How to spot innovation and a television winner

And the winner is?

To the left of the RTS emblem a jury convenes to award practitioners in the industry the coveted statuette and moniker RTS programme of the year; RTS journalist of the year and so on.

As awards go, the RTS is television news' Oscar or to be more precise EMMY. You'll notice it on ITV's continuity, or the end of credits on Newsnight or Channel 4 News.

Major awards bring recognition from within the industry,  and outwardly to sponsors or potential employers.  You may thank the whole of the team when you receive an award, but in reality, quietly at home, you'll do a jig, look at the statuette and mutter "Mum I have done it !".

Then your partner tells you to take the rubbish out, the bin collectors are coming.  I chuckled when I heard a golfer say how his partner brought him back to earth after winning the Masters.

Back in TV land, the RTS are a couple of months away.

Digital and Social Networks have made the awards particularly in the innovation category interesting. Last year Channel 4 won the award for its disability reportage campaign. It built a seamless number of programmes connecting studio interviews with transport executives,  and commuters with disabilities who had to wrestle with London's inaccessible transport. The whole idea started on Twitter.

One year, The Stream from Al Jazeera was the victor. Youth TV tackled weighty issues by combining an array of digital tools. The look and feel of the show mimicked a make-shift studio in a student's home. It worked. The next year, The Stream, 'upgraded' the show. It now looked like any other broadcast.

What makes an innovator show or idea? There's a criteria the jury adhered to. But how do you judge evaluate something within those parameters?  In many ways its the same criteria as an academic I would use to evaluate Master's work. The context though is different, but the cognitive approach is similar.

This year I am chair of one of the jury panels, so I'm thinking of detailing the cognitive procedure within the decision-making process of analysis and evaluation. I can do it this year because I'm not actually going to making my views known in the jury procedure.

The process may appear ad-hoc, but the it brings together a series of interpretive schemas and rationalising - the study of signs. Cues, patterns, themes, rhetorical arguments... we're not aware we're making them, but they constitute the body of evidence that we use to analyse programmes.

And the process of analysis is dependent upon social and literary values. So what might be innovatory now, many not be tomorrow. Let me know what your thoughts and whether it would interest you as a post. I'll trace winners from over the years and why they won.

David Dunkley Gyimah as a previous juror at the RTS Awards

BBC's Hostile Environment training for journalists - a review

A feature length of this article is being considered by a popular UK news website.

Be prepared to die.

It doesn't get any blunter than that. Last thursday I attended an event at the BBC - possibly one of their best open fouum for journalists.

The BBC could have packed in the nation's aspiring journalists, but on the day a mere 200 plus had the opportunity to gather in new broadcasting house's radio theatre to learn about hostile environment reporting.

And that's where the BBC's MIddle East editor Jeremy Bowen made the remark: when you're going out on a foreign assignment consider the fact you may not return. So why do it then?

The adrenalin rush, making a difference, you'll never experience anything like it, was the response.

This was grim, but poignant advice for would-be journalists in a digital age where the dangers of reporting have become all too apparent.

Analogue versus Digital

David Dunkley Gyimah reporting from South Africa 1994 - on the eve of their historic election

In South Africa (92-94) as a journalist in the analogue days, you went into a hot zone, reported and got out, or headed for safety. Digital, said one of speakers, has led to an increase in workload and the reality that you end up testing your luck in the zone.

I still multiskilled: worked for ABC News (TV), made programmes for South African independents (TV) freelanced for the BBC World Service (Radio) write articles, but it wasn't relentless to the point of having to stay in a hot zone.

The inauguration of Nelson Mandela. It was electric. The whole country came to a standstill.




Violence grips South Africa. The Townships e.g. Soweto has become a conflict zone between ANC and Inkatha factions. This a report from Jo'burg and Durban on the violence. Its scary!






The problems Today
So far, for a number of different but connected reasons 35 journalists are missing in Syria. Reporting from the region or any other conflict zone has spawned an underground digital reportage industry.

If you're lucky you'll make your name, if you're not, you've become another number. This was the sort of discussion that the 200 were privy to.

I'll report on this in more detail in a post for a publication that reflects my career reporting from hot zones, as well as more recent work in September 2013 working 3 hours from Kilis on the Syrian border.

