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

How good do you think you are and how do you know?

Here's a thought? How good do you think you are at what you do?

It's one of those squirmish questions human resource often inflict on unsuspecting candidates, who must then straddle a line between deprecation and the avoidance of arrogance.

That is, if you are good.

But spare a thought for those whom you might say are not very good at what they do.

John Cleese sums it up as follows - the same cognitive skills that allow you to know you're good at something, can also illustrate how poor you are at recognising how bad you are.

It's long winded, but put simply. If you're bad at something, often you lack the skills to understand how bad you really are. You see it all the time at open competitions, say the X-factor.

Cleese got me thinking more deeply though, because often the act of knowing something boils down to the science of knowledge and how to learn.  This is captured exquisitely in Don Schon's the Reflective Practitioner.

The philosophy of knowing
In Don's book he takes us on a journey of how we learn and how we might qualify that learning process.

Do something, fail, and do it again, reflecting on where you went wrong.  As such, even acts considered futile by others may have merit.

I demonstrated this when I showed a group of students an object and asked what it was. It was an apple, but how could they prove that.

They needed by negation or what Don refers to as hypothetical testing disprove it was anything other than the object in question. They needed to traverse a reflective journey articulating and discarding thoughts.

I often in my first video classes give a camera to clients asking them to go out and shoot. Many students return often embarrassed or disgruntled that they were not given instructions.

I point out there is no formality in what to do. Were I to abandon them at that point, then their fears would be justified, but I then begin to explore their natural ability, untainted learning, around the exercise.

Some will demonstrate natural talent; others will in despair do very little crippled by the fear of not knowing and not wanting to explore.

Which experimenter are you?
Schon devises his experimenters into the following

• Exploratory experimenters
• move testing experimenters
• Hypothetical testers
• and my own interpretation non-testers occupy these realms.

Explorers are what I call jumpers;. They'll take the leap into the unknown with often little guidance, backed by their own fierce temperament.  Move-testers need to see the next link in the chain. If it's not obvious they'll not move.

You meet them in Chess all the time, when you literally have to pull their finger.

Hypotheticals scratch an itch. They've thought about any number of tangible outcomes and will eliminate by active thinking what to do. Non-testers lack the spirit to move in an alien environment.

Child Psychologist Dr Desmond Morris' extensive work with children - the subject of a BBC programme gave some clues. Some toddlers in an experiment were quite at ease playing with foreign objects; others would stand by non-committed.

Perhaps it is preprogrammed, explaining why those who aren't as good at what they do often have no idea about this. But it does help if you're in a safe environment where you can explore your concerns.

This is something that I try and foster in my work. Creativity craves safe environments to work without fear before you let the genie loose.

Providing a safe place and getting people to work together, whilst encouraging the first three aforementioned often helps bring along the non-committed. It's a complex process of behaviour, but often it works. Age, background, self esteem all play a part.


Daring exploits
In 1992 with little more than a piece of paper and a scribbled name I travelled to South Africa for the first time. I was met at the airport by someone I had swapped a letter with. Yes, no emails and mobiles during those days.

It was a huge risk, but he met me and is still a firm friendship today. The fact it turned out he was one of South Africa's up and coming theatre directors adds another layer.

In this world of continual change, the tools- this onslaught online - is only part of the key to innovation. Steven Covey, author of the galactical best seller The 7 habits of highly effective people, provides an insight into interdependency.

It was true back when his book launched to become a best seller then as it is now.

Often it's not the subject that stymies us, but the process of how we acquire and process knowledge that needs greater critical thinking.

And here in a world being levelled by consensus whilst we have the opportunity for collective thoughts - a good thing- we must also be mindful of not losing idiosyncrasies and a sense of inddifference to consensus.  That's not the same as not knowing, more the explorer at their best.

We need more explorers.

News: the net generation -more digital Knowledge.

News: the net generation - more digital knowledge is akin to hyper-hydration if you have not given yourself some room to acclimatise. Teachers, lecturers, trainers and speakers will know instinctively what I'm talking about.

first published in the UK's Press Gazette in 2005. News the net generation. Click to enlarge to read

And so the scene was set as the young apprentice faced Knowledge at the summit of that long and arduous climb.

"Please Knowledge can I have some more?", the apprentice requested.

"And what", Knowledge asked, "do you intend to do with this new knowledge?"

"Seek some more", the young apprentice intoned. "many others are outwitting me".

"Come to the edge" Knowledge said. "Come to this edge".

The apprentice came, hesitantly, reached the edge and then Knowledge pushed the apprentice over the crevice.

And then the apprentice flew.

"When you have exhausted your existing knowledge and tested its flaws, climb the summit again. I will be here, where you may acquire new knowledge and appreciate its currency", was what the apprentice could hear in the distance.


Time to learn
For all the net's fantastic qualities, its Achilles is the notion of immediate gratification, that it must be so, here and now.

