On the splintering of the fourth estate and fifteen things that twitter does rather effectively

I think it’s fair to say that this is one of the best things I’ve read all year. Consider it the first of my best-of-2010 posts.

Now I wouldn’t normally reblog a massive chunk of text like this, but Alan Rusbridger’s Guardian lecture the splintering of the fourth estate is a must-read, and definitely one worth saving for looking back on in a few years’ time. This particular passage – "off the top of my head, things that twitter does rather effectively" – seemed particularly rebloggable, because a) it pins down the massive cultural significance and potential of Twitter; b) it’s so very twenty-tennish; and c) it’s a list. Lists are pretty.

Just to clarify, everything below is written by Rusbridger, not me. Don’t credit me. Credit him. And thanks to Jeremy at magCulture for making me aware of this transcript in the first place.

The short version:

  1. It’s an amazing form of distribution
  2. It’s where things happen first
  3. As a search engine, it rivals Google
  4. It’s a formidable aggregation tool
  5. It’s a great reporting tool
  6. It’s a fantastic form of marketing
  7. It’s a series of common conversations
  8. It’s more diverse
  9. It changes the tone of writing
  10. It’s a level playing field
  11. It has different news values
  12. It has a long attention span
  13. It creates communities
  14. It changes notions of authority
  15. It is an agent of change

The long version:

1 – It’s an amazing form of distribution

It’s a highly effective way of spreading ideas, information and content. Don’t be distracted by the 140-character limit. A lot of the best tweets are links. It’s instantaneous. Its reach can be immensely far and wide. Why does this matter? Because we do distribution too. We’re now competing with a medium that can do many things incomparably faster than we can. It’s back to the battle between scribes and movable type. That matters in journalistic terms. And, if you’re trying to charge for content, it matters in business terms. The life expectancy of much exclusive information can now be measured in minutes, if not in seconds. That has profound implications for our economic model, never mind the journalism.

2 – It’s where things happen first

Not all things. News organisations still break lots of news. But, increasingly, news happens first on Twitter. If you’re a regular Twitter user, even if you’re in the news business and have access to the wires, the chances are that you’ll check out many rumours of breaking news on Twitter first. There are millions of human monitors out there who will pick up on the smallest things and who have the same instincts as the agencies – to be the first with the news. As more people join, the better it will get.

3 – As a search engine, it rivals Google

Many people still don’t quite understand that Twitter is, in some respects, better than Google in finding stuff out. Google is limited to using algorithms to ferret out information in the unlikeliest hidden corners of the web. Twitter goes one stage further – harnessing the mass capabilities of human intelligence to the power of millions in order to find information that is new, valuable, relevant or entertaining.

4 – It’s a formidable aggregation tool

You set Twitter to search out information on any subject you want and it will often bring you the best information there is. It becomes your personalised news feed. If you are following the most interesting people they will in all likelihood bring you the most interesting information. In other words, it’s not simply you searching. You can sit back and let other people you admire or respect go out searching and gathering for you. Again, no news organisation could possibly aim to match, or beat, the combined power of all those worker bees collecting information and disseminating it.

5 – It’s a great reporting tool

Many of the best reporters are now habitually using Twitter as an aid to finding information. This can be simple requests for knowledge that other people already know, have to hand, or can easily find. The so-called wisdom of crowds comes into play: the “they know more than we do” theory. Or you’re simply in a hurry and know that someone out there will know the answer quickly. Or it can be reporters using Twitter to find witnesses to specific events – people who were in the right place at the right time, but would otherwise be hard to find.

6 – It’s a fantastic form of marketing

You’ve written your piece or blog. You may well have involved others in the researching of it. Now you can let them all know it’s there, so that they come to your site. You alert your community of followers. In marketing speak, it drives traffic and it drives engagement. If they like what they read they’ll tell others about it. If they really like it, it will, as they say, “go viral”. I only have 18,500 followers. But if I get retweeted by one of our columnists, Charlie Brooker, I reach a further 200,000. If Guardian Technology picks it up it goes to an audience of 1.6 million. If Stephen Fry notices it, it’s global.

7 – It’s a series of common conversations

Or it can be. As well as reading what you’ve written and spreading the word, people can respond. They can agree or disagree or denounce it. They can blog elsewhere and link to it. There’s nothing worse than writing or broadcasting something to no reaction at all. With Twitter you get an instant reaction. It’s not transmission, it’s communication. It’s the ability to share and discuss with scores, or hundreds, or thousands of people in real time. Twitter can be fragmented. It can be the opposite of fragmentation. It’s a parallel universe of common conversations.

8 – It’s more diverse

Traditional media allowed a few voices in. Twitter allows anyone.

9 – It changes the tone of writing

A good conversation involves listening as well as talking. You will want to listen as well as talk. You will want to engage and be entertaining. There is, obviously, more brevity on Twitter. There’s more humour. More mixing of comment with fact. It’s more personal. The elevated platform on which journalists sometimes liked to think they were sitting is kicked away on Twitter. Journalists are fast learners. They start writing differently.

Talking of which …

10 – It’s a level playing field

A recognised “name” may initially attract followers in reasonable numbers. But if they have nothing interesting to say they will talk into an empty room. The energy in Twitter gathers around people who can say things crisply and entertainingly, even though they may be “unknown”. They may speak to a small audience, but if they say interesting things they may well be republished numerous times and the exponential pace of those re-transmissions can, in time, dwarf the audience of the so-called big names. Shock news: sometimes the people formerly known as readers can write snappier headlines and copy than journalists can.

11 – It has different news values

People on Twitter quite often have an entirely different sense of what is and what isn’t news. What seems obvious to journalists in terms of the choices we make is quite often markedly different from how others see it – both in terms of the things we choose to cover and the things we ignore. The power of tens of thousands of people articulating those different choices can wash back into newsrooms and affect what editors choose to cover. We can ignore that, of course. But should we?

12 – It has a long attention span

The opposite is usually argued – that Twitter is simply an instant, highly condensed stream of consciousness. The perfect medium for goldfish. But set your TweetDeck to follow a particular keyword or issue or subject and you may well find that the attention span of Twitter users puts newspapers to shame. They will be ferreting out and aggregating information on the issues that concern them long after the caravan of professional journalists has moved on.

13 – It creates communities

Or, rather, communities form themselves around particular issues, people, events, artefacts, cultures, ideas, subjects or geographies. They may be temporary communities or long-terms ones, strong ones or weak ones. But they are recognisably communities.

14 – It changes notions of authority

Instead of waiting to receive the “expert” opinions of others – mostly us journalists – Twitter shifts the balance to so-called “peer to peer” authority. It’s not that Twitterers ignore what we say – on the contrary (see distribution and marketing, above) they are becoming our most effective transmitters and responders. But, equally, we kid ourselves if we think there isn’t another force in play here – that a 21-year-old student is quite likely to be more drawn to the opinions and preferences of people who look and talk like her. Or a 31-year-old mother of young toddlers. Or a 41-year-old bloke passionate about politics and the rock music of his youth.

15 – It is an agent of change

As this ability of people to combine around issues and to articulate them grows, so it will have increasing effect on people in authority. Companies are already learning to respect, even fear, the power of collaborative media. Increasingly, social media will challenge conventional politics and, for instance, the laws relating to expression and speech.

That was an awfully long blockquote, wasn't it? Maybe I should try to boil it all down to 140 characters or something.

Stanley Kubrick reading list

I thought it'd be good to compile a list of Kubrick-related books for you lovely people to stick on your Christmas lists (thanks to Maggie, Tess and Tom for the suggestions). 

First off, Jerome Agel's The Making of Kubrick's 2001 is excellent. It's the sort of making-of book they just don't do any more, with plenty of insight into the film-making process, rather than a simple slapped together collection of publicity stills. It's out of print now, but there are still copies floating around, so keep your eyes peeled for it in charity shops. (Big thanks to Michael for my copy!) 

Taschen have done their usual trick of publishing one cheap and cheerful book, Kubrick, one amazing, reasonably priced book, The Stanley Kubrick Archives, and one overpriced lump of gimmicky naffosity that wastes genuinely interesting material, Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made. That second one is one of my favourite books about anything, ever. 

Unsurprisingly, the BFI are always good for film books, so James Naremore's On Kubrick, Michael Chion's Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey and Peter Kramer's 2001: A Space Odyssey: BFI Film Classic (a bit colon-heavey that one) are all worth a look. Chion has also written Eyes Wide Shut: BFI Film Classic, but I take exception at the entirely unjustified use of the C-word there. It's not a classic, it's merely an okay film that happened to be made by a genius.  

(I should point out that whilst writing this, my iPhone has decided to start playing Chris Isaak's Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing, from Eyes Wide Shut. Creepy.)

Cinefex Magazine Issue 85 from April 2001, probably the best behind-the-sfx look at 2001 anywhere.

Norman Kagan's The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick and Vincent LoBrutto's Stanley Kubrick – both come highly recommended. There's also Drama and Shadows, a rather beautiful collection of work from Kubrick's life as a photographer in the forties.

For other Kubrick resources, you can do a lot worse than Coudal Partners' astonishing Kubrick linkdump, which could keep you busy for a week.

Enjoy.

An open letter to Apple regarding the flagrant misuse of hyperbole

Dear Apple,

I have a small bone to pick. Please understand that this is coming from someone who usually impressed with your marketing (I’m even on public record as being an official sucker for Apple products). The thing is, that whole “tomorrow is just another day” thing was just a bit embarrassing, wasn’t it?

First of all, you made out like you were going to be making a long-overdue improvement to your flagship application, the one that has been suffering from feature-bloat for a couple of years now, and what do we get? A few albums that have been available in the shops for several decades.

