2023 is going to be strange year.

I  suspect 2023 is going to be strange year. Visibly, a number of things are being nakedly exposed, even atrophying before our very eyes. Things like politics and its governing system, behaviours that upend equitable actions, and so on.

Yes they’ve been apparent, but we’re increasingly aware of the urgency to do something. What replaces pre-2020 is still in incubation, if not fully formed. It was a bit like this around 2004–2006 with ideas. The first wave 1989–2001 set up a correction for the next jump, and to now 2023?

Except that the last two innovation jumps, whilst opening up new communities have tended to veer towards the notion of capitalism at any costs. What happens next has many already acutely aware of the ills of the past. What happens next, particularly in the engine growth of new economies isn’t to replicate templates elsewhere.

The word “integrated” gets used a lot, because generally work and lifestyles are still seen as actioned as independent silos. It’s that division of labour thing necessary for its time concerning productivity. For instance work until recently was primarily office-based. It was felt if you weren’t in an office, you wouldn’t be so productive, but increasingly, meetings or work is taking place from the home and a balance for output has been found.

Journalism, which I know a bit about over the thirty years is an area that requires an integrated overhaul, but with what? And hasn’t it already been through change? And should it be called Journalism, any longer? Why is journalism important?

it’s a main conveyer belt for knowledge, but its achilles is its set form in which its guard rails can be found struggling against the status quo. Rightly bound by facts, but losing the sense at how it fashions a story so people take positive steps from being informed, taking action for the right reasons, taking action towards bettering society and cultures. AI, behavioural science and Applied storytelling have a role here integrated as one.

There was an out and out model of journalism as news that appeared to work before methods were found to undermine it. A model to inform people in the next wave that fails to integrate behavioural psychology, with applied storytelling, tech and art will only serve to provide what we’re already doing.

Some years back, I wrote about the journalism interfaces that would establish for readers connections in stories. That’s doable now.

In the 1600s the word “Nice” meant to be Ignorant or stupid. Words change, disciplines too. By 2030 I hope the word storyteller or journalist is someone who performs multiple functions from different domains in building things that solve problems, whether that be stories or otherwise.

OUTWITTING THE NEW EXPERTS - GETTING MEDIA IDEAS DONE

Admit it, you're no more interested in what happened 5 years ago, than you are 60 odd years ago, when vast swathes of the media was taking shape.

But there's an interesting phenomenon, which I keep encountering which I'd like to share with you and why those yester years really matter. I have illustrated it with this oversimplified diagram.

1) It goes something like this. At some point in the 20th century or before, or lesser so now, an individual (an exemplar, genius) or a group, often unconnected, discovered something. Let's say in this case television.

2) A number of key figures then came up with their findings that suited them for personal reasons that they would share with others. Television news producers terrified viewers would turn away from their reports if they were longer than 2 minutes kept them short and snappy. They also devised a number of highly relevant schemes for the time, such as how to make a report. The TV equipment was heavy and cumbersome so it shaped their thoughts to keep the camera steady.

3) These key decisions determining television became sturdy and contemporary. If it's not broken why fix it.

4) Then you and I came along. What we observed as contemporary features suited us fine. They had to be true and meaningful, otherwise everyone else would not be using them. It's like your grand mother and father telling you a story. It's true, but it doesn't mean we too need to go and find bicarbonate of soda to clean are teeth.

6) We then decided, based on what we'd observed that this is how things should be and where they're going.

5)  Except that we'd missed out point 5) which arises because at the point that the exemplars (clever people) made their decisions, which were often correct, and before they became contemporary, a number of things changed. What's more, the people who often adopted forms from exemplars had different ideologies from the exemplars.

Why it's all different now
Society changed, the ideology of those who often pushed what the exemplars knew were different, culturally, we've grown, technologically the camera's no longer heavy, and philosophically a range of the original theories or even guidelines have been questioned.

