Media, Schmedia

This has been my year for pushing social media and learning — developing use of Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter.

Diary function and sharing snippets is probably best done by Facebook, news by Twitter, recce information about places for exploring by Foursquare.

Where does that leave the humble Blog?

As what people used to call a commonplace book, with occasional comment, it’s unbeatable. I need to invest more in it. Some of the comment threads it stimulates turn are fascinating, and it becomes a focus for a form of community. It’s brought great joy this summer to meet a few of the people whose comments I most respect and like. That and the occasional diary or policy reflection does make it worth some effort.

The key to them all is interactivity and human value. Up on my electronic watchtower three convictions have stood out this summer:

(1) There is no such thing as “Cyberspace.” Value comes from people interacting, not trips into space. The technology is hidden to most practitioners. The speed and availability of new media have implications, but the silly old idea there is a place somewhere beyond the blue called “Cyberspace” flies in the face of McLuhan’s observation that any form of human expression is a “medium.” The whole notion may just be the place memory of the obsolete commercialised information kitchen we used to call “the media.” Like the Urban Spaceman, it don’t exist.

(2) Interactivity and relationships have driven the crumbling of old media power. What contemporary media do give us, along with an invitation to waste time, is multiple small opportunities to add value to each others’ lives. Everyone is more naked now, for good or bad, but attentiveness encourages, heals and strengthens people. Facebook is more immediately effective for this than a blog.

(3) Quality stands out. Unexpectedly perhaps, old fashioned correspondent virtues of accuracy and painstaking research carry a premium. The role of professional journalists is to check facts and assure information quality, not to spin titillating or terrifying stories out of thin air. Good information sources prioritise researchers and journalists not marketing. That's why the FT and BBC have heads above water, and Murdoch doesn’t.

What we each need to work out is how much time we’re willing to invest in what particular media when...

Why new media matter in Church

People who don’t get it about new media often assume that the revolution in communications through which we are living is driven by desire to play with kit.
Thus the anxious, especially those who do not want to appear anxious, can stay safe from any requirement that they change, by treating the use of contemporary media as a hobby.
“Phew! real change is happening, but belongs in the world of electronic hobbyists, so it can be business as usual for us.”

In fact, communications revolutions are always driven by the ways they change people. The invention of the printing press did have interesting implications for industrial design technology, but greater far was its impact on people’s attitudes to authority including the Church and the government. Once people could read and write, especially en masse, the old assumptions were subject to constant critical scrutiny. And, as the dear old CIA used to say, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The true implication of the printing press only took hold in the twentieh century, as costs came down sufficiently to allow information that had previously been privileged to flow all over the place. Information revolutions never go backwards, mostly because people have an insatiable thirst for information, and you can’t uninvent the technologies that provide it. One World War I song title expressed the rulers’ dilemma in the face of 20th century mass media technology perfectly — “How do you get them back on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paree?” But at least, then, they could try to control the media.

20th Century press was entirely free, as long as you owned a press. Now we all own a press, and we remain voracious information producers and consumers. We want to know the gossip, we want to know what’s going on, we want to be entertained.

Let me illustrate. Back at school governors in the 90’s we had controversy about making seat belts compulsory on school trips. We wrote to a local MP who assured us he was very much in favour, but the European Union, the square banana lot, wouldn’t allow progress on the issue. One governor had a dial-up connection and downloaded minutes from Brussels, where the UK had singlehandedly opposed compulsory seat belts on school buses, as a restriction of free trade. Same politician. Touché! Our dear leader was instantly outed for a bit of hypocrisy that would have been almost undetectable before.

What is called from all leaders in our new context is not necessarily technical skill, though the old pride that “Sunshine Deserts” British managers used to take in not being able or willing to type, an assertion of their superiority, is obsolete. It’s about radical transparency and mutual accountability. We shouldn’t have too much to fear, for our Scriptures teach mutual submission, redemption, and a call to consistency of life (Holiness). These are not things for which clergy should be too busy (or not). I wonder if our feared deficits in these weightier departments cause as much gut-churning fear of, and resistance to, new media as technical competence or busyness. I hope not.

Lions and Unicorns, mods and rockers

One of the great highlights of last week was finally meeting Euan Semple. I’ve come across Euan as a thinker and educator (in the broadest sense), and have long been impressed by his pragmatic wisdom, systemic awareness, and ability to open rather than close down, or geek up, new media issues. Euan’s blogged our conversation here.

On the face of it I was after new ways to raise my colleagues’ capacity to engage in the new media landscape, and Euan is indeed a resourceful friend in this world.