I'll talk about my motivation and how the lack of black journalists getting breaks irked me. I have done things therefore when I was young to prove to myself and critics who were less prone to hire people from minorities.

I'll also reflect on how that has spurned me on, and my ambitions to correct a narrative in journalism, specifically videojournalism,  that requires reevaluating. The results thus far has rendered videojournalism  anaemic. That's the subject of my PhD.

Then I'll round up with my experience as both a journalist and academic, how the next generation could strengthen their involvement in a journalism of empathy, affectivity and cinema.

David Dunkley Gyimah is an academic and journalist.

He is a chair of the jurors for the UK's RTS Awards - the highest awards in the UK for professional television journalists.

Go hear for more on his background covering conflicts in South Africa etc.

The Lone Videojournalist, has ended - Next its the Super Collaborators.

For sale - the serious side of me

By David Dunkley Gyimah connect on Google 

I have put myself up for sale - a risque move amongst those who will fail to see the point.

Awww! Do I really need to spell it out? So, like, I'm not selling myself, but my attributes, which obviously come with me. So yes, I'm selling but not in that maladroit way.

But I am making a finer point.  If you're the uber digitalist working alone? You shouldn't be. Collaboration is about to get supertanker big, or at least if trend extrapolation is anything to go by, it should.

The videojournalist, YouTube loading, self-twitting individual is dead!  Here comes the epic collaborator. Let me explain!

The title of this post then is a reworking of French philosophers Barthes and Foucalt's insight into the author and imminent death of the author.

Having found their voice in the renaissance, the concept of an author marking their work with a distinct signature had waned for these two towering figures.

Barthes main point was the moment you attach authorship to the text, you limit its potential.  It may sound existential but what Barthes is getting at is to remove the identity of the author and in many ways enjoy the product for what it is, not the name of the person.

Would One Direction's Best Song Ever, be a great song, if you didn't know it was One Direction?  Er don't answer that nearly 157,000,000 have. Barthes obviously wasn't thinking about Boy band branding.

For Sale. I can do the work look. David filming on the Turkey side near the Syrian Border

The Author
However, authorship or identity is a difficult thing to achieve. As Focault noted, everyone can write, but not everyone is an author. Similarly, and this makes sense  - not all twitters, videojournalists and social networkers are the same.

But there's a broader point and its the economic scarcity principle that provides an alternative argument to the death of you, the lonesome twitter dancing, You Tube uploading, Instagram mover and shaker, author.

The more something becomes available, the less desirable it become. Its price, the level of entry removes its mystique.

If you remember the frenzied days of 2000 to 2005. To blog was to becoming, to video was to look venerable. To tweet before anyone else had (circa 2007) built you a loyal following very quickly and was considered outstanding.

David's name tag presenting at SXSW. Austin Texas, about videojournalism and social.

The room all of a sudden got very busy, and very crowded - all for the right reasons. Because, now we're hearing from people whose views could outdo guests on David Letterman or strip Paxman of his king of the media jungle label.

No! Even if you had the world's foremost 500 brilliant people to listen and follow, when does your life begin?

Sea Change in Education
The change from the individualist to a collaborative group happened in education about 2005, albeit implicitly. Lecturers woke up one day to find Gilmor's aphorism of the Wisdom of crowds staring them in the face.

Now, for the first time in public, the combined intellect of a wisdom of crowds of students congregating on Facebook could challenge the pedagogy and authority of the academic. Few institutions had an answer, rather than roll with the punches and devise new methods, the ostrich scenario dominated.

Many educational establishments survive because of their analogue knowledge [see last post]. Some provided a glimpse of new working-educational practices to match the sign of the times. One of those has been a government-run programme called KTP.

The knowledge transfer programme  (KTP) sees a recent graduated hired by a company to drive a project and mentored by an academic. Er, I happen to be one of the KTP advisors.

Meanwhile back in the industrial world, the notion of the videojournalist, twitter and You Tuber being dead then can be viewed as an inevitability. It comes with the dynamic swings and roundabouts of society. Societies change and when they do their needs alter.

One minute in the 1920s the film industry said it was about collaboration. Next thing in the 1960s the French said it was about the auter, then years later we tired of the self-publicity seeking auter to go collaboration again.

The difference today is we're living out decades in a matter of years. Years have contracted to weeks.

