The New University of Digital Empathy II

David interviewing VC Geoffrey Copland, University of Westminster. 

Knowledge is a gift.

It's difficult to think that way when the transactions today are real and challenging. Nine thousand pounds per head in the UK next year will put a strain on this.

But knowledge, while all around us, takes shape through a complex, yet looked-on-as-simplified exchange between educators and those being educated.

The gift is in the invisible act that those being educated may feel while they're being challenged, acquiring something beyond what they may have thought - though that may not seem the case at first.

I put together this video in which the VC shared his insight of the future of education.

It also requires from educators a fresh digital empathy. Take this example. I have come across some educators whose feedback mechanism on students work is to write: "this is nonsense", "rubbish" and Caps with "I HAVE TOLD YOU THIS BEFORE".

I have been horrified. A common sense approach and also mandatory amongst educators is to refrain from emotive language in the first place.  It may, just about may, be dismissed on the odd occasion through frustration, but to occur consistently?

That level of frustration requires a round in a boxing gym with a punch bag.

But where's the digital empathy in this?  It lies in the acronym before digital (BD) and after digital (AD)  The action lies in genuine attempt to understand how someone wanting to do journalism today may carry little of the notions that reinforced beliefs a decade ago.

Investigative journalism of a kind that meant pouring over newspaper cuttings and sustained methodological approaches seem byzantine in today's digital, so in fairness the student is not at fault.

That the use of "rubbish" etc should be banished, the frustration that might generate this, must be tempered with what educators now know.

If there ever was a time when the Jarari window plays a deeper role in education (remember Rumsfeld's known unknown) it's now, within this schism between the digital student and the analogue-digital educator.

Of course the role of educator including experience, social skills and a whole range of others layers the educator's role as simply a seller of knowledge.

Again this might have been the 60s analogy, but the role of educating today assumes a vast curatorial one. Educators engaging in dialogue over work they're not familiar with or its not in the module, but believe it has value.

We do this all the time now with links to other people's work.

Digital Empathy is testing all of us in ways we couldn't imagine because the rate of turnover of new artefact's exceeds normalised behaviour; people now walk on the streets head burrowed into their blackberry's texting, and seem to have no concept they may bump into someone.

Artistic practice would have me design corridors on the pavement for text hungry commuters, in the way we have signs saying "No Smoking" or "No phones".

In my next post, I'll explain digital empathy from a student point of view and how sharing, and journalism's fixated prerogative can lead to unusual situations.

The New University of Digital Empathy

 

The logic is clear enough.

As unitary disciplines have evolved and diffused into one another, systems that once worked to manage these disciplines are becoming redundant - and themselves should change.

Often these rules and regulations - which set boundaries - and have been developed incrementally over the years can find themselves under strain.

Take the example of the lecture theatre - designed to hold many - in a structure that has the professor of the 60s onwards delivering tablets of knowledge in a "them and us" scenario. Its default in behavioural positioning is an acknowledge deference.

Were a stranger to walk into the lecture theatre he or she might immediately know who the lecturer is.

Then digital happened. Laptops became accessible. Then one day educators the world over - where these devices were available witnessed the emergence of a new phenomenon.

As the educator was lecturing, the student was tapping away at their keys. A new digital doodling - one that sometimes had purpose in Facebooking and emailing had  arrived. What is one to do?

The logic is clear, as systems change they require new approaches. If the phenomena is embedded enough this has the potential of a new philosophy that I might call a "Digital Empathy".

Whilst Empathy is about the ability recognise and share in the feelings of others, the digital is not merely a bolt on, but a constructed approach to understand new paradigmatic advances in these recent years.  Its complex but the nuts and bolts to build new systems exists. 

Some of the aforementioned resides in engagements within artistic theory. I'll explain.

For the digital student, the use of a laptop in lectures is seen as a natural state of affairs. They've always been there. And while I'm not entirely certain we've fully developed bicameral absorption ( reading and watching use different brain functions) we need to find ways to mediate the use of technology.

For the educator that requires a Digital Empathy.

Do you a) say no computers during lectures
b) allow but say no FBing or emailing
c) Allow - with no conditions.

Our predilection to want to tweet, FB, is established, so the accommodation becomes a conversation around new compromises. Artistic practice provides a level of responsibility in engaging with works and estates. It's not a classroom or lecture bound manifestation, but a public space where we can transmute behaviours and etiquette.

The rewards for participation and penalties for transgression should be made known, not as dogma of a past generational - good ol days- but a feature of how matters are evolving now.

In the next two posts on the University of Digital Empathy, I'll look at what I believe is an educator's increasingly new role and some things that ill-suit the digital era and an example of students navigating this new space.

In Memory of Steve Jobs and Apple

Pic Apple front page

Steve jobs has died, aged, 56.

The news weighs heavily on the mind. Actors, famous people, VIP and loved ones exit the stage and invariably we know little about them, other than through their films etc. With relatives the mourning is an  intimacy developed over many years.

In reflecting on Steve Jobs, you could be forgiven for suggesting you've lost someone you knew beyond the reality of film or a computer screen, some how he was a bit closer.

That's partly because his legacy is profound. The device I am typing this post on is an Apple. The phone I hold is an Apple. My first ever computer I would type on, marvel over, was a baby Mac.

It was in 1993. I was living in Yeoville, South Africa and a good friend of mine, Barry Sandland, had an idea to publish an entertainment review newspaper. It involved a lot of work. He put together 8 to 12 tabloid-sized pages weekly and I would often contribute the odd item.

One day I'd been sent a floppy disk and unaware of what, now, we could refer to as "incompatibility issues" reached out to stick the disk in the Apple's drive, just as Barry was screaming, "Stooooooop.

Too late.

The disc jammed. The publication didn't make it that week, and from the small sums of money Barry earned, a local technician fleeced him to the tune of $80 - which meant opening the Mac with a screw driver and pulling out the disc.

We were not to know that at the time.

I purchased my first Mac many years later in 1999. It was a Powerbook, which I bought in New York because it was cheaper to buy one in the US inclusive of the air ticket London-New York return. Fancy that, hopping on a plane from London to New York, just to buy a Mac.

There will be many tributes to Steve Jobs who has touched the lives of millions of people in the way he influenced mine. On the Guardian Newspaper Tech Editor Charles Arthur delivers a poignant one about  who he was, what he stood for.

It's rare as Arthur recounts how a person can accomplish one major feat in their life. Jobs did several: the music industry in iTunes; computing and lifestyle in hardware; extending lifestyle choices through software; the film industry through animation;  for A list presenters, a relentlessness in making professional presentations look easy; and for marketeers how to build product expectation.

Those late night stay-ups gathering at a London Apple store won't be the same. And all the aforementioned wrapped up in "how to look cool".