Most interesting, however was to chew over how communication develops people and groups of people. We have entirely different world views when it comes to orgnaised religion anwyay, but some strongly congruent instincts and values — freedom, emergence, openness.

It seems there is a Right brain creative world of wacky possibilities to which the internet gives all kinds of flight. Now that anyone can communicate with anyone, hierarchies lie helpless — look at BP, for example, flailing around, trying to manage its image in the context of its present oil spill.

However there is also a minimal but essential Left brain rigorous standards world, without which the whole thing is imposible. A few infrastructural rules make the whole communications structure, possible. We saw a fundamental difference between blinkered rules that, taken too seriously, restrict human flourishing and others that enable it. One feature of good rules is that they don't draw attention to themselves, just serve a bigger infrastructure elegantly.

So the relationship between order and complete liberty sounds like a tussle between the authoritarian lion and free range unicorn. People get their security and meaning, the ability to articulate, from a settled order that revolutionaries then subvert by asking questions which initially irritate system professionals, but change the order of everything and eventually move the whole game up a notch.

For this to happen you need enough common framework for questions to be asked, but an anarchistic freedom in asking them. Put it another way — Jesus receives a Pharisaic / dogmatic education, then goes round from within it, asking Pharisees cheeky questions that subvert everything. So we deconstructed human communication as something almost like a religion.

It struck me how elements of the Christian tradition work this way — creeds, commandments, golden rule. Once people become self-conscious about them, however, and add their own powergaming, they soon become death warmed up; licenses for insanity.

It's a struggle reflected by everything from the war between Data managers and Creatives in industry to St Paul’s great struggles to locate the Jewish Law in its place for the infant Churches of Rome and Galatia. It mirrors our own internal conflict between painting by numbers and free expression.

Bad “religion,” in this sense, takes itself too seriously, frames issues too narrowly for forward movement, closes down fresh possibilities for meaning, and becomes a license for stuckness, paranoia and, ultimately, sociopathic insanity.
The law, as St Paul was wont to say, is fine as far as it goes. It just does not go as far as its most enthusiastic afficionados think

Good “religion” in this sense thakes the same raw materials, but encourages people to tell their personal and pragmatic stories. It frames discussion in a way that can fly, by holding creative, open articulations within a minimalist framework that exposes everything to human, empirical fit. Its truth is emergent rather than propositional; or, as the man said, by its fruits ye shall know it.

Turning round publishing

Some pubishers are understandably pretty apocalyptic about prospects for their industry. It’s ironic to read pieces about church attendance, which is almost static and rising in places, from newspapers whose own paper readership is collapsing through the floor.

The draining away of the power to communicate from the clique that owns the means of production could induce ever more desperate attempts to claw it back by re-establishing monopolies.

I suspect however, that as water will always find the water table, information will always out. Although there is scope for low point cost creativity in marketing, that won’t win the war. Desperate attempts to monetise the market by locking people into paying for stuff they basically don’t want — the aggregating strategy — is unlikely to do anything but hasten decline. This is as true for deprtment stores as for newspapers. One alternative is to embrace new technologies instead of fighting them, with a new focus on understanding readers, high quality content, and creativity about how to deliver it.

This seems to be the message of an interesting video that’s going around, produced by Dorling Kindersley (penguin). This started out as a high quality publishing house that established itself by producing beautifully designed children’s books. If they can do something similarly beyond the realms of the conventional, decline may be reversible.

Google doodle doo

Image via CrunchBase

This week has seen continued salvoes exchanged between the Rupert Murdoch Empire and Google about the Mikado’s plans to charge for his titles. He’s quite entitled, of course, to do charge anything he wants, and the rest of us are quite entitled to decide whether or not we want to pay. I have to say, on present showing, I am unlikely to cough up.

I personally doubt, apart from one or two cherries like, say the Times Law Reports, there’s much in the Murdoch stable for which specialists would care to pony up. I see I’ve accessed a (free) Murdoch site 17 times in the past month. Would I have bothered if I’d had to pay? Quite honestly not. I think I do find talk about Google “poaching” advertising somewhat arrogant, as though Dinosaur media had some kind of divine right to advertising revenue regardless of the laws of commerce. What might get me along to the party could be extraordinary content. Attempts to bully me into the deal aren’t attractive...

So, by way of riposte, I caught a wonderful Google poem on Saturday Live BBC Radio 4 this morning, on my way to a meeting in Wycombe. It’s by Matt Harvey, wonderful poerformance poet. It fitted into the context of an item about Gilbert and Sullivan, and an interview with Sarah Speake, Industry Leader for Technology at Google. So, here goes, Mr Murdoch:

A Google Poem

What's a google, Daddy?
Well, Son, I'm glad you asked:

It’s a sifter, filter, searcher
cyber guide and cyber Sherpa
all the world’s a google library
does it frighten me? Just slightly

It used to be a noun, son,
but it turned into a verb,
There is nothing you can't google,
Google cattle, Google poodle,
human folly, human foible
Google Babel, Google Breughel.