Someone asked the question: what's the appropriate length of a video online. To answer the question, you either conduct your own research, which can be time consuming or expensive ( not really!) or you take heed of what some other clever person is saying. But what you can't say is, just because it was like that before, should be the reason why it is now.

What we know, is only as good as the period it was often devised, and some. Some of the exemplar features ground everything there is today e.g. the motor car, but to understand the true nature of the forces of change and how to get by the new experts, we need to go and talk to the exemplar.

There's a lovely point in the film The Facebook, and whilst I know its fictional, it may just have worked this way when Mark Zuckerberg figures out what people want to see. They want to know about each other, his character proclaims. Zuckerberg the exemplar of his time based his thinking on what people before him, such as Hobbes had discovered in the 17th century about social networking.

Now a brief point, the exemplar is not fixed in a time zone. They exist now as they have over the years, but what separates the exemplar is they started from scratch, with no readily available, prior concept, or already made creation that they mimiced to launch their idea.

And that is the Fork in the road syndrome.

The next time a media expert tells you something ask them how they know :)

Scream if you're brilliant

Nay worries. I'm decidedly mute.

I'm in our library, but it's awfully loud in here. I mean screamingly loud. It's in my head.

And when it calmed down and I decided to hit these keys, I thought:

The singular most powerful idea you have is YOU.

Now this sounds atypically oxymoronic. **** you might even think narcissistic, and best of times, stupid.

We spend our times chasing the tornado and each time it eludes us. It has to.

The quick fixes we search for, only fix a short term habit. The long term solutions require more thought, considerations and commitment.

Look, see, consider, share, act.

Ideas to share
The best idea is You because you know what it is that lights your fire. You're just, a bit like me, a bit flummoxed, how to find it. And when you don't know where it is, the best person to help you is the conversationalist.

Society got so ancy about it, they called them Psychiatrist ~ someone who evokes talk.

A room full of people - all with different needs. Some will inevitably leave a conference bitterly disappointed. Those that don't often attend in the first place to hear what it is that makes them think about themselves.

Scenario 2.

A room full of people, with the same aims. I'd just let them talk to each other, and then come to a consensus. Stand-ups do it much better. "Oi you, what's on your mind?"

In presentation, it's not what you've done for yourself, but what the people present, will do for you.


Twittering on
I speak at a fair few dos, and each time I think: "What it is I would like to know, seated in the audience". In shape shifting mode, I begin to wrestle with myself. Damn it hurts.

Tips here, facts there - all good, but the overall tempo has to be one where the presenter is giving, engaging, clarifying, and making You feel that the world will not come tumbling down on you because 0.7 secs ago, you had not been on twitter.

Or that google wave came and went and you missed the set.

Good CEOs and managers, I learned, leverage their strategies by allowing the flow of modules one at a time. And these often take weeks, months, but what they give you upfront is the ability to start thinking about the differences.

OK, stop!

Why does this matter, because frankly, you're not supposed know everything. Unless you're a self appointed polymath.

I bet Steve Jobs can't shoot documentary as well as you. My point explained. If you're a tweet king or queen, great. If your video skills aren't ace, don't beat yourself up, and vice versa.


Plumbline
Lizbeth Goodman, the Dean of our Phd programme refers to it as your plumb line and circle of influence. Your plumb line is fixed. That's the thing YOU do exceptionally well. It's your comfort, no matter what happens you keep coming back to.

I'm obsessed with visualisation and narrative. My mind works in visualisation the same way I think I speak. It's not rocket science, If I have made/cut/produced some (5)000 videos.

Now you see, if I want to go web design mad, codecs n' all - I know a thing or two about them - I'd have to forgo my love affair with film.

Am I bored? Or plain mad.

Your circle of influence says as you grow your knowledge, expand beyond the realms of your comfort, you'll absorb all this new stuff, but your circle of influence, where you can make a change is the core.

And frankly I'm happy with that. It has nothing to do with tunnel vision, narrowness, but that each step that elevates or comes down supplements your core skills or depreciates it.