We live in such a truncated, metro-data driven, restless society, that the fix we require from knowledge has become so intense, we've forgotten how to gestate, to frankly, chill.

We have forgotten how to let those ideas brew, simmer, produce new nodes and richer thoughts.

After a while, that conference you're going to: different setting, different people maybe, but the message broadly will be the same. If anything the conference-fest is differentiated by the nuances of the personalities.

After a while as we've discovered even the bankers go bankrupt. Prompted by the Her Majesty the Queen's question: why didn't the bankers see the crash, they apologised in so many words claiming they just didn't

In rare cases, the collision of experts, location and juxtaposition of ideas yields genuine discourse as in this video here from SXSW featuring Clay Shirkey and Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture. And where I humbly had 50 minutes to develop my ideas of multimedia videojournalism.

Epic Mania @SXSW coverage Austin 2009 by IM Videojournalism from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

But alas the blog you write can no longer be sustained as a repository of new ideas, if you fail to replenish your own. You may succeed on the surface, but might you think you're now processing, regurgitating tired slips of others ideas?

The new multimedia journalist is one such debate.

The new multimedia journalist - Blue Print magazine - a well known architectural and design mag, where David Dunkley Gyimah wrote about the new digital multimediast in 2001.

Please can I have...
My niece asked for a glass of water. She's three. She did not say please, so her mother requested she ask again.

"David, please can I have a glass of water, quickly!"

At age three she's already learned to seek out her wants "quicker". Okay it's an amusing illustration, but is sums up a state of where we are and where we're likely wanting to be.

Until four years before he came to London, Tamal, now one of Al Jazeera's most dynamic reporters, did not know what videojournalism was. He was a fast learner and today broadcasts out of Gaza to millions of fans, rightly; I'm one of them.

He may not have had the "knowledge" when he came to the Uni, but truthfully, Tamer already had step-in knowledge -which he tested over a year as a postgrad. He had already been a producer and fixer for the BBC. The leap was not so big.

Step-in knowledge is the next step towards your goal, separated only by one or a couple of other steps, as opposed to a whole flight. As Jude Kelly OBE, one of the UK's most respected thinkers in society and the arts says in this video, to get to where you want, it's easier if they're small steps.


Experience and Knowledge
What's my point in all this. That the knowledge you require needs time to be road-tested, to find, as a former Applied Chemistry grad, what we would call "Aha".

Those "Aha' moments stem from getting those small steps right and often taking the odd cataclysmically wrong.

I hope some of my former International students won't mind me saying; some may even be cursing me, but after acquiring that new knowledge and literally and metaphorically been pushed to the edge, its time to fly - and they do.

It's time to test where you are in your own sphere of influence and knowledge - the one where you can affect change, without seeking more new knowledge; ideas yes, but better comprehension. Give yourself some time.

We can still be a Jack of all trades and master of them all, but experience now should be your next teacher. Experience craves time. It is the reason why knowledge (you) may often pay deference to Experience ( your tutor).

Your tutor isn't that bound inside the walls of a university; but is that blog, kiosk, or wise counsel you visit. And experience is unrelated to age, but length of time.

Lewis Hamilton, at 23 years of age, became Formula One's youngest world champion last year, but he'd been driving since he was eight.

Aggasi, Williams sisters, Tiger Woods et al all honed their skills over years.

Trouble with our system of education, is you'll find yourself post graduation - in your early 20s - before you'll take the media plunge. And as intense as any programme is, you need that innings behind you.

Mimetic Media
So the professor walking the corridors, may not have twitted before, but blogged on compuserve's platform and wrote wire copy and headlines at a news agency, so has an inkling of what's involved.

That producer, director with an understanding of story telling, and an appreciation working a camera to tell a stories, may well be able to simulate videojournalism.

That workflow of a newsroom, from years of working there, you've acquired generalised knowledge of the dynamics which may inform the new paradigm of net news flows.

Perversely, but not entirely efficient, there's something in serving an apprenticeship with experts before you're left to your own. Mine was the BBC et al

Have you noticed how many creative are polymaths? Ozwald Boateng, an old friend and super stardom men's designer, is now also making films.

Creatives, with experience, often also with a dose of failures, are highly tuned to what works. That thing called hunch, gut feeling is informed by variables including experience - and yes it doesn't always work, but enough times it does.

So if you're trawling through blogs, books, emailing inquiring thoughts to others in the face of this present environment, I wouldn't despair. Give IT ( knowledge) time to to become acquainted with Experience - and you'll be richer for it. That much I believe I have come to know in my own practice and as a senior lecturer and videojournalist.

When I'm often asked about training in cine-videojournalism. I often reply that I'll need some time teaching the basics in videojournalism. And then, we'll break all the rules that makes cine-videojournalism work. Small steps.

Question is are you giving yourself that much needed time? Or are you also wanting a glass of water, quickly?