Denoument

Well, with that, we’re at the end of our need for this little blog. If you’ve been reading along, and find what I have to say at least partially interesting, I’d like to let you know about how you can read more of what I have to say. First, there’s My personal blog, which hosts my fiction writing, promoting things I like, game reviews, and general opinion. If you’re in my creative writing class, I do apologise for anything I’ve said in the heat of irritation. There’s also my journalism blog, Irony Exports.

Contextually Angry

Compare and Contrast.

Set aside for a moment that the CNN website has small bullet-point headlines. Set aside that the main story out of Africa for CNN was about a conservation effort of an animal, set aside that the CNN narrative explicitly cites hip-hop lyrics and more subtly paints Kenya’s government as struggling to manage finance. Set those things aside, and just look at the core page.

Look at the headlines. Look at the way Al-Jazeera’s headlines speak about the news in Africa. It’s not just stories about politics, about peace, about the massive, complicated web of interconnected nations in Africa. They reference politicans and places by name, in the headlines, something that respects the importance of the topic at hand by assuming context. The Al-Jazeera website has sidebars to provide that context, but more than that, this is a page of news that assumes you understand some of the topics it’s talking about.

The CNN webpage doesn’t. The CNN webpage can tell you numbers dead, it can tell you nation locations, but the website’s Africa section is written like you don’t know anything about Africa.

This irritates me no end. Journalism should be the illuminiation of the public, the conversion of data into information, information into narrative.

The narrative presented by CNN is a minimal, bite-sized outline of ‘Africa,’ painting it as a place with dying animals, broken economies and strange, random violence being perpetuated by strange, shaped groups of ‘extremists.’ Al-Jazeera is pretty much the straight opposite: The articles assume context, and just comparing the two makes me feel like CNN think I’m an idiot.

Lords, this makes me angry.

Breaks And Checks

Arthur Jensen gave voice in this scene to a terrified Mr Beale of the notion of a multi-cultural, trans-national interface of corporations, referring to them as an interconnected system of systems. It seems fitting that our prior week’s presentation brought to our attention the nature of climate change, because there, we once again see that same meme. Climate is not weather in Canada or water levels in Tuvalu; Climate is, again, an interconnected system of systems.

It is all too easy for us to stand in our position as citizens of this world, and post on the internet, clucking our tongues about the American Empire. We can speak in doleful tones of the way that a nation so possessed of power and influence exerts that will over others. It seems rich, however, to me, as a white Australian, son of a British woman, daughter of a Welsh woman, to act as if all international influence, as if all transmission of culture and technology and people is somehow brand new and always bad.

We have learned in BCM that media capitals, centerpieces of information-based power, grow not in the middle of hegemony, but at the edges, where cultures combine. We have learned that information can drive economies, and that the economies drive what information moves. We have seen how we pass information along informs what information we pass along, and we have seen how the gaps in what people value determine their news, their comedy, and their views on people outside their worlds. Some of those lessons have been chilling, some hopeful, and some just funny. In each case, I am reminded repeatedly of two simple phrases. First, Truth Resists Simplicity. Second, that one phrase from Network, over and over: An Interconnected System Of Systems.

In the 1940s, an English actor, inspired by German politics, made an American film, quoting from a Hebrew religious text.

Let us remember humbly our connections.

Week 9 Presentation

Good god this whole topic of climate science – and its denialists – makes it so so hard to not be full of rage.

Week 9 Lecture: Climate Of Change

Climate Science is one of those nasty topics to touch on because it’s complicated and serious and has major ramifications for the real world, which makes it damn challenging to convey information about it quickly. Even the simplest version of the topic – the climate is changing and it seems really likely that it’s our fault – can be a few words too long for people. It gets pared down to the climate is changing, and discuss why that might be (we kind of already know, as the rest of the sentence suggests) or it seems really likely and then they start to talk about why scientists can’t just say things nice and simply.

These issues are made more complicated by who they get to care about them. Climate scientists are scientists. Environmental advocates are advocates. Both of these groups are ones that a confident middle and conservative political climate can dismiss – it’s even to the point where many political operators can increase their votes by running against their own left flank. This strategy is known amongst online operators as Kick the Hippy, perhaps brought to the modern attention by Rachel Maddow on her show on MSNBC. Running against the idealistic minority is basically a win: You get to look stern, and provided you aren’t worse on the topic than your opponent, you don’t even lose that minority’s vote!

I feel like I’ll always have a Dara O’Briain quote for every situation, but let’s quickly talk about balance:

This is really a byproduct of an overly exported idea, this strange sort of democratic thinking Isaac Asimov once disparaged with this beautiful simple summary:

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

This idea is perfectly democratic, to its detriment. It’s an outlook that says that a climate scientist’s opinion, as a single individual entity, is entirely equal to someone without any such qualification or expertise. In a narrative-driven journalistic pursuit, you don’t have time to interview fifteen hundred people and break that information down: You instead create a simple story which is about one or two people.What results is that you present ‘both sides’ fallaciously. Why, do we have a Youtube clip about that?

It seems we do!

Why is it that I have comedy clips I just know about that skewer this idea? Well, let’s cast our minds back to Kath’n’Kim – where we asserted that comedy derivces heavily from the subversion of the expected. When the media has failed, so persistently, so grossly, then, comedians have a rich vein of expectations that are wonderfully subverted. The media should be providing real information, but what are they doing? Not providing real information. There you go, nice and easy!

Now, in the instance of Climate Science, there are a number of possible causes for people to disagree with them. Some are outright Dominionists, believing that Global Warming being true would be a counterpoint to a religious outlook. Some have commercial outlooks that are incentivised to dismiss the idea. Some are even just ignorant, and victims of this two-sides approach of information distribution.

Here’s a dark greasy fingernail of the grasping hand of News Values: Without any reason to incentivise otherwise, the media will headlessly use the easiest tools they have. When you touch on a tough topic like this, it means that the information in support will be bad (Day After Tomorrow, anyone?), and that complexity means it’s easy to attack. There’s narrative when you say ‘This small number of elites are trying to fool the world.’ There’s much less narrative in ‘Ten billion humans over a hundred years have started to shit up the environment in a big way.’

This is true for almost all science reporting, by the way.

The False Balance Paradigm doesn’t stop there, though! In Political news in the United States, ‘both sides’ are seen as bad and equal on all issues; that sure, one side are heartless, but the other side are spineless. That meme is easily thrown around, it’s classic politics, and it’s even promoted by the worse of two sides to diminish the difference between them and their opponents. Just for an example, the Violence Against Women Act was passed in the House of Representatives this year, only to fail in the Senate (at first) due to filibustering. People complained that it showed Congress as unable to do anything, assuming that nobody could come together, except that all 138 votes against the bill were Republican.

Was the narrative ‘Republicans block Violence Against Women Act?’

Nope. ‘Violence Against Women Act Dead In Senate.’ What’s worse, the head of the Senate – Harry Reid, a Democrat – was shown alongside this headline! He didn’t block the act – he was pushing it forwards! Heck, if not for opposition from the other side – extraordinary opposition – Reid would have been celebrating the passage of the bill!

Let’s go back to Climate Science, where, to quote from The West Wing: “lunacy is a nation of SUVs telling a nation of bicycles that they have to change the way they’ll live before we’ll agree to do something about greenhouse emissions.” Small nations near sea level are impacted by climate change increasing sea levels. Cultures in cold regions like Nunavut in Canada are being impacted by the change in animal migration. Poor farmers in Africa and South America are being further impacted by the slow change in seasonal shifting – the hotter summers reducing crop yield.

Meanwhile, Australia, a nation in the top twenty of global economies, with monstrous fossil fuel reserves, and whose population mostly live in coastal regions with heavy infrastructure, sit around bickering about how little we should be trying to pay for carbon emissions.

Great Man History And Proportion

Journalists are taught to be professional communicators. They are told to make information into a story, creating a narrative that people can embrace. Steve Jobs’ death at the hands of cancer was a story about a technology mogul who died of pancreatic cancer after making many millions of dollars. That’s almost it – but people care so much about what happened.

This is what’s known as Elite-Focused news values, where a narrative can be coalesced around the story of a single individual who is very special, or even is perceived as very special. There are a number of people who can be said to have Steve Jobs’ personal traits – but he gives the impression of immense specialness.

It’s very easy to tell a story that focuses around an individual. This isn’t deliberate cruelty or propoganda mentality: It’s just easier.

The question that follows in my mind: Is a demand for more news creating worse news?

Post-Presentation Thoughts

You focus oh-so-keenly on what you didn’t say!

In our presentation, a point we brushed against but didn’t explicate is that the character of the news distributor is itself part of the news. While it’s easy to point to extreme examples like Fox News, every news organisation’s decisions about what to report is itself a way that the news source influences the news. This is shown in the Boston Bombings not just by the relevance of ethnocentric American attitudes, but because of expectations of the audience. Local Australian news networks did not necessarily show the Boston Bombings because of a sinister motivation, to shape opinion – it is just as likely they showed it because we had footage that would gather attention.

It’s a strange sort of News Quantum Theory: The act of observation influences the observation.

That said, finishing this post up so I can focus on the tute notes.

Week 8 – Who Counts?

This is the subject my group is doing for group presentation – so I’ve done the reading, but also read other subject matter. Don’t worry, though, tomorrow’s presentation won’t be about me mishandling the Arab Spring. We deliberately tried to draw from the reading, but not copy it. On the other hand, we still wound up cribbing of Noam Chomsky, because, well, that guy is errrrywhere in global media conversations. He started yelling about it in the eighties and for some reason, he has yet to have a reason to stop yelling.

News information in the modern age is effectively a package like any other type of television or audio media. The raw information is one thing to sell, but people aren’t buying and selling that. It’s easier – and faster – to buy the story, as produced. The strange thing that flows from there is that news stories start to become treated as products. News distributors try to eschew their local reference. This has been true since before globalisation, though – ever heard a ‘Radio Voice?’

American news and presentation experts typically pitch their voices to having an accent that does not represent where they come from; they affect what’s known as a midwestern accent. Strangely, the majority of Americans don’t live in places that sound like that – the biggest population centres of America are renowned for their accented form of speech and stylistic slang, but news in those locations – news produced in those locations – actively avoids using the accent. That’s a byproduct of the desire to make news easier to distribute across the country – the Radio Voice.

This news-as-produce worldview has two side effects; first, news reporters are encouraged to pursue work that is easily packaged and distributed. Second, non-news actors have the opportunity to instil news-ish items in the minds of other people. Staged events can be given legitimacy by being deployed as news items to news networks.

All of these concerns in media are tools used to manipulate and control public perception. For anyone old enough to remember 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq, this should be a familiar, real-world demonstration of how news becomes accepted reality.

This isn’t to get conspiratorial. This isn’t a deliberately manipulative effort by the global media in general. After all, the deceit towards Iraq lasted for only a few years before the backlash transpired and people became aware of the reality. The problem is that these potentials for abuse exist in this global media network. With a near-headless economy-driven news cycle, one that has no individual cultural compass, an amoral selection process is inevitable.

The values that flow from this become values that make it easier to sell. News needs to be exceptional, culturally close, and ideally, has a form of negativity in it. It’s much easier to make news against something than for something. Attaching it to an identity, and involving some elite individual strengthens the narrative – but say, Russell Brand has a fairly ordinary day isn’t news (except on the Onion).

In the example of Syria being Putin vs Obama, that’s even a simplification of a simplification! It’s not ‘Russia vs America’ – it’s this vast argument about sovreignty and inter-relationships of war in a global world! But try to phrase it like that? It won’t sell. The news becomes France vs the US. The US vs Syria. The US vs Russia. Obama vs Putin.

Oh yeah, and-

Remember, I am really just some guy. I try to state things definitively because I think it’s better to give someone something to disagree with. If I say something you think is crap, please bring it up.

The Kettle Defence and Kath and Kim

First things first, the Kettle Defence, explained. Nicki quite astutely noted that the presentation held up two contrasting arguments without connecting them regarding Kath ‘n’ Kim in America.

• Kath ‘n’ Kim didn’t work in America because Americans don’t understand Australian humour.
• Kath ‘n’ Kim didn’t work in America because the humour was Americanised.

Very simply, I forward that there are two people presenting these problems. I’m not sure I actually agree with the argument, but what I think was being brushed against was that the people producing the show did not understand the source of humour; and the audience didn’t like the Americanised result, because that Americanisation process did not successfully identify what would make it popular.

I’m not sure either way. But I can see how these two seemingly-conflicting arguments can mesh.

I’d comment on the Chris Lilley stuff, but I do not get it, so I feel it best to just sit and listen.