The new Authors
Tarantino, Soderbergh, and Spike Lee may sound like they did it themselves when the film trails " a Tarantino film", but even they know it's a collaboration between many workers and that only a sleight of hand seeks to reward them as the progenitors.

The film industry is a good barometer in how to respond to the market place. It is one of the most durable industries second to the arms exports in the US for the money it generates. Throw as many invectives at the studios as you can, they're skilled in the warfare of driving their businesses.

If you were to note an overwhelming change to the movie world in view of the social, digital world of everyone-can-do-this, it's been about raising the bar to a level of super collaborations.

World War Z ( read Rosenblum's take on this) Avatar, The Great Gatsby...Films, have gone epic. The list of collaborators is the size of a small country and eveyone is a winner.

There's evidence of this success in journalism. 18Days in Egypt,  Storyful, and these little known about digital student class in India generating digital heat by bringing everyone together.

Collaboration isn't a new thing.  Ask Brian Storm of Media Storm - one of the new agencies in digital media which is blaizing a trail.

Also, Viewmagazine.tv - my site won it awards for its collaboration, as did another project called the Family, coming second place at Channel 4s Digital Awards.  It's just that collaborations this time has a more visible value in a market where so many people have the same or complimentary skills, and you don've time to read what 500 people continually say.

At SXSW when they said do Epic, they weren't kidding. Now its super Epic

Size matters! Size and quality makes for an even more interesting mix. Admit it, when Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diza, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt and Rosie Perez are appearing in the same film - and think of Pacinno and De Niro being featured too, that's epic.

So I am for sale, and you should too. For the potential of the outcome to do something epic. I have done a few, but time to raise the bar.

One aspiration I have is to be involved in a new type of university that marries multi-disciplines in a way that we've far from accomplished at the moment.

And lets start it off in Africa, Ghana, where the difference would be palpable, otherwise I'm good anyone else. email David@viewmagazine.tv


Read The theory of videojournalism - one of the site's most popular blogs.

David Dunkley Gyimah  presenting at the ONA NY relayed at Time Square. David is a senior university  lecturer completing his PhD into a future of media. He is an artist in residence at the Southbank Centre. This year he is a chair of the UK's foremost television journalism awards The RTS.

Viewmagazine.tv's David Dunkley Gyimah laments the lack of digital thinking to analogue problems

By David Dunkley Gyimah connect here with him. David has worked for some of the world's leading news outfits. He is a chair of the jury panel for the Royal Television Society Awards, the UK equivalent of the EMMYS. 

I'm planning on going back to Ghana at some point. It's where I was brought up in secondary school.

It's also an area, which is flourishing with new ideas and opportunities. Many of my friends whom I shared time with growing up have either gone back or are planning to do so.

Many of them have made an impact and for some it’s gone disastrously wrong. In the latter case it's for all sorts of reason, but there is a convention that I wish to share that helps us understand one of the main reasons, which is closer to your home. 

As a lecturer, I’m intrigued by three areas of making sense out of things.

1. common sense
2. learned sense
3. and deconstructed sense.

By common sense, I mean what we use to complete tasks by some basic common knowledge. How you email, how you like a friend's page on Facebook. You're almost expected to know, even though at some point you had to learn the process.

Try this exercise! In a room full of secondary school students, ask whose done anyone of those and you get a flurry of hands going up. 

Learned sense, yes it’s not a word per se, but it should be, is something you’ve had to learn. You actively engage it. Do you Pinterest, data scraping, create cinema? All of the sudden only a few hands are left in the air.

You top up your common sense, which is more cognitive (invisible learning) by actively learning. 

For instance everyone can read and comment on a film, but few people know how to critique a film based on implicit or symptomatic readings. So, John Lewis' cuddly animation of a paternal bear is not about Walt Disney type animation,  but a clever attempt by one of the UK's leading consumer's to let you associate nostalgia and sweetness with their brand.

i

How common sense is defunct
Thankfully, the common sense way of doing things in the media, the analogue approach is still widespread. We might live in a digital world, but even if you were Sherlock Holmes you'd be hard pressed to find digital's DNA way of doing things after a full day's snooping. 

Digital may purport to bring us closer, contract the world through eroding borders, but in making us digital penpals what are we doing with it that signals a change in cognitivism.

Twitter lets me know what my friends are doing and what did I do with that info? A digitised world, without a digital revolution.

Here’s the rub, if you are at college and the person delivering knowledge comes from the common sense, analogue world, then you might want to think about how your future is shaping up.

Television’s continued dominance stems from this integrity of the analogue. If the media is the message, then digital turned out to be the slave master of analogue, because digital hasn’t changed the message. 

It’s quickened it, even given it wings to fly off in all directions, but a bit like putting a Ferrari shell on a mini engine, who are we fooling? It's still the model we so love and subscribe to nostalgically - just like the Lewis commercial.

The deconstructed sense interrogates common sense and what you’ve learned in an analogue world. The really innovative managers have it. Whilst other executive return from a conference and buoyed by what they’ve learned at a social network festival command their staff to implement a social policy. The justification is someone else tried it and it works.

The deconstructed ask about phenomenon and why it works. What is it that digital could do to create a new fabric of knowledge flow, to create new solutions to old problems, to reframe common sense and what we’re learning in our quasi-analogue and digital ecology.

Take the calamity from Typhoon Haiyan. Another typhoon, another human tragedy on a large scale, and our analogue response is near enough the same.  Russell Brand was right about politicians and the complicity... well it envelops media as well, you could argue.  

From a response and communication position, having read, seen, and even is cases witnessed porn-disaster - the gratuitously well-made up correspondent selling voyeurism of a hapless people, is this still the media response?  

It's much of the analogue same; this is not the media’s fault. We’ve gone digital might be akin to a flat screen television, higher fidelity, and green screen, but the social dimension, and I don’t even need to use the word “social”, is wanting.

Is the notion of reportage, which is just over 50 years old in television, so immovable that in 2013 we’ve not been able to devise an alternatives to address, in this case, human suffering?

Not our job, the analogues with common sense will say. But that’s precisely the problem. Any one who deconstructs the status quo knows there’s something wrong, but the source of their solution comes from a place, which is itself deficient. How could a digital thought process look at this recent tragedy? Here's a scenario.

A digital solution to one major problem.

Reporters get to the disaster scene with their equipment. No aid agency is present yet. Their feeds first go to a coordinated response of the Disaster Relief Agency. Survivors on the ground are handed 'pennys'. These are prototype transmitters and cameras. V. Cheap. They connect to a crowd map similar to Ushahidi, which combined with Touchcast [see previous posts] gives control over to viewers. Correspondents curate the info flow.



What is the Ushahidi Platform? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

The Philipines is digitally mapped. That technology and process already exists through the military. A series of mobile - make shift outernet systems are implemented [ see apple presentation]

Matched across different territories e.g. Hyde Park, Times Square and strategic locations in the Philippines citizens can openly communicate with each other. The Philippines is digitally mapped to give the impression how the disaster would look like in your area [see wag the Dog - the Sarajevo scene]. This creates empathy.

Students learn from students in Philippines in adirect contact exercises - a new form of empathy journalism

The whole event is scheduled into an educational module - "Digital Responses" facilitated by the Disaster Relief Agency. School children, universities and business's around the world have access. How do you solve such huge intractable problems? This involves a new form of empathetic ( digital) journalism. It is cause and effect. How do you use journalism to uncover a problem, then what do you do to help?

You can even pick your doppleganger – someone in the region who shares your same birthday and likes by data scraping medical records from the cloud.

School Children talk to other school children, university PR and journalism courses to Philippines equivalent. Everyone maps out different solutions accordingly. One major feature is the game theory approach. Mobile copters provide further images, the feed from Philippines is costing you one cent, but once you get on board, you can set your own tariff, which is money paid to help survivors.

Using similar tokens in Moshi Monster e.g. price card, users pay to be involved in the real life exercise. Payment is direct to survivors. which users control. But by doing so you’re explicitly paying to the relief of survivors.

The whole event is paid for by philanthropists, so there is no conflict between analogue rules of objectivity....

David Dunkley Gyimah in Ghana

David Dunkley Gyimah with US Special Forces in Ghana circa 1996. David is a senior lecturer and International award winning videojournalist. This year he is one of the chairs of the Royal Television Society Awards. His PhD he is completing looks at digital and news filmmaking.  For more on David's work - all on one page go to guidelines videojorunalism.

Postscript
Channel 4 News twitter response which led them to look for a family stricken the typhoon was an example of a digital response.