In a couple of weeks I'm about to shoot a series of films that last 20 seconds inspired by twitter.

You gave me that idea through us talking. Thank you.

You, You, You.

Postscript.
Now that I have got that out of my system, it's time I went home.

Everyone needs a Rachel

A late night back home, the penultimate train, after a couple of hours in Soho with Rachel, who called up a friend.

Let me explain; we all have dreams, wild ambitious, sometimes half baked and cooky, but they are our dreams.

We toy with them in our heads, occasionally we allow them out and then put them in their pens again.

At times, after a drink or two ( Orange juice) we splutter and meander what it is in a circuitous way that only friends would entertain the pregnant pauses and 20: 20 stares.

And then when we do, some friends sagely looking into their beers, others shrug their shoulders and then there is the Rachel.

What did that mean? Why did that happen? What will that do? Who is that for?

A litany of questions, non threatening, but interrogative, whose purpose is designed for you to dig deeper, explain simpler, see farther.

Rachel is like that.

She's a colleague of mine, but more than that, an unassuming scholar, a practicing medical doctor who gave up the oath to pursue her own dreams and one of those seems to be how she can help those unlock what they wish they could unhinge.

Everyone needs a Rachel.

By the time I finished up to leave, I was much clearer of several questions I have myself shied away from. Her friend a senior exec in Microsoft agreed Rachel is an extraordinary person.

Disruptive media practices and ideas

Scene from Digital Diversity and Communities

"if you want to know about water don't ask a fish"

At no point in their life cycle will any media outfit profess to not know what's going on. They are all, at anytime and place, in brilliant shape.

Before the advent of web 2.0,they would tell you we're doing well thank you and now pretty much the same.

But no one has a monopoly on ideas and even occasionally the most revered companies fall behind the times.


Ideas - where are they from
Some Execs attend conferences, others media gatherings, sometimes you hear inspiring people and some execs invite you in for a chat and take out notebooks - it's happened to you as well huh!

And then there are fantastic PhD Programmes, which I'll post about soon, which play out McLuhan's dictum about fish.

When I had the idea of embedding video into a page with key rich text wrapped around it seemed so obvious.

So obvious that I could actually build it and test it out. This is the original Viewmagazine.tv and you can laugh at my howler.

It is surprising how many basic occurrences, so called "norms" are never questioned, because well they are the norm.

Monet once said, he wished he'd been born blind and then found the ability to see so he could appreciate more the colours surrounding him.

For viewmagazine.tv I got the idea from Minority Report (I tend to get a lot of ideas from design and films) and found it really amusing when the UK Press Gazette previewed the site and said:

"Using View - now on its third quarterly edition - is like stepping into the sort of hi-tech world imagined in Steven Spielberg's science fiction movie Minority Report. more here"

Four years later at an Online News Association meeting recorded on viewmagazine.tv under the Tao of video journalism, the BBC released figures declaring embedded video worked and then the National newspapers hit on the eureka moment.

No, no this isn't about me and smugness, which is crass in itself;humility is a rare but necessary quality in this business. It's about attempting to understand the timeline of past events and how the trend extrapolate to the present.

What some strategist might say- is a Sun Tzu approach

It's no small wonder that MBA or say military students attending Westpoint or Sandhurst spend time studying Sun Tzu et al.

New Ideas?
So what might be some of the next disruptions to come along, that will add schisms to this already agitated news front?

1. 3 D web - Metaverse
The web as it exists today will be like hieroglyphics for a new generation. Greater processor and bandwidth will give you the capacity to enter a web very different to this here and the way we connect the dots: cause and effect will matter fundamentally.


2. Video Hyperlinking
I have been able to cut my first all video hyperlinked video featuring Al Jazeera's Riz Khan and designer Ozwald Boateng. Just as links give you value, a video hyperlink will strengthen you video package.

