure technique et des contenus numériques de confection canadienne.
• En matière d’économie numérique, la cohérence des réalisations nécessite une collaboration, des partenariats et une action concertée sans précédent à l’échelon national et intersectoriel. Le Canada doit profiter de la révolution numérique pour réinventer ses modèles de formation, d’éducation, de création de nouvelles entreprises, de coopération et de service au public ainsi que pour revoir la façon dont il envisage l’avenir collectif de la nation.
• L’avantage concurrentiel du Canada tient à sa capacité de conjuguer techniques et contenus et, ainsi, de produire et de diffuser des produits et services compétitifs dans l’arène mondiale. Les talents créateurs de ce pays doivent être « branchés » sur les possibilités techniques de notre époque.
• Le Canada doit devenir une plateforme mondiale d’essai des nouveaux produits et services numériques. Il doit également être perçu comme un incubateur de la nouvelle économie où consommateurs, gouvernements et entreprises se distinguent par leur capacité de faire place à l’innovation numérique.
• Le Canada doit se doter d’un milieu réglementaire et légal qui s’accorde avec le 21e siècle. Il lui faut également miser sur de telles dispositions pour se propulser au sommet du palmarès mondial de la gestion des droits d’auteur électroniques.
• L’écologie numérique alimente la concurrence mondiale sur le plan des talents, des idées, des brevets et des nouvelles entreprises. Les Canadiens doivent s’engager résolument envers leur pays pour en faire un lieu où apprendre, innover, travailler et prospérer. Le développement futur de l’économie numérique en dépend.
• Il est urgent de lancer un projet national d’une envergure, d’une portée et d’une incidence telles que les Canadiens en viendront à saisir les possibilités offertes par l’économie numérique et qu’il en découlera la collaboration, la coopération et la mobilisation intersectorielle requises pour l’exercice d’un leadership numérique mondial.
• Le Canada doit se fixer un objectif audacieux — devenir la première véritable nation numérique du monde — et s’employer prestement et résolument à atteindre cet objectif. (This is from the Facebook Page.)

PONTYPOOL | Shut up or die

Picture 14

Last night I watched a Canadian gem of a zombie movie, PONTYPOOL | Shut up or die. The movie takes place almost entirely in a radio studio in the basement of an old church in the small town of Pontypool Ontario. Grant Mazzy, a talk-radio host at the end of his career, exiled from the big city, stays on the air dealing with the eruption of a language plague where English words (primarily endearments like “honey”) carry the new type of virus that infects people. With his producer and technician they try to figure out what is real or not as strange reports come in and they are interviewed by “our affiliate” the BBC. Eventually the zombies, who follow the sound of speaking, repeating words or phrases, break in to try to eat their way to the voice. Grant and his producer figure out that talking in their poor French (remember the importance of bilingualism in Canada) is one way to avoid infection and they work out a cure which involves disrupting mean by asserting things like “kill is kiss”. Back on the radio to talk through the cure, the movie ends with a count down from 10 in French from off camera. Are the French Canadian troops sent in to eradicate the plague about to blow up the radio station just when they have figured out the cure? Was the talk show of the radio station the source of the plague in the first place or was it the posters for a lost cat “Honey” plastered all over town? Could the interview Grant gives to a BBC news announcer have spread the logorrhea abroad? Can words spread ideas (or memes) like a plague closing down our understanding until we are babbling zombies. After all, in the beginning was the word, not its understanding.

Talking of how zombie movies are often a metaphor for things we fear infection from like communism, the author of the screenplay and original book, Tony Burges, says about the movie that,

(a zombie is) really a metaphor for metaphors that keep hunting you long after they have been meaningful. They keep coming at you. … They’re figures of speech that become predatory long after their sort of meaning as figures of speech have sort of left the stage. And so … that for me is the interesting last hundred yards of a zombie’s life. (From an interview with Tony Burgess in December of 2008 at the Drake Hotel in Toronto. Interview by Ian Daffern, co-produced and edited by Tate Young of Vepo Studios.

Street fighting, Earth’s calmest spot, e-mail rudeness

The Globe and Mail today (Thursday, Sept. 3rd, 2009) have an interesting tidbit on e-mail rudeness in the SOCIAL STUDIES column on Street fighting, Earth’s calmest spot, e-mail rudeness.

E-mail rudeness

Vicki Walker was forced out of her job as an accountant at a health-care company in Auckland, N.Z., after colleagues complained her e-mails were too “shouty” and confrontational. A tribunal heard that she spread disharmony among her co-workers by sending missives with entire sentences in capital letters. She also behaved “provocatively” by highlighting key phrases in bold or red, according to her employer, ProCare Health. The panel found that, while she had caused friction in her office, her conduct did not amount to grounds for dismissal. Her firm had no e-mail style guide, meaning employees could not be certain about what communications were deemed unacceptable. Ms. Walker was awarded $12,600 and plans to appeal for further compensation. (L6, by Michael Kesterton)

The New Zealand Herald has a story Emails spark woman’s sacking by Rebecca Lewis (Aug 30, 2009) with more detail including the one offensive email submitted as evidence.

inamo restaurant: interactive oriental fusion restaurant and bar

tableTop

From the Wall Street Journal online I learned about a restaurant in Soho, London called, inamo. The restaurant has projectors over the tables so the table top is an interactive screen. You can project menu choices onto your plate, change the mood, play games, and even order a taxi. I wonder if we are going to see a lot more table-top displays? Will advertising pay for interactive tables all over? What could we do with a seminar room?