It shows you things your life is duller than,
Google Gilbert, Google Sullivan,
Shows you what’s for Google free,
for Google sale, and Google rental,
Shows things you shouldn’t Google see
It's so non judge-Google-mental,

Daddy, can we Google Google?
So we did. And there were oodles,
Google shopping, analytics,
Google earth and google physics,

Google info, Google-mation
Google dream interpretation,
Google gosh gorblimey crikey,
Google probing Google psyche,

So to return to your original question,
Google is a bit more than a search engine
And a bit less than a sentient life form
Taking over the world, we hope?

Church new media futures....

But what kind of future? And how do we access the goodies, whilst dodging those lightning bolts? New communications media are available, with implications as radical as the invention of the printing press.
This is not primarily about technology or hobbyism. It’s about people communicating It’s big, and it affects everyone. Even the Church?

Back in the 1950’s we would have set up a “C of E Social Media Council” so that a party selection of senior bishops, retired colonels and ladies in funny hats could mull over the creative possibilities and then tell everyone else what to do.
These days we have to be a bit more experimental and post-modern. We have to work out for ourselves what to do. I’ve been trying to brainstorm some needs and possibilities, including, as an hoary old adult educator, learning requirements.

So here goes: five possible areas of work for the Church arising from the New Media revolution:

1. Basic Training.
   Best learnt for self rather than trained in, but there are skills and dimensions to be acquired. For some this will involve gaining the confidence in empathetic surroundings, to have a go for themselves.
   But, of course, there’s far more to it than that. My Lord Bishop of Barchester may, indeed, abominate the Internet and all its works and stick to the Olympian heights, but when he pops down to Barchester Cathedral to sock it to them like Cosmo Gordon Lang on heat, there’s a danger that at least half the people in the congregation, their culture formed in the new media space, will think the poor old goat is mad... So even if he’s not interested in any of this stuff for himself, the Bishop of Barchester needs to acquire some working concept, at the very least, about how the majority of his fellow human beings receive and give information. You’d think.
   
   
2. Masterclasses for practitioners of the Dark Arts.
   There is what some would find a surprising number of great communicators in Church, but not all of them know it yet, and all of them could reflect and improve. Skills can be acquired and honed, among other things, by sharing experience and learning with other practitioners of the Dark Arts. Why not facilitate (residential?) masterclasses, to help us raise our games, of the people, by the people, and for the people?
   
   
3. Flying Circus
   There’s an amazing amount of expertise and breadth and thought in Church. Some remember fondly the General Synod Nuclear debate for the unusual experience it offered of well informed people actually listening to each other in the round, and so contributing to public debate. As the conventional newsprint media are going down the tubes, public debate is disintermediating. Some will think this terrible, and some a great liberation. But could a network of people at the sharp end of various issues and interfaces be persuaded to blog together on an occasional basis to bring their disintermediated perceptions and experiences into the new public square?
   
   
4. Strategic Mapping
   New media are emerging all the time. For example, Facebook became massive in about two years. Just on the back of an envelope, I can think of about 15 different types of new and social media, each with their own challenges and possibilities. New communications space needs to be mapped in terms we can all understand, sufficiently well for people to decide whether to have a go and share the experience. On a similar theme, media change is inducing a whole raft of changes in the ways everybody understands themselves. Without some kind of map of what’s going on, we’re all morons.
   
   
5. Theology
   The fact is every media innovation, like the advent of printed books or cheap newprint, has fundamentally affected theology — both the content and the way it’s done. Some people may find the whole notion pretentious (“pretentious? Moi?”) but whoever’s mapping this stuff, however, surely the Church has to be among them...

One thing’s for sure. This isn’t just going to go away. I’m not laying down company policy, just sketching on the back of an envelope. Please react.
What/ Who have I missed? How badly have I misunderstood the situation? What else could and should we be doing? How?

News: the March of Time

I’m delighted to catch Ruth Gledhill’s characteristically clear, honest and illuminating talk from Religion and the News at Cumberland Lodge online — sadly I wasn’t able to join the consultation until the session after hers, and it’s good to catch up. Ruth observes, hitting a very important nail on the head, that the plane that crashes is inevitably a bigger news story than the thousands that land safely. Back in the sixties the BBC, beseiged by letters complaining that only bad news made the headlines, tried to run a programme called “The Positive World” that majored on good news stories. It lasted all of six weeks, if that, before bombing out, via the world service in the wee small hours. Sad, you may say, but this truth reflects human nature.

