“I honestly don’t know what the great trends of the future or industries of the future will be,” noted Fareed Zakaria in his commencement speech at Harvard.
But he did had some very unusual observations (such as “The world we live in is…profoundly at peace”) of how smart people can and continue to make a difference.
In 1815, more than 2000 people died at the Battle of New Orleans. Two weeks before. a peace treaty had been signed between Great Britain and the United States at the Treaty of Ghent.
But information had not still reached the US –it took two weeks for the news of the treaty to travel from Belgium.
But there’s an interesting counter to why slow news could be good news. Some trends are not understood by the hourly trickle of news updates, as Alan Durning writes. He cites big issues such as pollution and urban sprawl as examples where slow news provides deeper knowledge of underlying issues. He uses a great quote from Ben Hecht to define this:
“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second-hand of a clock.”
Working on an article about the media war that broke out with the phone-tapping scandal in Britain –you know, the one that brought down News Of The World.
No one really questions who reads these crappy papers. (Typical front page story in NotW: “F1 boss has sick orgy with hookers.”) So I am sure there are very few who moan the loss of the ‘red tops’ as there are referred to in the industry.
I found a great project (the mock up is his on left) by Adam Westbrook, a journalism lecturer who asks “If you edited the final News Of The World, what would your front page be?”
The Time cover below, by the way, is real.
The son of Moammar Qaddafi had this to say about the rising tide of democracy:
“The whole world is going through more freedom, more democracy,” he says, pumping the air in impatience. “We want to see those changes now, instead of 10 years’ time, or 15 years.”
It was very heartening to hear this, especially from the son of a dictator.
But there was one problem. He gushed about democracy before the people of his country took to the streets demanding reform –in a statement to Time magazine, last year! Like all sons of dictators, he was tipped to be the next leader, and (armed with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics,) seemed like the kind of person the world could work with. Until he said this, this week.
“Libya is at a crossroads. If we do not agree today on reforms, we will not be mourning 84 people, but thousands of deaths, and rivers of blood will run through Libya.”
He wished for, and predicted, change. His Ph.D. Thesis talks of a ‘democracy deficit.’ But he probably never foresaw the rivers of connectivity between his people that would make that happen.
Be careful what you wish for!
Capturing a sound byte used to be a great way to thread a breaking story. News organisations such as NPR, or BBC for instance use the formula well. Some use it to balance a story, others, to tilt one in favor of a point of view it wishes to hold up.
Audio is also a great way to capture the ambiance of a particular environment. A machine grinding away on factory floor, a call to prayer from a far away minaret, children on a playground…
So why is it that the poster is suddenly making a comeback? It’s one dimensional, after all!
I think of it as a powerful tool not only because of what it says but how it is displayed. In other words, there is more contextual detail that surrounds a poster that adds to the story, even though it is a frozen moment. Two things come into play that make a poster powerful:
There is a third element – mystery. The unknown or un-clarified details take on greater significance, goading our curiosity, and our need to fill in the gaps of the larger story.
The protests in the past few weeks in Egypt demonstrate this. From the simple pen sketches, to the large-font messages to the administration:
No face here, but the reference to another country adds a new dimension to political intrigue in the region.
Adding more context, a paper poster is just another element to counterpoint the heavy machinery around it!
Unlike when utilities are down, life doesn’t appear to go quiet when the Internet is down. Or cut off.
While on-ramps to social media sites are blocked, as we see in Egypt this week, something else gets to work. Call it the Internet effect. The connected world has learned to find its way around broken nodes, to bypass toll-gates, and evade any form of censorship — soft or otherwise.
This is what happened in Egypt on Thursday.
Foreigns journalists were being attacked and arrested, including 
two AP journalists and a Guardian reporter who were beaten up. (Listen to the Guardian’s Jack Shenker’s recording of this.) He was released and was able to blog about it:
“Along with nearby protesters I fled back down the street before stopping at what appeared to be a safe distance. A few ordinarily dressed young men were running in my direction, and I assumed they were demonstrators also escaping the oncoming security troops. Two came towards me and suddenly threw out punches, sending me to the ground. I was then hauled back up by the scruff of the neck and dragged towards the advancing police lines… All attempts I made to tell them in Arabic and English that I was an international journalist were met with more punches and slaps;”
Other voices are getting out, too, despite the bans and threats. The next few days will certainly reveal if such attempts can contain the uprising, or backfire.
While Washington wrestles with the right response, other countries (and not just those countries in the region) are obviously watching this live-action drama closely. “Authoritarian governments” observed Clay Shirky, ”stifle communication among their citizens because they fear, correctly, that a better-coordinated populace would constrain their ability to act without oversight.” But any attempts to promote social media as the tools for regime change are wrong, he warns. This is not what the Twittering masses want to believe.
Promoting access to media and social media as a basic human right is complicated from a foreign policy perspective. Consider what Wikileaks has just done!
But the lesson is clear. The world is quite a different place now, with amplified communication and greater means of collaboration.
I am a big user of UStream, and of course YouTube and Vimeo.
But did you know you could create your own ‘World News’ video channel?
Check it out here, and take a look at some of my videos here.
Quick note of thanks to all the attendees at the webinar on blogging, yesterday. (Sunday night here, although it was still the 21st in Sri Lanka.)
Dan Wool Steve England, and I enjoyed being able to share our ideas, and answer your questions.
The application, DimDim, did cause us a hiccup for the audio at the second location, but we know exactly what the problem is and how to fix it in the next sessions.
Since this was a session on blogging 101, I created a basic blog for the attendees, on the fly. I will be using it to update content for the next few sessions on the other key elements on social media.