Two problems! Firstly, will outfits want to provide external video links?
Secondly, how will video hyperlinks affect the exposition of the news package, because oh yes it does something to the video.


3. Negative space
With billboards, the web, the bus, all festooned with all manner of information, you'll be looking for negative space to help you.

Just as you retire to that study, shed, your own room. So at some point they'll be a backlash because as creep sets in, we'll keep on adding asset after asset until the notion of choice itself is difficult.

So how do you cleverly design in Negative_space? What were you looking for in your chill out room because there's a correction on the way

When?

(Shrug shoulders) there's always a correction.

Have an original idea - the people you love to hate

You know them, they quote the Bard, Joyce's Ulysses, and claim to have understood Rushdie's Verses, even though they'd never read em.

You shoot them daggers eyes and mumble something like F@£%%$£ and p^%**.

I was working at Channel 4 News at the time, when The Satanic Verses was released.

Ok, Ok, I'm a simpleton, but I didn't get it.

There!

But then in yesterday's post I mentioned: Alan Kay, Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush.

And anonymous posted a comment:

"The difficulty with this article is knowing which part of it to leave out of a submission to Pseud's Corner...."

He could have been refering to other areas.

But I posted a reply agreeing in part...


The trouble...
The issue I have with the opening para of this post is the unfamiliar names.

Well not entirely, if you get what I mean, but the bit that forces one out of their comfort zone so much that a whole piece becomes inpenetrable can be a pain.

Then there's the equally sinful quoting said figures in succession of each other to support a skewed point.

But worse is when you realise aftewards that the author hasn't said anything worthwhile. They've not had an original thought.

Yahh!

The last one gets me, cuz whilst I believe a lot of what I like talking about is rooted in the past: cameras - degeurotype; the web-memex, it's tiring hearing all that pat again, if you've heard it the first time.

What I like...

What I like is a repository of ideas discussing the new new things, with context, but with a fresh take.

Furthermore I'd prefer if it wasn't so abstract: Mathematics and Multimedia, getouta here.

Though... though... there's a wee point in this: "Wanna know about water don't ask a fish"

Paul Brannan, BBC Exec would make me laugh when I'd extend an invitation for him to pop over to the universty to talk to students.

"Oh good", he'd remark, "I might be in for some original ideas, which I can lift and claim are mine".

The last bit he was joking about.

But original ideas.. yes

We're for ever lifting ideas and remoulding them. This very post is here courtesy of anonymous, but I guess it's the level at which we quote chapter and verse that can become irritable.

Rework ideas, rework em.. that bit at least i hope showed its crown from yesterday's post.

In the end it's that mantra that keeps coming back and that which you feel impassioned and passionate about.

K.I.S.S.

Verbosity is...
I had a teacher in the boarding school I grew up in Ghana.

He used to say "Let taciturnity and serenity be achieved in this architectural edifice".

Effectively, be quiet in the classroom.

We'd never laughed so hard, but soon stopped with wry smiles when we discovered he meant it. That's the way he spoke.

Can't say I have ever quoted Joyce et al in an article, and never will, but the idea of tieing up different thoughts to make a point stick is the stuff of PhD thesis, which ( hick) puts me in a wierd space or not according to the last piece.

But this post/blog is no place for self aggrandisment, but as I've said a notebook of scribbles and ideas; brain dumps, a sort of functional Tourette's Syndrome.

But it's also about engaging and truthfully sometimes it (post ) works and sometimes it doesn't.

And when it doesn't that's when the fun really starts, because that forces you to ponder, rethink those ideas, refine them if possible and perhaps discover something new.

"I exhaust my ideas so I'm forced to think of new one" I claimed in this 60" promo.



"Yeah I can hear you, but not rubbish ones mate" LOL

Ideas..that's why I write this blog for that thing.. that thing.. ideas.

p.s. Yer can't take yerself too seriously

How to get ideas

Just how do you transform yourself into an ideas factory.
more on viewmagazine.tv