This ugly something about ourselves sometimes gets blamed on journalists, unfairly. You might as well blame criminal lawyers for crime. Without it they’d be out of a job, but that hardly makes them criminals. There is, however, a severe temptation for people selling stories — “you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” was Randolph Hearst’s legendary response to a correspondent’s report that Cubans were not, in fact, murdering and raping Americans left right and centre in 1898. The power Hurst weilded to shape the news was the direct result of the fact that in 1898 only press barons like him had the resources to get someone out to Cuba with a camera, and inflamatory pix back onto the streets of New York in hours. He had the steam press — the only technology to deliver news to ordinary people affordably.

Now turn the clock forward. Pretty much everybody now has the technology to read or tell their own story; and there is no longer any need, or increasingly desire, to pay money for newsprint. I wonder what the new found ability of news targets to answer back does to the exclusivity of any story in conventional media, and what kind of accountability it will require of them.

Looking at online newspaper sites, I wonder how they can raise the quality of outside comment on religious stories, rather than the rubbishy weary procession of same-ish comments from, e.g., about a dozen snarky atheists going on about sky fairies, with equally silly rejoinders. Many newspaper comments seem to come from small coteries of fans and people with axes to grind. Are the crown jewels of journalism changing — no longer the Hearst style news stories of the past century, but what conventionally would have been labeled op-ed?

The journalist whose work people may increasingly be bothered to pay to read will be anyone who manages to draw interesting comment out of ordinary life, rather than the person who zeroes in on potential conflict and drums up a war to go with it. Plane crashes will continue to make the news, but sexing up flights that land safely and pretending they were plane crashes just looks silly. Don’t sex up the material — go for depth, colour and connections. Don’t be anonymous, be yourself and own up to your biases. Above all slow down and reflect.

I was at a London mainline station at 2220 recently, surrounded by piles of newsprint waiting for the pulper. Someone offered me an Evening Standard, now a freesheet. Was I bovvered? The Daily Telegraph (£1) was giving away a bottle of mineral water free with each copy. This was a not inconsiderable offer, as the bottle itself cost £1·55 without a Telegraph. Reading the morning’s news fourteen hours on, noticing the only story I know anything about, the RC ordinariates one, the line between news and comment was so confused, the content so thin, slanted and childishly inflamatory, I thought “If this is supposed to be quality, why would I pay for these people’s take on stuff I don’t know anything about? I’d rather read people who do understand what they’re talking about...”

Human beings are insatiably interested in information. It’s perfectly possible to sell something people actually want or need on its own merits. You can, for example, buy a packet of Nurofen without having to give away a free DVD with it. But the fact people can only shift conventional newsprint with prodigous freebies says everything. If media barons had invested as much in quality journalism, as marketing ploys and production economies, they might now have rather more to offer. But good correspondent journalism takes time and immersion. It costs.

As it was, I had a very good book to read, and bought a hot drink instead, before getting onto a crowded night train home. 4 out of 65 people in the carriage were reading papers, all freesheets.

The delivery of information and news is pretty much down to search engines and the like, spiced by social media and with hundreds of channels of conventional radio and TV, led in the UK by the BBC.

So what business should newspapers actually consider themselves to be in today? Comment and Review, à la Huffington Post? If so they’d need to invest substantially more in journalists and quality. If it’s publishing, iTunes and Amazon are becoming lead repositories of all kinds of media, with increasingly blurry lines between them. Could newspaper groups invent new website activities to add as yet undreamt of value to our lives, within their clouds? Trouble is, Facebook and MySpace are leading the way on that one... Time for newspaper editors to get thinking caps on and start justifying their up to 1·6 million pound salaries, I would think...

Religion in the News

I’ve been away for a conference among media people at Cumberland Lodge. Everyone had brickbats and bouquets to throw, all of them sincerely, but I don’t actually think religion gets as raw a deal from the media as people sometimes fear. Yes, there’s a lot of ignorance and prejudice in the papers, but distortion applies to all complex activities in the Fleet Street hall of mirrors, and it’s ceasing to matter in the way it did. There is probably generally less nastiness than applies to sport and politics, and fractionally more understanding than they have of science and medicine. I remember diocesan conferences in the eighties where people actually ordered morning newspapers to read. Even on a media conference, the pristine, generally unread, condition of the Fleet Street titles laid out on the hall table was notable, even as late as lunchtime.