The pioneering videojournalist whose voice fell silent

Picture from Ravi Vadgama

The year is 1994. The picture shows the coming together for the first time of a group of people who started a revolution in the UK. They were chosen from 3000 candidates.

Almost 20 years ago, this diverse group launched videojournalism in the UK. You may be aware of videojournalism. You might even state you're one yourself.

But without rancour or arrogance, I would like to tell you that the videojournalism you know today, was nothing like the one practiced by the this group 20 years ago.

Unfortunately there is no record of them, except the odd post in my blog.

Similarly, for the videojournalists or One-man or One-woman bands, what you did was amazing, but Channel One created a model that was unique and has not been replicated since in the UK.

Those details are wrapped up in a doctoral study, whose finishing touches are being put in place.

If you look in the picture I am second to the left, on the second-to-back row. At the immediate right side, next to the Channel One logo squatting with a camera is my friend Steve Punter.

He was one of the best videojournalists and an amazing intellect who went on to work for many of the UK networks, creating some of the best television you could watch.

When I wanted to start my PhD to tell the story of videojournalism I called Steve. We met and spoke for three hours, He provided me with material I couldn't believe I was hearing.

At times I was asking did we really work at the same place?  But his retention of facts and the fact that he was a videojournalist who progressed to management gave him a unique perspective.

I am so indebted to him. I can't wait to finish this thesis. It's been a relentless six years with its own back story in it to be told for another day.

But this post is about a more immediate issue; not about videojournalism per se, or Channel One, but about my friend Steve Punter.

Steve died two weeks ago. The circumstance surrounding his demise are unknown, but it appears he took his own life.

In spite of his brilliance, his grit, his exemplar work and huge personality, for reasons that make me angry at the state of affairs in Britain, he couldn't find work.

He'd been over looked or ignored for positions which on merit should have been his. He was the best man for any media management jon.  His loss isn't just a gaping hole for me and all that loved him but truly to anyone interested in the future of media in the most exciting and radical way.

He understod and bridged old school, classic story telling and journalism, with the new edicts and ideas enveloping social and digital media.

They, editors and programme makers, in the UK didn't get him. I empathise with this. The UK can be a harsh place to present ideas.

Another videojournalist R V Vadgama from 1994, now working at GMTV wrote a tribute to Steve. I choked reading it.

In the digital age videojournalists don't die; Steve's twitter account and Facebook page are still active, it's just that his voice has fallen silent.

R.I.P Steve - but I know this will not be the case, because in the place he is now in, I'd like to think someone is finally listening to him and thinking wow what was wrong with everyone on the other side.

Steve Punter being interviewed by me. We're laughing because Mac Dictate which he is speaking to via headphones keeps screwing up his translations.


This is the message that Steve left, with this picture below. He was an extraordinary photographer.


After nearly 20 years
In and out
I will come out of this door 
for the last time
On Wednesday
Sometime after 11 o clock
AM
Hope she misses me
When I am gone
It's been fun

Ten things that digital said it would change and b*******ks all it has

Here's ten things digital could have changed, but hasn't. From this mornings Digital hasn't cut it

1. We're still interested in those self-interested subjects e.g. fame, celeb, meism. If anything digital expands conditions for all of us to be self-centred.

2. We've hardly invented a different journalism, and if we have its popularity is along the lines of Hogwarts and big foots. Sighted once in a while,  mythical ever so often, and trammelled where there are green shoots into oblivion.

3. Digital: the have and nots of traditionalism have become the haves and have-nots of the new system.

4. The view of the world is hegemonically based around a corpus of digital opinion. Attend two or more digital conferences and see the same people talking about their same thing. Thank Goodness Kenya's tech society is punching about its weight.

David Dunkley Gyimah reflecting on the digital gravy train

5.  When was the last time you went to a tech meeting and the diversity of people e.g Women and people of colour blew you away?  Nah ! Thought so. I was at one two weeks ago. No comment!
Africa digital, India digital... the revolution is still shaping.

6. Digital has become so corrosive as to discombobulate cultures. We all seek solace in a hashtag culture that erodes rather than strengthens. Somehow too, digital has become a Western come-to-product.  If you've nothing to say, even though you might have bombs raining down on you, shut up, as we listen to an ageing Joe 90 parachuted in and out of the news zone to give us a peak.