Almost Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is almost real according to a BBC story by Michael Fitzpatrick, Mobile phones get cyborg vision. Developers like Layar have made it possible to get realtime information about your surroundings overlayed over what your camera sees.

Launched this June in Amsterdam, residents and visitors can now see houses for sale, popular bars and shops, jobs on offer in the area, and a list of local doctors and ATMs by scanning the landscape with the software.

The social media implications are tremendous – imagine having a myPlace site where I can add meaning to locations that others can view. Historical tours, ghost stories, contextual music, political rants and so on could be added to real locations.

Thanks to Sean for this.

Philosophy 366: Student digital ethnography

Derek, Kat and Yosuke in my Philosophy 366, Computers and Culture class voluntarily put together a short video summarizing a survey they took of the classes use of computing. See Philosophy 366 Ethnography. I like the variety of ways they showed the information from having characters talking in WOW to other students holding sheets of paper. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is more information in the video than just the summary information on the cards. Short videos are becoming an argumentative form.

PressThink: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News

I blogged before about Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Guy P. pointed me to a really good summary of positions on the issue of what’s happening to newspapers, see Clay Shirky’s colleague Jay Rosen on PressThink: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News. I should also gather in my blog entry on the New Yorker article, The News Business: Out of Print which is a good introduction to the issue.

Personally I think this will strengthen public broadcasting and their news capacity. No one in the USA thinks publicly funded broadcasting as an alternative because they don’t have it, but here in Canada the CBC does a great job, at least on the radio, and in the UK (where they are well funded) they do an even better job with an international service. For example, watching Generation Kill you will notice the Marines are listening to the BBC for their news! (Yes, I know it is fiction, but it is based fairly closely on the experiences of an embedded Rolling Stone reporter.)

Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Thanks to Peter O I came across Clay Shirky’s excellent analysis of what’s going on with newspapers and the web, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable . Some of the salient points:

  • Change has been so rapid that it has changed who is pragmatic and who is a fabulist. Newspapers are in denial about the realities of online content so those who describe what is happening (the pragmatists) are treated as fabulists.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry.

  • The economics of publishing have changed. It used to be that there was a tremendous upfront cost to set up a newspaper or broadcasting facility. Now the infrastructure of distribution is paid for by all so publishing is cheap.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

  • It is easy to describe life before or after an epochal shift. It is hard to describe the chaos of experiments during the shift. Shirky looks to The Printing Press as an Agent of Change as an example of the hard type of history.

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

  • Advertisers don’t want to pay for the costs of a full-featured newspaper (with international bureaus and investigative reporting.) They will move their money to where it connects with their (usually local) audience.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

  • Newspaper reporting provides a public service that will be missed, but knowing we will miss it doesn’t save it. We just don’t know how to fill the gap that will be left when daily papers dissappear in cities.

“You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.

Actually I think there are ideas floating around as to what might fill the gap:

  • Blogs may take up some of the slack with various advocacy groups and NGOs providing investigative reporting in the areas that concern them. I think it is wrong to assume that amateurs will necessarily do a worse job than professional reporters. In fact, as most know, professionals are too busy to usually go into depth and whenever they write about something you know they get it wrong in all sorts of ways. A blog like Buckets of Grewal probably does a more indepth job of examining the Grewal controversy than any newspaper story. The difference is rather that the professionals are committed to breadth and they write better.
  • Publicly funded broadcasters like the BBC and the CBC will provide tax funded news reporting with foreign bureaus and so on. They don’t have to have make a profit and can invest in things perceived as useful for society.
  • There will always be some big and international newspapers like the New York Times or Reuters because there will always be a demand for that sort of news. The internet reduces diversity – every city doesn’t need a newspaper with a foreign bureau. All we need is a couple of news services with foreign bureaus.
  • Some companies have already figured out how to package news as analysis and get other businesses to pay for it. This will accelerate as newspapers fail. Companies like Oxford Analytica will meet the demand of multinational businesses who need access to strategic information. The sooner the newspapers fail the sooner we will see these companies come out of the woodwork and start selling their products to us.

To conclude with another quote from the Shirky essay, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

MIT: Open Access Mandate

From Twitter I found a link to Peter Suber, Open Access News where there is a story of MIT’s unanimous faculty vote to adopt an Open Access mandate that gives the University the right to archive and make available their articles. Like the Harvard mandate, faculty can opt out if they have a good reason.

Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination.