open Democracy News Analysis - media & the net - Comments

Viaggi Africa on "Reporting Africa, blog by blog"

Viaggi Africa — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:32:28 +0100

Africa is a complex planet.
It's easy to produce dramatic images and it is always difficult to go behind the surface.
You need time to understand the differencies between countries, regions, cities and villages.
Time always mean money.
Media are not very interested in nice stories coming from Africa they prefer "easy dramatic" or "travel beauty".
In Africa I find culture, humanity and a lot of positive enrgy side by side with death, poverty and famine.

brianct on "Citizen war-reporter? The Caucasus test "

brianct — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:55:00 +0100

[... editor deletion ...]

1. 'To watch Russian leaders and media make the public case for war with Georgia when the conflict was still in its infancy was also to wonder why at that point there was still so little factual evidence '
'The Kremlin's spokespersons wanted the world to believe that the city had just suffered a Stalingrad-like devastation - though there was as yet no visible proof of the thousands of victims claimed. '
There were thousands of South Ossetians fleeing INTO russia. And the initial claims came from the South Ossetian govt.
2. 'Some Russian reporters present in the war-zone also turned to writing blogs, to overcome the self-censorship of their editors and newspapers, and to share the real story of Tskhnivali and elsewhere with their readers '
This comment applies to the western esp american reporters:
'While CNN basically used an 24/7 'open mike' policy towards Saakashvili, the rest of the US and European media uniformly bought into the US propaganda on the causes and effects of this conflict'
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2008/08/real-meaning-of-south-ossetian-war.html
3. The western media and Opendemocracy are ignoring the despotic reality of Georgia's Saakashvili:
'One of the constant themes in the US government and media presentation of the conflict in the Caucasus is the depiction of Georgia as a bastion of democracy. The Bush administration has increasingly invoked the terminology of the Cold War by referring to “democratic Georgia” as a symbol of the “free world” and its struggle against authoritarian Russia.
The reality of political life in Georgia is far different than the media image.
Only last November, in the midst of mounting protests against his regime, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili employed dictatorial methods against his opponents. On November 2, opposition demonstrations began in Tbilisi, demanding democratic reforms and the ouster of Saakashvili. These protests, while organized by billionaire media tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili, gave vent to grievances against government repression and the desperate living conditions of the population. They attracted tens of thousands to the streets of Georgia’s capital city.
The demonstrations continued until November 7, when the state police, acting on orders from Saakashvili, used tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons and truncheons to disperse the protesters. More than 600 required medical attention after the crackdown. On the same day, Special Forces raided Patarkatsishvili’s broadcasting corporation Imeldi, beating journalists and disabling equipment.
Saakashvili declared a state of emergency, suspending democratic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly. Independent broadcasting was halted even before the state of emergency was declared, and only the state-controlled television station was allowed to broadcast for a period of fifteen days. Imeldi was taken off the air indefinitely.
During the crackdown, Saakashivli called for snap elections to be held less than two months later, on January 5. The elections, held under conditions of political intimidation and repression, placed the opposition at an enormous disadvantage.
All media were under the de facto control of Saakashivli. In addition, two opposition leaders, Konstantin Gamsakhurdia and Shalva Natelashvili, were declared “wanted for treason.” The government accused them of conspiring with Russia to overthrow the government.
Patarkatsishvili, who likewise faced a government investigation for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government, began his campaign from Israel. He withdrew from the elections after the government released a recording of him attempting to bribe a police officer.'
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/saak-a18.shtml

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "Gilberto Gil: the open minister"

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:26:43 +0100

I saw the video of Gilberto Gil on a much-watched YouTube that was referenced on Second Life blogs because he was very enthusiastic about Second Life. His enthusiasm is infectious, and he seems a lot of fun. He seemed willing to apply new tools and approaches to culture -- what could be more interesting?

But...The problem with these copyleftist ideas is that he doesn't really have a very good idea about how "cultural workers" (if we're to call them that now) or artists are *to get paid*. How will they make a living? Who is going to pay for all this? The government? Are you sure that's a good idea?

He seems to sanction piracy and copyright theft, and unleash the masses of the poor world simply to paw over the artifacts of the rich world, harvest them as they wish, and make a "mash-up" of them. OK, but when those artifacts are exhausted because people get tired of having their works ripped off and stop creating? What then?

I don't associate hackers with ethics -- just the opposite. The effort to rehabilitate the term and sprinkle the holy water of creativity over it is part of the criminality.

Cathy Fitzpatrick

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/un_tethered

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/ngo_accountability

evgeny.morozov on "Citizen war-reporter? The Caucasus test "

evgeny.morozov — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:56:44 +0100

Cathy, thanks for your comments. I've watched the FoxNews/YouTube debacle quite closely and have written a piece about it -- not sure if it will got out though; it's actually closer to a million views now and it did produce a lot of hysteria -- including deputy chief of the presidential administration calling Fox News's behavior "the pinnacle of shamelessness"...

I do agree with you that citizen journalism is a concept that is far too broad to be dismissed outright; what often passes as "citizen journalism", for example, is good old activism using the same digital tools that citizen journalists use -- YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc. It would be hard to deny that such campaigns have tremendous value -- but they are not journalism, strictly speaking...

I also wonder to what extent success of citizen journalism depends on the availability of Internet infrastructure -- if the cybewars escalated and Georgians or Ossetians had no access to the Internet at all, it's not at all clear how they would be doing their reporting. I know the famous case of Burma and satellite phones -- but anyone to use a satellite phone in that region to transmit photos would be automatically labeled a spy....

But thanks for the great comments -- I found them very interesting.

Evgeny

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "Citizen war-reporter? The Caucasus test "

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:37:51 +0100

I'm so glad you've taken this on, Evgeny.

There are a lot of reasons why citizen journalism is limited, and can't work everywhere, and shouldn't work everywhere; this has to be about complementarity between user-generated media and professional commercial media or public media.

Reporting is hard and dangerous work in a conflict zone; it should be compensated properly, and the person in this situation needs an editor and needs extensive knowledge.

Citizens in a situation that reaches the point of war tend to already be mobilized in one direction or another by state propaganda; war is usually the continuation of television by other means, as Lawrence Weschler once famously said about the Balkan wars. People in this part of the world are reliant on state-controlled Russian broadcasting and state-controlled Georgian broadcasting that got a lot less independent in the last year or so.

People whose perceptions are already pre-aligned from their media setting aren't suddenly going to spring free of that setting and start asking hard questions, especially of themselves or their neighbours dodging bullets. "Citizen journalism" isn't a narrative to save a community, and enable people to survive; nationalist fables are.

The perfect result of this we saw on Fox TV, which interviewed a 12-year-old Ossetian girl who had fled the region, after living in her uncle's basement during the bombing, along with her aunt. They reported faithfully that Russia was their saviours. When questioned about bombing, the girl faltered for a moment, and couldn't quite report any eyewitness of bombing, but she believed it to be the case. Both were absolutely sure that the figure of 2,000 civilians killed was correct, even though they had no eye-witness report to back it up themselves -- they had fled. And that's how it works. You cannot pull "citizen journalism" that would be questioning the official state version, out of this sort of situation.

The Fox news clip, interrupted several times with commercials and some probing questions from the anchor, drew more than 350,000 views on YouTube, and numerous, aggressive replies from Russians in particular saying "See? It's all the Georgians fault" and "see? Fox News is censoring the truth and silencing these women because of evil Bush and the neocons". That *is* your citizens' journalism. That *is* the result -- a YouTube hysteria.

On the other hand, more than 17,000 people joined a Facebook group called STOP the aggression in Georgia, and it was the Twitters and the blogs that turned up the first (and so far best) war photojournalism. So the story is mixed, and it's not over.

Citizen journalism is a concept a lot like democracy itself -- it depends on what kind of demos you have to start out with to see the outcome.

Cathy Fitzpatrick

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/un_tethered

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/ngo_accountability

Not logged in on "SuperMedia: the future as “networked journalism” "

Not logged in — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:55:47 +0100

good work

AgilisLux on "The media and the war: seeing the human "

AgilisLux — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:48:23 +0000

As a photographer I was used to write my captions that included details of what, when, where & who. This times are over!

Its okay when keywords contribute to exact searches, but I find the language exactly streamlined to reach the widest possible audience is alarming. When we “google” with keywords, we are distancing ourselves from the victims in an overflow of information.

For some years I even did not picked up a free newspaper when entering a plane that got me to the destination of a assignment because I have had enough of all kind of information I downloaded and printed out to brief myself with before start working there. This habit was born out of my personal experience that a very personal story was often used to stir the pot.

Fact is on the example of the fate of one single person, a victim, a conflict can not be explained. In one case a NGO who was reading the story evacuated some children that would hardly survive. This NGO vehicle in which the children where transported was attacked and the children badly wounded.

I have become very reluctant to contribute to Human Rights organisations and think that it is professionally not right for a journalist to follow the “do good approach” of “Humanitarian Organisations”. We as journalists can not lift the finger and fulfil the position as a “headteacher” for a better world. We are also not a instance for common moral. After all, - what actually is moral?
I might be driven personally by injustice, or what I believe injustice is; the main question simply remains for me as a freelance journalist: does the story has the market value to cover the costs, “the hazards and expense of reporting”?

In the past also some editors told me straight: if I get this out, I can loose my job (it was about disgusting behaviours among German troops in A-Stan) . This what they published was sometimes totally the opposite of their personal views just to please their employers.

Iraq and A-Stan are for the Western Media what is Cechenia for Russia. And here we have again a similarity to the “Humanitarian Organisations” who refused to help the people in Iraq knowing the occupying army's are behind them. I was embedded and also spend time with insurgents. The photos that have been sold where those of our armies...

We don't move away from our “human views”, it is maybe just the tsunami of information.

veridis on "iWar: pirates, states and the internet"

veridis — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:13:29 +0000

While overall the definition and discussion of iWar certainly is worthy of more thought the continued comparisons to gunpowder seem to display a certain level of ignorance about iWar, gunpowder, or both. To claim that iWar is possible with little training, implying you could pick it up in a few days, is laughable. Even in the 90's when internet security was generally much more lax the most basic script kid would need months to be able to achieve anything against server size targets. To compare the proliferation of iWar technology to gunpowder, and to imply the central difference is the accessibility of the internet completely ignores the speed all technologies spread in the modern, globalised world. I would suggest that the spread of iWar technology and concepts has taken a surprisingly long time to emerge is possible military contexts. DoS attacks have been commonplace for over a decade but it is still very much a marginalised technology as far as use by governmental agencies for strategic purposes. The increase of potential targets may have something to do with it but the use of DoS has spread quite slowly.

opendemocracy on "The blind newsmaker"

opendemocracy — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:34:00 +0000

Bendara,
I am not a technological determinist, and I agree that the tech might be liberating and used for great things. It is interesting that your one example is taken from a publicly funded source - in other words precisely not one that has to contend with the market logic that this article was about.
I am all for expanding public funding of journalism (in the right ways).

I think you are optimistic when you say that veracity can "easily" be checked. There have been som pretty high profile cases of this not being so easy - like the reuters picture of Beirut burning last year. Photoshop'd. A single photoshop'd picture could change the lives of thousands....

Tony

Bendara on "The blind newsmaker"

Bendara — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 08:24:35 +0000

Journalism may be changing under the influence of the blogosphere and this may reduce journalism to less nutritious version, but if journalists and newspapers are prepared to take advantage of this, they could reinvent journalism in the post internet world.

The amazing advances in technology now allow anyone to film and record events that were once impossible. Just look at all the personal videos on u-tube. Mobile phones and cam recorders allow anyone to record, transmit and comment on events in secrecy. They can then be uploaded for the whole world to see. Rapid advances in technology and global connection will only enhance this ability.

The new role for respected newspapers is in fact happening now. The BBC encourages people in hot spots (Kenya for example) to email them eye witness accounts of events as they are unfolding. In time, witnesses could be used to report events and submit them for publication. The veracity of reports could easily be confirmed by other witnesses and once a newspaper is satisfied of authenticity, they could be reported on television or online as real news. Professional journalists who are unable to get to the action, could use such reports when filing a story. In effect, everyone becomes a reporter.

It would be difficult for politicians to deny events if the evidence is there for all to see and newspapers, be they electronic or printed, would continue to play a vital role in bringing these stories to a wider audience.

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "The reinvention of scarcity"

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:06:40 +0000

I wish there was a better way to space your post with paragraphing on here. Here's an article in the New York Times today that perfectly sums up this idea of how a digitalized version of a real life scene on the Lower East Side vacuums out content of music clubs and removes "the curatorial moment," as one club owner put it. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/arts/television/06itzk.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "The reinvention of scarcity"

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:51:36 +0000

I'm tremendously heartened to read your post, because you've hit upon something that has troubled me for a long time: the *orthodoxy* of the Creative Commons movement. There really needs to be some liberal revisionism away from some of these rigid doctrines. You've made a wonderfully valid point about the context and community around publications on an Internet site such as opendemocracy.net In fact, there *is* a scarcity in the new world of social media and that is *attention*. And that means if you can no longer gather the coin of the realm of attention, you cannot survive. If other sites like ISN essentially vacuum away your content, it doesn't "live" in the same way with the same sustenance and at some point, you cannot keep producing that content such that ISN can go on vacuuming it. So the ISNs of the world have to figure out how to pay, too, as much as you have to figure out how to retain value. I'm afraid Cory Ondrejka (the former CTO of Second Life who has now left Linden Lab and who will be teaching at USC) is somewhat disingenuous in his depiction of the Brave New World of virtuality and his claims that it doesn't suffer from scarcity. Of course there's scarcity -- starting with server space, which costs money, and programmers' time, and therefore costs a maintenance fee to Linden Lab each month. Then there's frame rates (FPS) and the capacity of those servers to hold only 40-100 avatars. In fact, there are very real constraints on creativity given those parameters. Land to display content cannot be rolled out endlessly for free like shelf paper. Second Life is a very concentrated, visual example of the attention economy, and it is definitely one made of the very real scarcity of people's time, views, and cash. Even Cory's claim that the virtual architect has no start-up costs or material costs and can bask in the glory of sheer creativity is heavily misleading. The building tools are wonky and difficult for the average person, so only the tekkie who is well schooled in Photoshop and the scripter who knows code can really excel -- education has to precede the utopia of SL. And naturally there is competition among architects for the marketplace, both commercial (housing, clubs, businesses) and non-profit (aesthetics, blog reviews, public meetings, reputation). The architect may be free of the weight of stone masonry and gravity and the cost of building a tower, but now he has to ask: Can he become a *good* architect? Will his builds gather the precious eyeballs of the attention economy? The tragedy of the commons in Second Life isn't that there is no bustle in the marketplace -- that's just a superficial impression that comes from needing more adaptation and lessons in how to use the search functions and networks to find topics and people of interest. Rather, it's that on the mainland, the place where precisely serendipity, creativity, collaboration should all come together in this very interesting international space, the Linden-induced anarchy misrules in the name of open-ended "creativity" that often winds up turning into a very accelerated lesson of the tragedy of the commons. You have to buy the view if you don't want a huge purple spinning tower or giant refrigerator in it, cramping your own style. Worse, on the mainland, land (that is, the metaphor for the display space for creativity and communications) is defaced and devalued by ad-farmers who cut up the server space into 16 m2 squares and put ugly spinning ads on them, then set the squares to sale for outrageous prices in order to extort residents to "buy back the view". This and other rigors of the mainland (griefing, crashing, etc) mean that it's quite the challenge to live and work on this commons, it's like trying to live with an email box that is full of spam. But I would say it is worth it, and gradually the norms will start to come into place to create the necessary degrees of restraint that help preserve the space for the creativity of all, not to grant it only to a few at the expense of the many through a misguided orthodoxy of absolute creator's rights that amount to cavalier licentiousness. A terrible blow to the world, and one in which Ondrejka took a position that was controversial yet became orthodox for the elite, was the appearance of the "Copybot" or program that could copy anything and therefore destroy all intellectual property rights -- the hallmark of Second Life had been that unlike other games or worlds, they gave subscribers the right to retain rights over their IP and to buy and sell for real money. Copybot as a metaphor for the copyability of everthing that is digital remains as a profound problem, as does the drive to open source the server code of SL itself -- it raises issues of property value and content copyright. I don't see that an exuberant business model that glorifies open source yet survives through foundation grants and constant demands for voluntary donations is really functioning as a *business* or that it is quite the viral model that we should all be emulating. People need to be paid for their work. So often the excited theorists relying on "wisdom of crowds" aren't factoring in that the people who make those crowds are paid at day jobs that give them just enough disposable time or fractured "multitasking" and "microchunked" attention to give away for free to various open-source projects. Somebody always has to pay...somewhere. I don't think you define the new world of Web 2.0 and such as "beyond scarcity" merely because there isn't a model of earth, resources, labor, etc. Rather, you need to define what the new scarcities are, and they are server space, attention, reputation, etc. I've been pondering that in this new dispensation, with copyright "withering away" and the difficulty in holding value in recordings and objects, copyright and intellectual property will become more event-driven than object-driven. That is, people who put together communities and networks and events within them will make up a kind of footprint or social graph or community icon that will in a sense become the new "copyrightable" thing. In this new kind of existence, you wouldn't have to worry about physically copyrighting an object in Second Life or a work of philosophy on the Internet because those would become artifacts that you would willingly hand out as freebies in conjunction with your community/event/interactive space. You won't have to worry about attempting to imprint and legally defend the community icon, because it will be unique, like a retinal pattern -- people might imitate it, but poorly. This communal icon can take many forms, from loose networks of individuals collaborating, to more organized corporations or non-profit organizations. A lot of thought and discussion will have to go into how to define the elements of these icons and also not become rigidly orthodox about "communities," as so often happens online, because the individual has to retain rights and dignity and minorities must be defended as well within the context of these overarching communities. Catherine Fitzpatrick/Prokofy Neva