7. Have we become less experimental now? Was 2000-2005 the last of the chaotic experiments, with big ambitions to change the world. Because now everything looks so well defined as to embolden complacency and erectile dysfunction set in because, guess what. There's no rush anymore, and yes you get this thing digital.  Example, I was a juror for one of the UK's top media awards. A newcomer to the field won the prize for innovation. They went back to their offices and relaunched their show, er, to look like every other media. Missing the point completely, why they were chosen.

8. Most of the conferences and water holes of the digital spark of the 2000-2005 have folded. Others have been taken over by the multi-companies, who dictate the agenda. Yes I read Clue Train  Manifesto when it first came out too.

9. Digital makes us less empathetic. You notice this in tertiary education. The availability of everything renders little emotional premium attached to the pursuit of that something. It's almost as if there's been a technological revolution, but not a social - digital one. Listen to the lyrics of Thabo and the Real Deal

Politicians are too concerned with winners, when they should be referees...
They'e got the crew in the pocket that's the news that we're watching so religiously         So when we lose, which we do they can tranquilise us effectively.

10. Explore what you can do for others, not what you can do for yourself. Otherwise proclaim yourself an absolutist. Alas, there's no problem in doing so, but stop calling yourself digital social networker. P.S BTW this summation is all relative to who you are and your cultural standing. So yes you could vehemently disagree.


David Dunkley Gyimah is a senior lecturer, completing his PhD in an area of digital. More on him here.

How digital erodes what make you different

 In the library, between the methodical drone of thesis editing, "Oooh  look there's another stray comma". and reflecting on the next lecture, which has something to do with SEO, I reached for a magazine.

Uni libraries are good for that. I have passed on taking subscriptions, as I tended not to get through the magazines I subscribed to. Time magazine, for all its worthiness, was the worse. Pristine copies would gather dust in the hall way at home.

A quick flick through the New Statesmen became a stimulating distraction. New Statesmen, a political left leaning magazine, is enjoying a purple patch. And its latest edition illustrates perhaps why that is.

Comedian and Actor Russell Brand's guest editing turned out to be a masterly stroke of risk-taking. His interview with the coruscating BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman, ( I am still scarred from being one of his researchers eons ago) was illuminating and a good piece of television. [ Fight ! Fight fight].

Paul Mason, formerly of Newsnight, now the Digital Editor on the other side,  C 4 News, likened it to a mutually aided symmetrical skewering contest. Brand got one up on Paxman, who also dug the knife in rather systematically.

And, if you want to see how journalism truly benefits from cultural baggage, witness the gesticulating finger jabbing of the presenter (Paxman) akin to a lovers tiff: "You're so selfish, you bastard", or headmasterish command "go-and-stand-in-the-corner "syndrome.

As Mason said, they both had a go. Paxman, on a more supine programme (Graham Norton) later in the week, let go of his feisty daschund persona to reveal that he believed Brand was correct to bang on about people being tired of politicians.

At that moment, along Tory hallways across the land, you could hear the thud of a door closing as Tory person (A) got into their Aston Martin to drive 50 metres to Tory person (B) to confirm, what they'd always maintained, and that is journalists are biased.

Of course they are! Who isn't. Except they are, what's that phrase I heard this morning on Radio 4? Yes, secular! That means many a journalists Jon Snow, Paxman, Humphreys and the late Charles Wheeler can be as cranky or disagreeable as they like, based on their own prejudice, but in a studio they make every attempt to be fair and honest.

I have been banging on my own mantra, which piquantly described journalism as a cultural construct courtesy of the writings of American academic Michael Schudson [read Deuze]. 


Being different
It seems rather controversial when I say this, and it is perhaps understandable, albeit erroneous. If you consider how Willem Defoe's  (of Robinson Crusoe fame)  separated himself from the creative writings of his peers, it becomes a little clearer.

He was after the stated facts. Getting to the truth or pulling together the facts is the bedrock of journalism and journalism putatively does so based on its parity with the judiciary.  A pound of flesh, is a pound of flesh Mr Shylock.

Brand's rhetoric and Paxman's interventions open up a secondary debate alongside abject discrimination amongst the disenfranchised young and the getting-rich-and-fuck-anyone-else gentry.

Sigh! Blimey, it's taken me this many paragraphs to get to the point. The point? Digital has no more redefined the media landscape than Barney makes children scared.