My reflection is also selfish - if that is the word - because without Apple I couldn't do the things I'd like to do and therefore am grateful to Apple in that manner of "not-being-worthy" for my looped "15 mins" on their Apple Pro website, as well as presenting twice and hopefully more at the Apple Store, London.

RIP Steve Jobs and Apple. Long live the memories of Steve Jobs and Apple. Our thoughts are with his family and close friends.

Rise of the Machine. Let the Machines make the News - how humans keep failing

Terminator 3 Rise of the Machine - Columbia Tri Star 2003

At the point that everyone understands the narrative, how to get their point across re; Newsnight, how to even manipulate the events and plots as observed through programmes such as Big Brother, there cease to be, what could be described as "truthful events", just self-mediated narratives, David Dunkley Gyimah asks is it time to hand over the media to the Machines.

By lending John Smith $250,000, Drew, an analyst, knew Smith at some point would default. 

Drew in turn through a labyrinthine  transaction would bet against a particular bank writing off that debt, and also posting a downturn in their balance sheet. $250,000 was small enough to go unnoticed but big enough for him with 8 such clients to make his small fortune.

That was the story?  This is my fictional account of an event that would become cataclysmic and spiral into truism, so stay with me.

Writing in Business Week Peter Coy investigates how subprime lenders hid an impending crash from vigilant overseers. It goes back to 2004 he adds, with this from Michael Youngblood an Asset Manager who's talking about how subprime went unnoticed for so long:

'The change was little-noticed, because the lenders actively denied it. "To my disappointment as a long-time analyst," says Youngblood, the major lenders insisted that they had not lowered their credit standards long after they had begun to do so".

Just over a week ago a London city trader Alessio Rastani caused widespread shock in the industry when he told the BBC this story that:

"Traders 'don't really care that much' about the prospect of an economic collapse... He said: 'Personally I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I have a confession, which is I go to bed every night, I dream of another recession'".

Lots of narratives, stories, but at no time in the intervening years  of subprime and even before then have we heard such a story, which we deem to be truthful.

We all tell stories, some believed to be more important than others. The feature story sates our craving for the "enjoyable" story. Its value may be distant, so it impacts in a different way. The documentary for the untold, now to-be-told and the news story plays to a more immediate impact. Its value has a greater currency.

But there's a problem - one in which social scientists have girdled their portfolios with standards and practice to combat: yellow journalism, ethical dilemmas, the hypodermic needle theory and the rest, so the question is:

1. How inadequate is the media at large, at this time, in capturing and retelling truthful stories?
2. Should we hand over the retelling of stories to seek truth to the machines?

The first point must be explained a bit further. This doesn't mean not professional or poor at telling the truth, but it is increasingly finding it difficult to find a mechanism to extract, relay truth for the narrative, within its existing methodology.

And as such the story telling and narrative have become a currency debased. Just tell any story, the story that we expect, our narative - who cares?  Publish.


Psychologist Julian Jaynes using one of the earliest artefacts in storytelling Iliad posited the idea that
humans circa 500BC were different mentally to today's lot. They lacked consciousness, so obeyed without questioning their gods.

Consciousness, and the period of enlightenment altered this. Deity and religion were challenged.

Two questions arise now. Has our consciousness in this day and age evolved sufficiently from the aforementioned period to make the right decisions. Yes! Secondly, have we consciously become enslaved to new gods within the media? We hold that what we hear in the news is unquestioningly true.

And if the media doesn't say it, we can be certain it's either not important or its not happened, or did and has been resolved. So the famines in East Africa, there are none any more.

There are two issues here; getting to a story, and its truth, and how that story is relayed truthfully.

Poisoned Media Tree
The story at the top shows how fruit from the poisoned tree perpetuates, with each media organ largely retelling or not a flawed narrative, so the not telling of the truth in subprime, the media not telling that story,  becomes a tsunami later with unimaginable consequences.

You could apply this to everything that emerges from the media. After all the media is human and thus responds to existentialist qualities of being human e.g fear, emotions, consciousness.

It attempts to address qualities of truth and getting to the story by the use of a plethora of  standards refined over the years.  But that still hasn't prevented it from getting it woefully wrong.

And if you thought subprime an exception,  consider The Guardian's Paul Lewis on how he believes the reporting of the recent London Riots was woefully inadequate, despite its back to back coverage.  He might be a lone voice, but I believe we should pay attention.

The end question I consider then is do we need machines to make our news? Could the machines do a better job?

Of course this begs the question of what I mean by machines? Something non-sentinel that is not prone to emotions and can get to the truth and eschew congnitive dissonance.

To an extent we already do that in cameras recording, television's relaying pictures and the rest. Before the camera we had no way of retrieving for analysis what someone said. We took our notes as gospel at the time, but even with the camera as Roland Barthes notes the image does not project a truth.

Through the lens of a camera the story is still mediated by human agents. But as I write this and blogged months ago, manufactures are looking to address this.

The rise of the machine here is a  camera with secondary sensors. One that records data e.g. pupil dilation, skin temperature, voice register etc. that when added to the narrative can bring more valuable information to the veracity of the subject's narrative - though again that data is likely to be interpreted by humans.

The telling and interpreting of stories is seemingly the stuff of Sci-fi. In Kubrick's 2001 HAL the space ship's computer shows a fallability, if not seemingly displaying emotion to getting to the truth.

In a film shown by former Edingburgh Film Festival Director Mark Cousins, a South East Asian reporter investigating a highly secretive story buried from WWII is seen on camera beating the truth out of his interviewee. When the secret is revealed he backs off; Canabilism amongst the troops.  In A Few Good Men (1992), the point is dramatised: You can't handle the truth!

I'm not suggesting violence to extract the story, the truth - for torture and the ethical question of getting the the truth of the story by justifying the means is contestable, and clearly wrong according to the former head of Britian' Intelligence Service Eliza Manningham-Buller 

Let the Machines make news may seem far fetched, until you consider Robert Harris' research for his new book Fear Index about how Super Computers are preying on our human fear to make money. He writes in the Mail:

"In the 20 minutes I was watching, the machine made a profit of $1.5 million. This hedge fund has made a return for its investors of more than 80 per cent in the past three years, at a time when most of us have seen the value of our pensions and tracker-funds go down in a falling market".

Harris' point is the machines are the one's running the economy, with humans merely in attendant similar to fly-by-wire piloting. And if the narrative resides in the few who entrust machines to make money, surely to meet their match it's as a good reason also to have machines decipher and tell the news.

It's like the equivalent of Kasparov playing Deep Blue - even then when it was a crusty computer.

How we use Machines might be the lesser connudrum than the economic and technological debate of its consequences. But it's worth consideration, unless that is....