Tony Curzon Price on " Making up minds"

Tony Curzon Price — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 08:58:12 +0100

I Think StevenRogers42 makes a really important point - new media is hyper-responsive to consumer desires; but consumers of analysis typically want the comfort of opinion, not the clash of ideas. Remaining open-minded in the face of media hyper-choice is like rtying to keep off sugar in a patisserie. We hope to do our bit to help.

Steven Rogers on " Making up minds"

Steven Rogers — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 14:56:15 +0100

I feel that this discussion is overlooking one of the most important trends engendered by the Internet-based "new media": the increasingly prevalent use of "new media" resources as tools for affirmation, rather than information. The Internet makes it possible, in fact rather easy, for any individual to tailor a network of blogs, "news", and "analysis" that is compatible with that individual's particular preconceptions and prejudices. The preference may be right, left, libertarian, centrist (all too rarely), Islamist, feminist, militarist, racist, environmentalist, or anything else... this phenomenon is by no means specific to any ideological grouping. What they all have in common, though, is the use of selected information not as a tool for developing new views or challenging existing ones, but as a controlled, filtered, device for affirming a preconceived view of the world. It's easy to note that major media are widely distrusted. What I find more interesting are the various reasons for that distrust. The same media that the right denounces as "the liberal media" are denounced on the left as "the corporate media". In either case, the complaint is the same: "the media aren't telling me what I want to hear". That complaint is nothing new. Today, though, it's possible to go out and tailor your own private self-affirming universe of "information" - and large numbers of people are doing exactly that. This process is, of course, entirely free and entirely democratic. The Internet allows us to review a broad spectrum of reasonable opinion on any given issue, with almost unbelievable ease. It allows us access to information that can open our minds to new perspectives, or to choose between a multiplicity of offerings in the marketplace of ideas. It also allows us to create a hermetically sealed and incomparably vicious single-minded universe of "information" designed entirely to reinforce and support our own preconceptions and prejudices.. It's not just about the tool... it's about what each individual chooses do do with the tool.

tonycurzonprice on " Making up minds"

tonycurzonprice — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:24:32 +0100

Thanks, Jack, for the comment. I agree - to a degree - with your defense of skepticism against cynicism: journalism left to its own devices tends to slide towards cynicism. From all sides of the political spectrum, "qui bono?" seems to be the lazy reaction to any event from the press ... no surprise that this is then reflected, almost as parody, in the conspiracy theory culture. When I praised detachment, it was not on its own: it was there to balance the inevitably parti-pris behaviour of activists. Do you go to a consumer review site before buying a digital camera, or do you believe Sony's promotional material? It's the same - except more important, with commentary. This brings me to Angel25's comment (thanks!) and faith in the adult consumer of information. I agree with this as an ideal - as I say, in the ideal, "understanding subsumes authority". But I don't think we should let down our guard on all the ways that the new media do, in fact, mediate what we come to know. I had a try at talking about some of these things in this article about Google ... but I'll be trying to do more on this in the coming months. The un-mediated lives firmly in the realm of the ideal; in the real, we should keep up our guard over the mediators - be they Google or the New York Times.