The University of Quiddity - Viewmagazine's university

You can't remember can you?

And when you do, you want to apply everything you've remembered.

How to be the best,  how to create the most arresting video, how to win friends. It's stupefying that there exist no part in the brain, neuroscientists could have named "how to".

Of course there isn't because cognitive thinking is more peripatetic.

It roams searching for a place to land after imbibing ideas on the way.  "How to" is a resurgent 21st century phenomenon. It is more direct, constrains the matrix of "packet" thinking and its existed in some form or shape since the Book of Ecclesiastes and before.

Then, it provided answers how to lead a rich God-fearing life.  Then as much as now, we digested this knowledge attaching a great deal to its literal denotative value. Turn the other cheek and we physically did, when others walked away.

Today, "how tos"are so pervasive,  we're in danger of heading for a cognitive cul de sac.

We forget like the scene above, structures bend, compositions change, condition differ. In the next second, the pattern of people around me will have altered and I will be moved from my spot.

David Training at the Chicago SunTimes in Chicago.

And that's the analogical point. What works where, and how can never prevail in perpetuity. There is no fixed "how to". The mesh of communications is too vast for packaged formulas.

It was exposed in Mass Communication theory, Users Gratification and Transmission models, albeit, they enjoyed moments in the sun until the 1960s, before the post structuralists took over and now in the 21st Century it's the era of Quiddity, and the Quidditians.

Quiddity

Quidditians want to know why rather than just "how". They're not sullied by the mass, but intrigued by the individual. Their thinking is phenomenological: "to the things they are", one of its architects intoned.

It is about the idea, becoming an author or as Schopenhauer would say, having something to say.

I am considering creating a university. It would combine ethnographic journalism if that's not tautology -articles researched in the field to build knowledge. 

It would consider competing philosophies in conjunction with the warning that everything we learn is conditional. That's the beauty of knowledge,  that the more you learn, the more you understand and the more you understand should undermine previous ideas, which leads to confusion and debates about meanings.

From here further discursive learning should help untangle your state of mind, but this stasis can only be temporary.

A scholar yesterday piously condemned journalism asking for a return to its roots, and abandoning of theory, when the irony was he was himself promoting a theory, a theory of the skeptics, whilst forgetting their is no grand theory any longer. There never was, but we were too concealed from knowledge to know.

There is no tablet of knowledge. Mosses destroyed the principle physically, if not connotatively.

David discusses ideas with Tinia in Lebanon

The university would recognise that it's not disciplines and the promotions of "how tos" that are the principle cause of angst, but that there's something in the art of critique, the bold idea, which drills deeper and deeper  - which by default discards those ten points - and cognitively and flexibly considers how to think like the the prosumer.

It would flatten the hierarchy of learning, where the lecturers train and curate and Quidditians wisdom-of-crowd study.

It would attach more emphasis in our discursive world to artistic practice as expression, and logic or rhetoric as the power to rationale an idea. Then it asks what do you believe in and why?

You can't remember again, can you?

Remember what I have been saying because you might have been expecting a "how to" - that's the crux of the problem.

Here are my ten points...

In his career, David has worked for ABC News, BBC World Service, WTN, Channel 1, Radio 4, Channel 4 News, BBC Newsnight, BBC Reportage and through his thesis is devising a taxonomy of storytelling. See more on Viewmagazine.tv

Is how we teach future TV/Videojournalism flawed - look to the future of libraries!

Photo Courtesy of Ken Mallor, Soundman working for ITN in the 1960s/70s

."..It has been proved beyond question even before the war that it tired the viewer, if over a long period, he has to keep reorienting himself as the producer cuts back and forwards from camera to camera."

The quote comes from 1948 as the BBC set about devising a new programme idea called: "News"

Many, many years on and if the author of this memo were to drop in on his once new creation, he would not find fault.

In my research some of the most respected figures in the industry though can see the seams of News' structure coming apart.

Yet in the absence of a clear solution, which history shows is never a clean break and must often must come from within those structures, the law of entropy prevails.

When a young photojournalist stumbled across TV crews creating a story by what he called 'staging', it's news because someone not native to the form is seeing this for the first time.

It doesn't make it right, but at one point in our history, doctors attempted to cure illnesses by letting blood. You could in your infinite wisdom then have spoken out then but you'd be seen as sententious.


Reworking new ideas

Author reviewing his notes on his study wall

I'm exhausted; but I'm finding the reserves to sum up a couple of years research.

TV News will remains untouched; I have worked in it long enough and possess a healthy appreciation for what it does within its coded system.

My research looks beyond news and some interesting things are emerging. But first the process of discovery...

A PhD is an interesting, sometimes painful pursuit.

It's not interested in commercial knowledge and how one might prove a previous commercial system wrong; neither does it reward personal gain. A PhD looks for what they call an original contribution to knowledge.

And this is not a sweeping, broad canvas statement; a thesis is about burrowing deep, not across, and uses rhetoric and citations to build its case.

I have interviewed more than a hundred experts, read more than a thousand book/ text and watched countless films; sometimes its like looking for a needle in a haystack. One page in a 500 leaf text reveals a crucial link, ad then you're off again.

I've come to the realisation emphatically, rather than whimsically, that if the research holds, then the way we story tell needs overhauling.  Now you could argue, well that's obvious.

But how do you know?

You'll say because .... and I'll ask how do you know. And that process continues to the point where you arrive at the source.

This was Kant, the great philosopher's contribution. Knowledge must be defined apriori - meaning without experience alone, through empirical research.

So in proving a point we arrive at the giants of industry, those who developed ideas, before the structures existed.

Why for instance in the 1960s was a law introduced by an independent body stating news should be free of involvement of its shareholders. For ITN's boss at the time at least it would get the executives of his back telling him what he could and could not do.

Fast forwarding to the present and does this framework still hold?

And it's not just that. But if we believe we need to do more, a digital renaissance to address present issues, just as an aging institution in Seattle has become the model for new learning, then we need new ways of learning.

The libraries  in Seattle and Netheralnds, Dok, include meeting places games zones and  digital learning zones called the media lab, mimicking Apple. Attendance had risen to 80 percent. Innovation has sparked a new appreciation.

It may be that we may the approach developed by the Khan Academy is the approach, where independents requiring change use the Net to test their theories. If that's the case I have got some site building to do.

Research shows News unaffected by the Net

The news agenda has not changed and blogs have had little effect on the news. These were the findings of one of the UK's major media research bodies, in the wake of a major and ongoing piece of research. ( see previous post)

Goldsmith's media is internationally renowned so this research involving extensive ethnographic studies and interviews is not to be taken lightly.

In the face of noticeably huge shifts in the way blogs, twitter and web 2,0 have impacted on news, the reality after the research by academics is it's business as usual.

Some noticeable results

1. Journalists were publishing more across platforms
2. They were over worked.
3. Traditional news set the agenda
4. The mainstream of blogging fed off traditional news
5. There is no real shift in a paradigm as we've been spurting.
6. There was no real participatory exchange between public and traditional broadcasters such as the BBC.

The academics expressed surprise behind their research, which yielded equal surprise from the floor.

Any research and its framing has merits and drawbacks.

That is whether one adopts an interpretive(this link looks at wikis) or positivist epistemology.

Equally the methodologies behind the data can vary depending on the frame work of the questions and who's asking. Social Scientists have wrestled with these two polars for as long as they've acknowledged the differences.

It may sound incredulous that the impact of blogs, twitter and readings from the likes of Dan Gilmor, Jay Rosen, Poynter and indeed Charlie Beckett on which the researchers based their premise, count for very less than what we've assumed.

We can't dismiss Goldsmith's research out of hand, but does it require further analytical research? Would the make up of a highly qualified and venerable team make any difference to the outcome?

Would the pool of interviewees and question framing have changed the results from the times they spent with more than 200 journalists and a number of institutions?

Or as the head of the University of Westminster's research Peter Goodwin asked, is this research too early to determine any significant change in the media landscape?

A point that still does not describe what many web 2.0 practitioners see as a shift in the way news is being orientated by technology.

In one way you're damn if you do and don't if you engage in research which marries new and old media.

I'm due at Wemedia in February, and these findings offer new food for thought, at least from a UK perspective.