David Dunkley Gyimah is a PhD Candidate at SMARTlab, University College Dublin. A former BBC and Channel 4 News freelance producer and winner of a number of international journalism awards and would be interested in expanding on this at talks, seminars and conferences.

Tips for becoming your own star - Dream Big, Go Do!

Bray, Dublin. Stepping out for a walk.

The tips are below :)

Head cranked back, eyes trained to the distance, and a flickering light signals what it is I have been missing out on all these years.

There it is says Allison pointing upwards Cassiopeia and if you look between the two stars there is the North Star, and there to your left, the Big Dipper... and just over there, her finger gently wavering is Jupiter.

At that point I swear I could hear Gustav Holtz the Planets.



And just as well. The morning had been the stuff of combat, textual combat: trying to make an argument, constructing a methodology - this simple, but not simplistic pursuit.

The diffusion of our aims and ambitious, brought on in part from displacement of traditional methods, means there is no one way of doing something now.

Studying to be what ever it is you want, well the rule book has been torn up. Working in an institution for sustainability and profit? Well in our economic uncertain times, the rules have been shredded.

About the only constant is Cassiopeia. She was there from the crust becoming an earth, and she's still bang right there now, though some smart alec astrologer is likely to tell us she since moved a bit. Them stars, eh always moving.

Such disunity is perhaps one reason why we seek structure. It's another reason why we crave solutions: good points- bullets in blogs to cut past all this gunk. The gunk preceeding this.  If we can keep it simple, but not simplistic - job done.

But the simple things are often the hardest, distilled from years, hours of work to generally assist in what it is we're after. Point. You try writing a story captured in 25 words, when 40 will do. All of a sudden you're admiration for tabloid journalism becomes, well, stellar.

So after all that star gazing I headed back in and reflected on the things said to me to get me over those gordian knots and in the spirit of simple, but not simplicity. Here they are:

1. Get angry - if you must, get frustrated. You will. Step out for a walk and then ask yourself what are your options. Realise there is only one. Risk winning or failing? Step in and go for it again.

2. Be practical about what you aim to achieve and the time you can put to it. There are two variables in your equation for accomplishing a task: Time and You. One of them refuses to be moved about.

3. It's said you get to know yourself when you push past your limits. Mental strength untapped exists for the taking. It's what will get you back onto the task.

4. Imagine where you want to be, rather than where you are. Skiers and F1 racing drivers do this as a matter of course. They know something we don't?

5. Then work backwards how you make that journey work. What is it you need, where is it that needs looking..? e.g. what do you need to do to make films like Kendy


Release (Director's Cut) from Kendy on Vimeo.

6. Stay close to those who know what they're talking about. The wisdom of crowds is only as good as who is in your crowd. Smart people (stars) aren't generally born, takes a lot of work, and often working within the crowd.

7. The Bell Curve is prescriptive at how you might be, where you are placed. Prove the Bell Curve wrong...

8. Think through your methods, and construct for yourself your own methodology - how others go about doing what they do, will undoubtedly help you. Methodologies can be thought of a series of methods strung together that yield a unique strategy to accomplishing a task

9. See if you can make up tips approaching a nice round number such as 10.

10. There!

Now where's that star gone?

Why we tell stories

Little Lukas is gorgeous. I took this this  morning.

His first reaction entering the house is to dart after George, the cat,  making those exemplary scary attack sounds, which all cats the world over fear from human beings around a foot in height and not quite ready to say "C'mon here cat, who loves youuuuu. Cueeey".

I'm in Bray, a coastal town in Dublin on a one week retreat with PhD colleagues - all nearing their write up stage. That culmination of five, six years work now to be delineated into a comprehensible and comprehensive argument.

PhD colleagues at the SMARTlab, UCD

The environment is one any writer craves. No television, radio, few worldly distractions. Instead space, the sea on your doorstep, and the kindness of colleagues and PhD staff who can help you reify your thoughts, build up that all important knowledge tablet.

1. Through the window - shot taken working on desk
2. Then 15 paces outside the house - the sea

Remarkably I seem to have got more done in the last three days; the thought of just coming here, being an added spur, than I have in a long while. From a morass of words I believe I have constructed something in the spirit of dialectics that builds on a pervasive and acceptable model within film and aesthetics.

Of course that it what I believe, yet it may well not be the case for you, when it's published. Doctorates, our Dean tells us are meant to break eggs, and in the process you may well upset a few people.

Why we tell stories
Over breakfast, I find myself talking with friends about transitions and space, and the essence of factual films, and fiction for that matter.

Why are we drawn to stories, why do we like telling them? The Epic of Gilgamesh is a starting point. Yet there exist a host of reasons. Some film makers like seeing themselves, others showing their friends what they do. Some film makers pursue more personal quests other than to entertain.

My reasons involve change. Stories that involve the interstices of one's life where uncertainty momentarily rules. But where the conviction of the subject, their mental strength within this change signals - what ever it is they want, will be fought for.

Subjects from Tahrir Memento - film trailer screened at the Sheffield Doc festival

These stories exist all around us, but the state I'm interested in exploring is more Deleuzian than physical. Though yes, the physicality of the subjects must be shown as well. That's what Tahrir Memento tried to capture: young people witnessing personal change. That change became allegorical for the country as a whole. Hence many people might identify with it.

And therein is the cause-effect of my idyll for stories. That by way of pleasing myself - for I am the maker and audience's barometer [ dangerous and full of pitfalls if you're an inexperienced video journalist] I make something that I hope inspires others.

It's not an altruistic pursuit, for what attracts me, may not necessarily attract others. However I'm quietly confident that through out the years of working in various broadcast and public institutions you become attuned to what may have universal attributes.

A story was recounted this morning. A football player whose career is coming to an end. Injuries have got the better of him. This individual has now put his mind to coaching others at a local level. Therein is change. How might the footballer do?

We can't tell, but I do know that fighting spirit that made him a formidable player at a high level will be evident for others.

There will be doubts, there always is, but there will likely be a magical ingredient that we all will be mesmerized by. It is one we wish we could bottle to help our own lives - that's what my camera wishes to capture.

And that,  if anything is factual film making - one of a couple of reasons why we tell stories. The writing continues...

I want to be a journalist

Mr Westbrook's right. His post on 10 ways to make the most of your journalism course hits the right buttons.

Adam also gives a reality check for aspiring journalists. 14k a year- that's if you can find a job at the end. These are indeed tough times. In the UK it's 2000 new applicants for roughly 200 media jobs - a piece of stats quoted from newsbeat about four years ago.

It does beg the question. Why you want to be a journalist in the first place, really?  But the world needs nosey parkers. I mean those who are bothered by things and can see how journalism can be used to scratch that itch.

As Marr writing in My Trade says in the UK we've not quite mastered journalism as a profession. It's something you kind of fall into and then haphazardly make your way. Well, you can't even rely on that any more.

I tend not to speak directly about what goes on campus. Even in the digital open world, some things must remain safe for students and participants to engage in without feeling exposed. That's what are classes are "safe environments' to make mistakes - an artistic practice, which journalists might call Chatham House Rules.

Hopefully within are safe system we can harness a spirit too of reciprocity. However speaking in general terms, hopefully class of 2011 have already had a taste of journalism 101.

In other words a simulation of the real world in the lecture environment. Broadly and it's one that many students share, journalism can still come across as a light switch which is a given. Quite literally you grab the switch of the wall and et voila' you're now qualified to do societies' bidding.

Adam draws your attention to the pros and conversely cons. If there is a wider observation about trainee journalists it's what academics would refer to as what constitutes  a "comfortable epistemology".

Fortunately, and if it were the case I wouldn't say - at least this year, but everyone knew about 9/11. Last year that wasn't the case with one student, who needed prompting several times before making the connection.

9/11 just wasn't something the student was familiar with. But 9/11 is just a wider reality and expression for journalism knowledge.

The journalism curve that shot up so exponentially in 2005 has stabilised, with my mother even knowing what a tweet is - and she is most definately non-techie. This plateauing is a source of jubilation and trepidation.

We're moving storytelling on - (sigh!) finally, but now everyone can do what you do. However, employers as a matter of employment evolution, need a fresh crop of youngsters to fill in the yearly musical chairs of retirements, resignations and those moving on.

So there's still hope for the job, but the suits now can't be hoodwinked. "Er Yes really get a twitter account and you'll save your paper".  Quite! At a conference with now Guardian Journalist Jemima Kiss years back, I remember someone from the floor saying all managers needed to "hire a youngtser, and not just for Christmas".

Then tweeter was an insult to be confused with twit.

The Today Journalist
Today then young aspiring journalists might need a little bit more, which combines academic rigour, technical saviness and a maturity that allows them to oscillate from team work, to isolated periods of being alone, either as entrepreneurial journalists or freelancers. Yes, it goes on, but each year, requires a new confidence to cope with the world.

It boils down to using the year to learn something often not taught, but by default made available - human behaviour in a digital age. Why will one person read your blog, as opposed to a lot more? How do you make your presentations attractive, while being caustic with your keys? What is it that sets us off?

One student who wasn't on our course wrote "journalism sucks". Already? Whilst another lamented what was a facile exercise in monitoring and deconstructing media?  Deference aside, a sought after commodity within any discipline, sometimes its difficult to ascertain cause and effect- unless you're in the army and you don't question that.

No, I'm not suggesting you don't question. In fact question some more and some, but at the point where your lecturer tells you "it's time for a death march", you could trust them.

As Dorothy Byrne says in results from my Phd enquiry; '"Those doing news now could trust us TV lost a bit more, we have been doing it much longer than them". Yep and I can hear the counter argument too, but there is a case to had here.

 And if you don't know what a death march is....

So here's my two bits to bolt on to Adam's. Journalism doesn't stop outside the lecture room, in fact that's when its intensified. Become voracious at everything - including steep lessons in contemporary and classical media histories.  Social networks for instance did not start with facebook. grrr! Thomas Hobbs Intelligent Commonwealth more than 400 years ago

"Commonwealths ( woops, sorry Hobbs) Social Networks can be formed in two ways: through institution, or agreement; and through acquisition, or force. Although the group of people taken by force under a sovereign’s rule may resist the acquisition and depose the sovereign before he takes control"

Discuss and Share, not just tweets, but that round table drinks session at the pub. If you can squeeze in the EU bail out and what the heck it means, in between Desperate Housewives, you're morphing into the journalist.

We're entering a pernicious time in world politics, the economies doing its impression of a shark with tonic immobility. Money men meanwhile are lining their pockets with the fear that if the world collapses, they'll find a new home on Mars.

Oh yes - all of a sudden it will make no sense.

A labour party is in stasis, with a leader who looks like he's taking lessons from Thatcher, while the incumbent rulers are about to go to their conference and tell us we've never had it so good. By this time next year, the UK and a number of countries will not be what they were. The US elections looks like being the mother of all ding dongs.

All this is grist for the clever journalist, but it won't come looking for you. It's who dares wins. Truer back then, ever more so, now.

Political wastelander in Liverpool

Add caption

So, what will Ed Milliband's resignation speech be in 2014/15 after a defeat in which the majority of the populace would have been yearning for an alternative to the status quo?

Something saccharin and how he'd giving it his best shot, and a smacker thank you to party loyalists. The incumbents of No.10 couldn't give away the keys to government even if they tried.

Politics gives rise to that psychiatric condition known to others outside it of "distinct disillusionment".

It's when you're bestowed with praise for being a perfect leader, while unbeknown to the nominee reasons that have little to do with their own ability.

Call it the Over-X factor. Once the judges praise an individual, they often run the risk of believing in their own magnificence only to come hurtling back and burrowing into earth with a phsssh of a thud.

As the Labour party prepare for the week in the news at their party gathering in Liverpool, what must activists be thinking, as council in some roman tragedy silently tuttut against him.

Until two months ago, Ed still looked like something out of a Disney character. He did what he could but it never stuck. How close did he come to being shown the door? We might never know, until the gamble of going up against the Murdocks presented himself.

Perhaps he had no choice. Last chance saloon and all that. But it won him credits, that in reality now, he still doesn't seem to know how to cash.  Unless the cynical ploy of Uni fees being pegged to £6k is what he perceives to be a vote winner.

Why do people believe to possess something they don't; their delusional state screaming at everyone but them. At least King George VI had a stutter which accounted for an uneasy quiet across the auditorium.

That's because every potential incumbent enters politics and reach for the highest office looking like something of a nerd. They all learn on the job. They all try to convince us they are prime ministerial material.

Blair's Bambinism made him to inexperienced; Foots intellectualism suited ideologists but heavens what would he do if he got in. Cameron and co were the Bullingdon privileged. Even those who showed their metal were seen through understudy eyes. Winston Churchill just wanted to shoot em up.

There's a great film in the archives of a heist in the early 1900s, when the siege turns nasty and police corner the villains in a house that would eventually burn down, Churchill as Home Minister can be seen in old cine camera shot wielding a gun.

The summer hols appears to have done Ed some good though. He talks with the wind of a slalom behind him, jabbing at every point thumb pressed to index finger, and fixing his interviews with the stare that would make goats keel over an die.