Make no mistake, there is big evolution going on. Look at it however you will, the game is now up for the 1938 Evelyn Waugh Daily Beast and all its works. The old media diplodoci are flailing around in a new kind of swamp they simply don’t understand, trying to get a foothold, and wondering if they might be able to float if they could only work out how to swim.
Unfortunately their bulk, limited vision, and small unadapted bigoted brains make them better adapted for floating, perhaps drowning, than swimming.

Intereactivity has made hand-me-down obsolete and the mushroms are beginning to realise they have the technology to bite back. Advertising value is leaching out of the newspaper trade in spring torrents. The best evolving media are probably those with genuine local traction — hard for Fleet Street, but easier for media like local radio, which live on their connectedness and travel light. They have for years had some degree of real interactivity built into their model.

Amidst very fine presentations, the money shot for me was Charlie Beckett’s excellent map of the outlook (read it all, but here’s a summary)

1. First assertion: this is a wonderful time for people who think media can promote understanding.

• There has never been more media - including quality media. Around the world people are richer and better educated and need more journalism to help cope with the information they need to live their lives...
• there are threats to traditional business model which may reduce the capacity for journalism - both good and bad.
• The media sphere is a contestable space - and that means it should be allowed to be imperfect and relatively uncontrolled.
  

2. Second assertion: this is a dreadful time for people who think the media is only there to promote what they think

3. Third assertion: in a complex world the media envioronment is getting more complex

• Issues such as migration, climate change, economics, science etc mean that the world is not getting any simpler. Individuals’ media consumption is now multi-layered, interactive, creative, passive, active
• Likewise, the production process is more complex - it is participatory & multiplatform
• there is much greater diversity. The challenge is to ensure that the variety and plurality is manifested in the content. There’s no point having hundreds of channels if they all show the same show.
• Mainstream media still dominates and will continue to do but it is getting more complex too. Think about how the BBC has become more diverse and how it will be encouraged to be more open and form partnerships

4. Fourth Assertion: the news media has to learn to be more networked to society as a whole

5. Fifth Assertion: institutions like organised faiths also have to learn to be better as networked organisations

1. Institutions will now have a different relationship with MSM -
2. they can have a direct relationship with the public too
3. they can be media organsiations creating their own channels and content
4. but just like MSM they have to go where the public is (social networks)
5. they have to be conversational - they have to listen as well as talk
6. they have to be more open, engaged, literate, interactive

6. Sixth Assertion: don’t get mad, get media

1. stop complaining and do something about your coverage - start connecting.
2. Most faiths are natural networks
3. Sometimes these can be dangerous - the most successful online faith-orientated organisation I know is Al Qeada
4. But if all you do is connect with your followers than obviously you are simply rebuilding ghettos in cyberspace
5. newspapers made the mistake of thinking that going online meant replicating their newsrooms and their pages online -
6. the analogy for the media is to shift from a fortress mentality and fortress insitutions to networks. For people of faith, the analogy is to stop building digital churches or mosques - it is about building networks and connectivity

To pick up on one of these fine points as it applies to the C of E, there is no such thing as the Church of England. You can talk about London Taxis, or even a notional “London Taxi Service,” but remember you are actually talking about 19,000 cabdrivers. That is not quite as large as the number of independent chartered public bodies that comprise the Church of England, but it is in the same ballpark for numbers.

Consider, for example 2 Oxford trusts. The governing bodies of Wycliffe Hall and St Stephen’s House are both independent trusts dating from within a year of each other, 1876 and 1877. They are in the same town, and the same business, training ordinands. They have common interests, but their policies sometimes diverge, sharply. Historically they have represented entirely different concepts of what an Anglican priest is and should be. The same Coral Reef level of variety, conceptual richness and passion is reflected across 16,000 odd parishes, many of them complex multilevel bundles of trusts. This will be very annoying to stupid poeople, who have no idea why it is that way, and would certainly have designed it differently themselves.

Since the 1960’s Diversity has always been seen as a Bad Thing for the C of E. The Holy Grail has been a kind of British Leyland Corporatism, with the Church of England compared unfavourably with the Roman Catholic Church which was supposed to be more of a single rational entity. That’s why every priest in a Dan Brown film has a hotline to the Vatican. In fact the Roman Church is every bit as multilayered and subtle, and on a radically international scale, too. So are Baptist Churches. Etcetera, etcetera. No surprise, then, that the whole coral reef is seldom analysed and understood, with a stress on the brightest coloured fish, not the whole structure of the reef.

But in the kind of media multiverse Charlie is describing, being the way churches are is actually an advantage. All that’s necessary is for authentic and interesting people to get out there, be themselves, stand up and engage interactively. Thus one message to angry vicars who feel misrepresented becomes “Forget Fleet Street. It simply doesn’t matter any more.”