It's an odd thing to say. I'm an ardent digitalist. Without it, viewmagazine. tv and the bits and bobs I have focused upon would never have left my study room.

But the perspective from where I sit ( Yeah who cares ?) seems patently clear.

In the 80s and 90s, I was campaigning (banging on) about the inequities of media. To get a job in the big five as the broadcast media were back then, there was no room for culture to be displayed on your arm.

It was a frustrating period. I was into South Africa, science, and youth culture. The period was  made enjoyable by periods in broadcast media where as an individual ( Channel One TV) you were encouraged to pull from your cultural moorings to talk about the things that bothered you.

If traditional media successfully showed that media was done, one way and one way only. A big fat wrong! Then digital media was going to expose this, because of the methodologies of doing things differently.

The method includes the  process, so yes Twitter offers a new digital media outlet, but the sociology of journalism had remained the same. Nothing has changed. Today you hear less about what it means to be young and unemployed, or being black and being discriminated against or being a woman and being harassed.

Yes you can read/ see it somewhere in the pit less vaults of a Youtube or or some website off the digital landscape, but the brilliance of an alternative media impacting upon the heavyweights and thus changing the way we do business has not happened.

Thatcher's legacy has been more powerful than anyone could ever have managed. In her prime with social networks available, what would she have made of them? Cynically her phrase there is no such thing as society, would apply. There's no such thing as social networks. If so what have they done? What have they changed?

It's nothing more than self-interested individuals fleetingly flirting with others. Digital has failed us. Of course this is all relative. If you've never had the attention Twitter gives you, technology is all the rage.

However, if the point of technology is to make our livelihoods remakarbly better,  (Naively it never has e.g. Nuclear) then it's done it for the few. Russell Brand's inevitable revolution looks like a shoe-in.

Yes there have been movements, along the lines of either tacitly or intentionally calling themselves social networks, but as yet that seismic thing to change the status quo has yet to truly happen.

More so within journalism, where we still believe culture doesn't matter. And that diversity is a badge you wear to show how many different friends you have from  spain or say, Ghana.

 We need more stimulus from the external voices that shape our politics and for digital to be more than a gateway to more of the same. Brand's revolution-in-waiting is as much about politics as it is about information, less ordained, more explosive emerging. When?

At this rate we may have to wait for a  new movement  e.g. quantum,  to take form. I'm holding my
breath.

Here's ten things digital could have changed, but hasn't.

1. We're still interested in those self-interested subjects e.g. fame, celeb, meism. If anything digital expands conditions for all of us to be self-centred.

2. We've hardly invented a different journalism, and if we have its popularity is along the lines of Hogwarts and big foots. Sighted once in a while,  mythical ever so often, and trammelled where there are green shoots into oblivion

3. Digital: the have and nots of traditionalism have no become the haves and have-nots of the new system.

4. The view of the world is hegemonically based around a corpus of opinion. Thank Goodness Kenya's tech society is punching about its weight.

5.  When was the last time you went to a tech meeting and the diversity of people e.g Women and people of colour blew you away. Nah ! Thought so. I was at one two weeks ago. No comment!

6. Digital has become so corrosive as to discombobulate cultures. We all seek solace in a hashtag culture that erodes rather than strengthens. Somehow too digital has become a Western come-to-product.  If you've nothing to say, even though you might have bombs raining down on you. Shut up, as we listen to an ageing Joe 90 give us a peak.

7. Have we become less experimental now? Was 2000-2005 the last of the chaotic experiments, with big ambitions to change the world. Because now everything looks so well defined as to embolden complacency and erectile dysfunction set in because, guess what. There's no rush anymore, and yes you get this thing digital.

8. Most of the conferences and water holes of the digital spark of the 2000-2005 have folded. Others have been taken over by the multi-companies. Yes I read Clue Train  Manifesto when it first came out too.

9. Digital makes us less empathetic. You notice this in tertiary education. The availability of everything renders little emotional premium attached to the pursuit of that something. It's almost as if there's been a technological revolution, but not a social - digital one.

10. Explore what you can do for others, not what you can do for yourself. Otherwise proclaim yourself an absolutist. Alas there's no problem in doing so, but stop calling yourself digital social networker.

David teaching videojournalism at the Chicago SunTimes

David Dunkley Gyimah is a university lecturer and teaches digital journalism