Politics Media school course 101. If you close your interviewee down or come swiftly on their heels you negate any notion you're a ditherer. The electorate love that. Yes only if they're all jabawabers.

Trouble is Ed could do a Maggie, lower his voice range for a more masculine effect, and correct his posture so he looks inches taller,  but is anyone listening as we shuffle our feet looking at the specks of dirt.

The conceit of the disillusionment  means even if the patient is told they're still in denial. So to 2014 it will be, and the winner paradoxically will still be Mr Milliband.

For his loss and loss alone won't hide the fact that he led her majesty's opposition for so many years, and built up a small nest of supporters who will now acquaint him post-leadership with the hall of fame. History has a habit of being kind to those who falter. Milliband can count on that.

People of Color Must Innovate or Die in Digital Media

 On Media Shift from January, the ff from Knigh News Challenge Winner Retha Hill :

In December in this space I asked about the lack of minorities at new media conferences -- both as participants and as speakers. The blog post generated a lot of comments; a Twitter discussion, and the start of a list of wonderful experts -- all persons of color -- who can help make your next new media conference a success..  You can read more of Retha's post here

This is what I posted back

Hello, Retha et al,

I'm a tad late to this ongoing debate. Perhaps I need to get my bookmarks in order?  But I would add that while the cause, a lack of diversity in digital is as much an issue in the UK, I posit a number of suppositions why this is so our end.

I've arrived at these from my position as a senior lecturer and fmr broadcaster e.g. BBC and digital media maker over 25 years. Of course these deserve some empirical research but here goes:

1. There's a blurring division between digital now as a media industry and mainstream media when it comes to major job prospects. Hence mainstream media's Achilles of a lack of diversity has been passed down/up the technology food chain.

2. Whilst in the UK, there have been initiatives to encourage ethnic employment, which were geared towards a political era e.g. 80s and 90s, I'm not sure there have been any specific running initiatives of note encouraging diversity in the digital age.

2a If anything an underlying notion would have it that since digital apparently levels the field, there's little inclination to support diversity in digital e.g. encouraging more speakers of colour, or job prospectors. Democratization, as an oft repeated phrase suggests anyone can do this if they get the tools.

3. The lack of diversity at conferences may be visible, though arguably in the UK in the digital mags there's a high number of people of colour as pundits. However there's respectable levels of  activity I see outside from diverse groups. So perhaps it's about relevance. Many of the conferences being staged around digital have a high bar to attract industry figures and correspondingly medium to high fees.

4. A cause - effect of the steep and competitive knowledge economy has led to stark tiering, most obvious in education and media. You only have to cite the number of blogs by diversity groups /individuals within mass-distributed networks as an example.

5. This here is an interesting one for me that needs investigating, but if the net is about social networks e.g. communities and cultural attractors, even though any app purporting to help the aforementioned will have universal values, there s a perceived notion amongst pros I have come across that strategies to attract specific varying groups has a reduced need for others. 

How do we combat these and the many more other digitalists have noted? For me, its encouraging groups and individuals to become more interdisciplinary, to continue to probe into areas that mainstream and mainstream digital are yet to access. It's not a panacea, but it might help a bit for this and the next screen generation.

David
UK Knight Batten Winner 2005 viewmagazine.tv

Movies of the mind

The idea of storing data in your mind like a mobile hard drive may not be far fetched.

In a fast approaching world where all data is being shared courtesy of the Facebook Internet by-law of 2018 - 'Share or we'll kick you offline", the only place to hide data may not even be a hole in your cranium.

Credit: Image courtesy of Freie Universitaet Berlin

If scientists can drive cars now purely through thought and electrode cables, then how far till we a) attempt to manifest these thoughts in a corporeal form e.g. movies, and then for someone to hack them anyway.

That's another discussion.

Movies of the mind already exist. Fictional Cinema. The illusion of the zoetrope - of flickering images that convince us of movement is a conscious aberration which we've shrugged off and accepted.

But creating films from the mind, well - that could involve a different sort of data excursion. Liquid films, altered realities.

This whole schema kicked at me this morning thinking about projects for the forthcoming festival of death at the Southbank.

Jude Kelly OBE, the Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre called us ( artists in residence) for a meeting about what we might have planned. I have got several, but one involves a taxonomy - which has emotional as well as business/ commercial values.

Language lives. We find new ways to express ourselves linguistically, though when was the last time you did this visually. Cinema linguist Christian Metz would have had something to say about this.

VideoJourney Beginning

 

Journey Beginning is an example of work which expresses transitions. In many way it represents the aestheticization of data again. By that I mean, we have become pre-occupied with making everything look appealing, as opposed to beautiful ( Kant), though I accept beautifying data is also on the rise.

Hans Rosling in this video on TED is beautfiying data

In the midst of writing this post, I went over to my tweet account and saw this:

zimbalist Michael Zimbalist

by evanvucci

Scientists use brain imaging to reconstruct the movies in our minds. You've got to watch the video to believe it. Wow. newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/bra…

Amazing ! We're nearing the area of videojournalism transcendentalism or reverse psychoanalysis. 

where were you?

Another world's sun

Out there

Last remnants of the old world

The road of no return

Viewmagazine.tv research, strategy & practise - new ideas for the future

The mood is changing. Slowly, surely in redefining critical theory from an unfurling future of journalism,  we're reconciling attributes that previously were divided: research and practice.

Part of the cause has been educational cutbacks, the other has been policy changes. The result, to push for academic research, which brings kudos to an institution and individual, with practical current knowledge of the status quo  - a tall order sometimes.

By research I'm referring to a reflective practice of interrogating existing knowledge or finding new ideas. And broadly, broadly, speaking practice in industry can be that which is traditional i.e. it always happens this way, or artistic.

Artistic practice rarely gets a look in within journalism which is rule-bound. It should, and will increasingly become so. That's the essence of multimedia at work.

The rub between theorists and practitioners is a perennial one. Theorists might talk about changing semiotics, practitioners film/shoot what feels right. Critical theory and strategy emerges from studies, yet the parameters of what and how we study sets up its own truth value.

Old journalism needs new creatives. Well yes, it always has, but what's different this time? And what are the certainties that still need to be retained?

Meanwhile, the thought becomes: How do I do this, better, yes, OK, but financially competitive than before, Or otherwise how do I do this at X cost and reap a dividend of Y profit.

We want to create the polymaths; I welcome that, but as an exercise its futile if there is no incentive from within oneself and what's perceived as industry expectation.

Shifting Media Aesthetics
When I use a third-shift aesthetic in my work. The term second shift emerges from Prof. Caldwell's book on New Media in 2003, I'm referring to collapsing different disciplines and rewiring a new practical-theory. However I can, I believe only understand what that process will yield if I have sufficient knowledge of both disciplines - as practice.  I must also be aware of what's going in industry.

Multimedia Sound from Viewmagazine.tv

Good multimedia I contend comes from an implicit deep understanding of sound/ audio and the image within the context also of creativity. That's why we bookmark sites like Devigal's Interactive Naratives, Multimedia Shooter and Honky Tonk Film's , to name a few. 

Creating websites from scratch which Viewmagazine.tv, my site, stands as one example that may have little currency for someone entering mainstream, I know that! But it otherwise may foster an entrepreneurial spirit. This is the currency of research and practice in action.

The schism between research and practice manifest itself all the while in Hollywood.

Experts talk about catering for the audiences, while another set claim the audience does not know what it want's until it's given it. No one was crying out for a film called Avatar, or Blade Runner. These were visions of the practitioner, but we all flocked to the cinema.

At some point research and practice combined:  audience research kicked in, defining publicly in this case an alternative ending to what Ridley Scott wanted. He would later release the Director's cut.

The point here is that storytelling is phenomenological, it emerges from within you. The subject informs you, and whether by rote or artistic practice you set about building your creation. You the creative decides.

Converging Research and Practice
So here's a question. Has the Internet changed journalism? There's a philosophical pursuit that despite the turmoil of the last few years can still be justifiable written up as "undecided". Arguments and sophistry, as opposed to dialectics, set out to mark victor and vanquished.

"You want the truth, you can't handle the truth" was uttered from A Few Good Men(1992). In practice, the truth combining practice and theory is an evaluation that reveals elasticated flaws and truths on both sides. It depends who you've read, who you cite, and how they tally with your own beliefs, and the logic of your own argument.

For a good while now we've been caught in an eddy of an industry looking for answers, sated by one mega conference after another extolling what's next. It's big business now, though less frenetic than it was three years ago.

Bridging what exists in journalism industry real world, with theory/practice in academia can often be the tail wagging the tail of another dog. The industry looks to new ideas from outside itself, but often may disregard them, until as such time its perceived as a critical mass effect.

Editorial systems often mean one person holds the key to any change. And sometimes for  legitimate reasons change cannot be implemented.  Real world issues such purchasing new macs are prohibitively expensive when for the last twenty years you've been windows-based. The practice-theorist ought to know that.

Yet often theorists and practitioners clash. Real world, and exercise world are parallel universes, touching each other but not, well, overlapping. That's what could change. If the future sees more of the convergence of practitioners with research knowledge who knows?

We might start producing some interesting truths.

David Dunkley Gyimah has worked in the industry since 1987, and lectured Masters, as well as MBAs and industry professionals since 1997. He is currently completing his practice-based PhD with SMARTlab, University College Dublin. Viewmagazine.tv is where he discusses industry practice and theory.

Creative fight Club - working after the Storm (Brian Storm)

Tyler Durden: I want you to hit me as hard as you can.
Narrator: Why?
Tyler Durden: How much can you know about yourself unless you have been in a fight.

 WHOOOOOA! WAIT.

Fight Club is a phenomenal film on so many levels: the script, the directing (Finch); and the philosophy embedded in the above statement.

Now for the many of us who don't want a fisticuffs and bruised body's there's something else to savour.

I rephrase: How much do you know about yourself unless you have been in a creative fight?

As much as I can, I take the chance. I cheat a bit because as a lecturer I get some students who creatively push me. Educationists and trainers know about this. But then there's the other side, the hardcores.  These are the pros at the top of their game who in Bergsonian speech:

"...imagines relations of magnitude, which adjust themselves to one another. mathematical functions which go evolving and developing their own content: representations, laden with the spoils of matter".

Bergson's talking about philosophers getting to grips with consciousness and images in Matter and Memory published in 1912 (I have become interested in memory as storytelling). Yesterday I was in Brian's creative fight club. Brian Storm of MediaStorm.

"After Fight Club Brian we all started seeing things differently" - (Fight Club script).

Creative Nudge
You know what it's like, someone, sometimes, does that. And then YOU raise your game. They're human catalysts: the preacher, the pastor, the professor, the evangelist.

Sit down and listen. Really listen. Humility matters. Because sometimes it's not only what they say, but the chain reaction of a series of unintended consequences that they trigger.

Brian Storm with Ex BBC Foreign Affairs editor Vin Ray and a couple of us in the Frontline Club after Brian's session

In the bar later we had a chance to catch up. I saw Brian present in Miami Wemedia  two years ago. I was "squint eyes" impressed then, as I was yesterday, but this time I got a more in depth measurement of his philosophy over the day as he set about deconstructing what MediaStorm does and its knowledge value.

I have worked for BBC Radio over many years before going into TV, so I reckon I have a firm understanding of many of the principles of sound and few people do sound/ audio better than the BBC. But Brian has found an illustrative way of informing learners that is elegant, powerful and compact.


This is one of my first BBC Reports in 1988, having just graduated It's Nelson Mandela's Tribute Concert at Wembley with Peter Gabriel, Natalie Cole, Anita Baker, Neil Kinnock MP etc.

Uber Adam Westbrook and Producer/Director
Jane (Fandango Media)

On his format for storytelling he's tapped into the rich seam of Sassure's and Walter Benjamin's semiotic to unveil the meaning of the image. It's a masterclass in visual language without the accompanying epistemological terms of signified and signifier or Benjamin's Punctum.

His publication continues to grow as he builds on a strategy of firstly an absorptive form of storytelling, yet also addressing subjects, that mainstream media would deem difficult and thus leave. I speak from experience here having sat in untold number of network TV editorials. Therein lies Brian's humanitarian spirit, displayed further when he talks of his company as purpose-focused, rather than profit-focused.


And then from his past, which raised a chuckle for me, how he has drawn from a penchant to experiment and build, whether it was at MSNBC or Corbis. The irony, where he tried to do so much, but ultimately hit a ceiling became the defacto inspiration that forced Brian him to make his own way, and what his company is today.

Chuckled, sorry, yes, because I too remember the dark days and nights of quasi death marches creating CD roms on Director 1; burning through hundreds of CDs because they would not self auto start, because a line of lingo code gone astray.

Playing to the Audience
Then there's Brian's hidden pièce de résistance - his player. Built from the ground upwards, it's frankly something you might have expected from a bespoke tech-player company e.g. Brightcove et al. But it isn't because Brightcove's profit perspective I suspect rather than the customer focus played to a different strategy. One that had many users smarting when Brightcove announced they would cease to share their player with the creative community -sans fee.

The elegance and backendness of MediaStorm's player  hides a potency that is persuasive. It's designed to meet the solutions a producer encounters. You want one :)  It's a matryoshka gift when Brian breaks open the back of his company's two year old upgraded website - now skinned via drupal. Nice!

The Business end of making money amounts to a book: How to make cool media and sell - MediaStorm, I suspect will be in a bookshop, their own online bookshop - sometime. All of this all snuggly bound together; textual with arresting imagery.


Part of the art of creative fighting is to talk about your philosophy by engaging with others, without any hubris of talking about yourself. What emerges then is a series of narratives of life stories and how to overcome one hurdle after another.

And each hurdle represents a problem that is universal; so it has relevance to you. The brand and the knowledge go hand in hand; they become one in the same. Just as if you wanted to understand ET, you'd interview Spielberg, so here to understand a range of media variables in the intensely-unfurling-evolving-media, you speak to Brian.

My motto has always been, "if it hasn't been done, it's waiting to be done",  and the journey to get something accomplished is a narrow and lonely one -at least for a while. And that lastly don't hide it, don't leave it under a bushel, but that in the process you will find naysayers telling you it can't be done.

That's almost the theme for doing a PhD in the academic world. Brian reminded me and many others of the creative fights needed to up our games in in the public world. There's work to be done after the Storm.

---------------------
ABOUT DAVID

Apple Profiled David Dunkley Gyimah is a Knight Batten winner in Innovations in Journalism and an International Award winning videojournalist, among other accolades. He publishes the award winning  viewmagazine.tv and is a senior university lecturer, artist in residence at London's prestigious Southbank Centre and is completing his PhD in innovative news at the SMARTlab University College Dublin. His part includes working for the BBC, Channel 4 News, ABC News ( South Africa) and devising news programmes and training programmes around the world over a 25 year career.
 


If you into creative media working with the BBC we're organising another creative fight club" on videojournalism. I can't wait.

p.p.s  A big thank you to Charlotte and the FrontLine Club for hospitality - as usual. And for the free membership for yesterday only of the Front Line Club. Hurray!

The Art of Doing Something Artistic

Artist in Residence with Southbank Artistic Director Jude Kelly OBE, third from left

Summer is set to tuck itself into its shed, as autumn makes its long-nights presence felt. And amid the concrete fixed facades in East Wing of London's cultural playground sits a beguiling sight.

It could be construed as a piece of art, and perhaps is one, but its main function is the meeting place for the Southbank Centre's Artist in Residence.

If you happened to pass by it at about 9.30 a.m yesterday you'd have caught us seating cosily inside catching up on what we're doing and our plans ahead.

Artists like, Poet and writer Lemn (Sissay) whom I haven't seen for a good while; he's just come back from touring Australia and is about to commence work with a hospital, plus the many other things he does.

And then Oliver Coates, an in demand solo Cellists and musician, who has recently completed a projected using the bowels of the Royal Festival Hall's hidden tunnels: the scene is something out of The Shining.  The lists of Artists is here

Meeting and sharing ideas with fellow artists is invigorating and then the bar is always raised and some with Jude Kelly, Southbank Artistic Director, mapping out plans for the Southbank in the months ahead and the work she would like, love to see from her artists.

This includes the up coming Festival of Death; Festival of the World; a Festival in collaboration with Brazil and then the Olympic games project.

For the Festival of Death I'm considering a narrative of the funereal procedure of Ghanaians, and the experience of my family when my father passed away two years ago and we had to take him back to the family's burial place in Ghana. The whole process was documented with pictures and is quite something.

A more filmic project explores what I'm loosely calling "A right to passage" which will explore space, movement as long tracks but delving into psychoanalysis - sans flaws.

Picture of Sensations - The Been Tos

Prempeh College 1978

A close friend sent me this picture.  It all came flooding back.

Our lived pasts, a rich past, which like precious mementos are stowed away until as such time they are needed: for reflection, a laugh, to recall faces.

In this sea of faces, I'm there, albeit faceless. 

This is Ghana in the 70s, a house photo for the school that would serve as my home, surrogate parents and foster carers: Prempeh College.

They were I remember at first some of the loneliest times, which would grow into some of the most fruitful. For unlike most of the 'green horns' - the term given to first years or sophomores - I was a "Been To".

Been Tos were children defined by their peripatetic nature. They would have been born elsewhere, mainly the UK and US, but at some point following a ritual of African parenting have been hauled to their parents motherland.

I say their parents, because before that journey, there was little sense that we were from Africa or specifically Ghanaian. The law under which we were born - English Law in my case - gave us the sovereignty of being British.

We spoke with English accents, had a British sense of humour and favoured fish and chips over fufu.

And then one day, one day, you found yourself on a 747, days before drugged with every conceivable tropical medicine, heading off to real home.

Your parents regaled. Now son, this is where you're from. But as you touched into Ghana, wrapped by that clenching humid hot weather, you wondered if you were from here, why did this all feel so alien.

At Prempeh College in the hinterland of Ghana, you were made to feel something of a Ghanaian - but more an immigrant of sorts classified as a "been to".

If you failed to understand any of Ghana's customs, you could either be excused for your naivety as a 'been to" or punished for your supposedly uppity behaviour, scowled at for being a "been to".

And I wasn't alone we were a tribe, a community, who shared our stories for comfort talking comics and cornflakes.  We were a class. In the above picture there are at least a dozen boys who had "been to" London or the US. Thousands of parents did this, depositing you in any number of Ghana's ex colonial schools.

Prempeh was set up by an Eton scholar and clergyman, as part of the brief of the church to spread the word of God. The Brit's God.  Sometimes we laughed, I may not have been able to make Eton, but I made the African one.

The Been Tos and the ritual of forced approved repatriation happens less now I'm told. It was confined to first generation Africans (Ghanaians) who had made Britain their home in the 1950s. They pined to go back apalled by the lack of respect their charges gave them, by the upbringing Britain facilitated, and in particular by the Brit school's that could not instill that sense of militaristic discipline.

Britain had yoked off this apparent constraint with the 1960s free love era, which for African parents in England signalled the downfall of humanity. "What do you mean my son can now defy me?"

Whatever we are or have become is shaped in great measure by our environment and lived pasts. It was in Ghana I developed a love for photography and writing. The thousands of photographs I would take live somewhere in a girlfriend's wardrobe - if they still exists. Her name as I recall was Diana Grunitaki  Tay from St Monica's school.

Kodak Camera 1970s

I left Ghana in the 1980s,  and as a sign that I would return to continue being a "been to" left everything including my early writings and pictures taken on my Kodak Instamatic. I did not return as planned,  though I have visited several times, but not as often as I would like.

Which is why this picture is so precious. Deleuze referred to an experience of sensations, with no apparent logic of cognisance or semiotic. Its immanence is its display of force, rhythm and duration, and for me of memories deep down.

As I write this, I'm listening to Radio 4 Today programme - a debate on what caused the riots in the UK. Remarkably, "Been Toism" has a voice in this debate, for our parents knew something of parenting in the 70s that whether we liked or not involved a loose programme designed to help our upbringing.

Thanks for the memories, with a plethora of social costs and gains.

New Journalism: journalism-of-self but at what cost?

The Journalism-of-self, but there are costs

We can all take stock now. Some already have and I know I have written around the subject before. Yet some of its themes and my understanding have grown.

It comes in many guises, but ultimately it's the journalism-of-self. This is different in ways to other journalism, because the journalist-of-self is the Brando of the unfurling profession which professes all the world is my stage. Its actors are rebellious, adventurous, soloist, at times wary of company.

But for all their flaws, the actor-of-self, starting out on their career recognised Stanislavski, as much as they did Strasberg or at least the techniques they passed on.

Journalism-of-self is now embedded into our psyche, prefixed by such conferences and training manuals as "Everyone is now a journalist, "Twitter and Facebook journalism"  and the 'hail videojournalism".

Any argument to the contrary is drowned out within the sphere. But the conversation or truthfully enquiry is a philosophical one which often negates asking what journalism is or its function today.

Philosophical because systems undoubtedly change via socio-cultural, technological and the historical and thus any interrogative question seeks to understand the core.

The latter, "history" implies even the best history academics, through their own narrative discourse rarely tell the same story in its whole. In years to come Berners-Lee will still be the father of the web, but antecedent's and protagonists will change as new information becomes available.

Take Mike Conway's superb book on the history of broadcasting published two years ago. I mean who would have thought there was still a treasure trove of info to acquire for a subject that's been so fastidiously combed over.

So whatever constituted journalism in the 80s, compared with now may have general variables: inverted triangle n' all but different specificities. One reason why Bradshaw's rework on the triangle has lit up academia and the workflow of institutions. These are philosophical enquiries.

This however is not a treatise on what is journalism, but a side spin of its rump. If we can do it all, why do we the association of others and note I distinguish between associative journalism and social. A post for another time.

 Journalism.co.uk captured me talking about associations in  in 2005. And even though I advocate the "wisdom of crowds" approach, we assume and hope the crowd has proponents who can intelligibly deconstruct our wishes.

Old Journalism reworked values
So moored with a presumed new function of defined journalism; and if you haven't in the face of Murdoch's crisis, Schmidt's MacTaggert Lecture on google's interface with TV, or Dan Gillmor's now lengthy dog-eared We the Media, then this means nothing to you.

This quest assumes stories and their genesis are becoming an irrelevancy. What riled the outsiders, within the onset of convergence culture circa late 1980s looking for change in story plurality, contextually, interpretation and analysis hasn't quite been the seismic change.

Change which says "I kick you, you kick me, and then a third party sees if he can kick both of us", can be a tad tiring.

Our attention, quite rightly turns to its distribution in that if the best story in the world can't reach an audience and fails to attract anyone, it fails a primary function.

But the journalism world as it unfolds according to one good friend has metamorphosed into the "google journalist". And herein lies the danger for the journalist-of-self.

Google journalism is perhaps a harsh term, given what the proponents have done in using search as investigation et al, but the name conjures up  an indelible image of the vampirish journo who never sees the light of day or night for that reason.

If we're relying on the vortex of stories weeded into our filter-bubble - so eloquently explained here by Eli Pariseri- that's a concern. If we're not hammering from the ground, or not consulting wise counsel in at least the mechanics of traditional journalism [for want of a better world], we're not fit for 21st Century purpose.

This figure merely serves as a model for enquiry,  translating Mathematics to social issues. So I'm simply taking a view of an issue and positing how it might be viewed when thinking of an issue in journalism. This method is not uncommon. Journalism invariably fuses multiple disciplines; more recently data journalism in computing and trends. I'm trying to understand how something as formidable as imaginary numbers I learnt in my grad days can have some application to what I'm doing now. An abstract which will hopefully develop further critical thinking.

Looked at it through the prism of maths, at least, that's how I rationalise change, we're used to the x-y axis and elements of the z have appeared but where's the "i"? In Maths the imaginary numbers quotient as brilliantly explained here. It's an attempt to see past the obvious as an integral means of new enquiry.

Witness how Paul Lewis from the Guardian says even reporting from the ground, journalists covering the riots in London largely got it woefully wrong. How so? I've not seen any study to confirm this view but I respect, as many other journos do, Paul's view that something's wrong in Dodge.

The internal review that purports to answer what the best of journalism does and then how, a more testing question, in the "holy cow - everything goes world" can be quite elusive. Question: has any journo institute dissected what could have been a model of reportage for the riots place. Paul proffers some answers.

And in speaking of wise counsel, when was the last time outside of a $695, 40 minute talk sprint, you heard some of the giants of the profession discussing their craft?

This all infers something, which we knew but elided through a dash of supposed schadenfreude.   Schmidt hits on. Any system relies on the savvy of new and currency of tradition (old) to survive - particularly when tradition has a stake in the status quo.

So, for instance that television screen is not about to disappear anytime soon, and those newspapers the minute they do watch how trend-setting companies will introduce us to vintage 2015 - and what newspapers looked like.

So what does this all mean for the journalism of self, that incidentally I have been an ardent apostle?  It says the discourse needs to shift from tech to language, the art, the practitioner sans po-faced and some of the practices of evaluation Carrol elegantly records in On criticism Thinking in Action.

That within this discourse which heaven help us should be dialectical rather than solipsistic, there's room for good practices to be the source for us to chew and reflect over. And one that doesn't reduce factual storytelling to exclusively assuming its anyone's game.

My head of department SMS'd me this morning, saying how he'd read a citation of me at a conference saying "leave me alone".

If there ever was an aphorism for the journalism-of-self it would be this. Yet it hides a fallacy, in that "Leave me alone" only ever makes an impact when the time leading up to that has been an inculcation of many association.  When Brian Storm talks of collaboration, this is what he's alluding to.

Brian Storm, Jesicca Stuart, Tom Kennedy and David Dunkley Gyimah

We both agreed collaboration is the new, er old black, even in the face of the the Dietrich's I want to be alone.

In a few weeks new cohorts of future journalists will start their journey into the known-unknown and many of us will enthuse about the new new thing.

But the danger and one that has seen its roots sprout furiously since the convergence culture took grip, is the you can do it by yourself comes with a note of caution.

For the soloist figuring out the planes of journalism, there's another older reality beyond the journalism-of-self. As many actors sometimes end up musing about their partners, the best performance comes from studying others, and via the generosity of the other actors.

We can all push this out, but it takes a bit more to get it in - in the first place, and I am mean proper in.