The Beatles appearing on iTunes doesn’t matter to us. It matters to you. If we so desperately wanted to own any of their albums, there are a multitude of ways we could have bought them and quite simply ripped them onto iTunes ourselves. Aside from the Apple Inc./Apples Corps Ltd. shareholders, the announcement is only of real interest to complete shut-ins incapable of getting to the shops and who somehow have access to the iTunes store but not Amazon.

Also, that teaser page. Now, I’m no professor of the English language – my blog is littered with all sorts of typos and grammatical gremlins – but then again, I’m not writing something to go on the homepage of a multi-billion dollar corporation, am I?It’s as simple as this: what you’ve got yourself there is one sentence, not two. It just doesn’t look right. It especially doesn’t look right when it’s still on your homepage ten minutes before the Big Announcement. Could not have changed the “tomorrow” to “today”? Has there been an accident at the Time Machine factory? Or is it just some weird reference to Tomorrow Never Knows?

In summary: today you’ve successfully messed up the English language, the space-time continuum, and the very notion of excitement. Well done. Don’t worry though, we probably will forget it.

That is all.

D. A. Gray Esq.

Movember

Just like my Uncle Lando, throughout November I’m risking ridicule and excessive trade sanctions from the Empire by growing a fine, luxurious moustache. We’re doing this as part of the Movember movement, raising money for the Prostate Cancer Charity. Now all you have to do is pop on over to my MoSpace page and donate. They accept PayPal payments, so it shouldn’t take more than a minute of your time. All donations are welcome, no matter how small. Or large.

Many Bothans shaved to bring you this information.

How not to rescue a nerf-herder

I watched Return Of The Jedi the other day, and it struck me how utterly crap the plan for rescuing Han from Jabba was. Although it all turns out quite exciting in retrospect, they had no way of predicting the turn of events and so most of what they do makes no sense. Observe:

A sensible plan:

  • Get one person to infiltrate Jabba’s staff – as a guard or something.

  • Unfreeze Han in the middle of the night, and scarper.

A not very sensible plan (Concocted by somebody who thinks he’s a Jedi Knight even though his training has consisted of balancing some rocks in a swamp and giving an old man a piggyback around a pond.)

  • Get one person to infiltrate Jabba’s staff - as a guard or something. This person is to do nothing at all. Probably best if this is someone completely untrustworthy - ideally the person who was responsible for Han’s capture in the first place.

  • Give Jabba two droids for no reason whatsoever.

  • Someone goes in in disguise and gives Jabba a Wookiee. Attempt to gain Jabba’s trust by threatening to blow him up. Hang around, soak up the atmosphere.

  • Send in “Jedi” to bargain with Jabba for Han’s life, even though you’re already pretty committed to a rescue plan. Under no circumstances should “Jedi” be armed. It’s probably safer to give lightsaber to one of the droids. Try not to stand on any really obvious trapdoors.

  • The disguised person unfreezes Han and scarpers. Everyone goes home safe and sound…

  • … except for the two droids and the Wookiee, who are imprisoned or enslaved at the palace. Consider rescuing them at a later date.

Do you know who would’ve done a better job? Mal Reynolds. In and out in three minutes. Bish bash bosh. Job done.

Films watched/facts discovered

Films watched this weekend:

Facts discovered:

  • Ken Russell can be rather sweet when he wants to be
  • Jeff Bridges’ eighties mullet has dated rather well
  • Judging by the trailer, the makers of Tron Legacy have lifted a few shots from The Fabulous Baker Boys
  • Dave McKean is a significantly better artist than he is a director
  • It’s possible for a film to look a bit too nineties
  • Mark Herman, director of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, runs a production/training company called Parashoots, just up the road from me in York.
  • There are few things on Earth more manly than Burt Reynolds armed with a bow, circa 1972
  • The guy who played the charming hillbilly rapist in Deliverance has a website called squeallikeapig.com and will call you on your birthday for $19.95
  • George Clooney needs to direct more films
  • David Strathairn needs to be in more films
  • Patricia Clarkson needs to have more Oscars.

Gill

Whilst working on some Welsh text (oh how it hurts my head), I discovered that Gill Sans doesn’t have a ŵ character. Dan suggests that this may because Mr Eric Gill was probably a tad, shall we say, ‘preoccupied’.

Seriously, the man was filth.

Pentone

Unfortunately I can’t make the Creative Review tweetup at the Design Museum tomorrow night (with all the designers and the writers and the Lego and the cakes and the nibbles), owing to the fact that I’m at the wrong end of the country. Basically it’s all space, time and money’s fault.

Bloody universal constants.

So it’s rather handy that Asbury & Asbury have kindly summed the whole thing up in a brand new Pentone. Looks like a fairly accurate prediction of the night’s discourse. Fingers crossed I can make it to the next one.

Confessions of a struggling archaeologist

ck/ck has written a great post called Internet Archaeology. It’s essentially about lazy blogging – posting up images with no credit to the source or the the original creator. He details the amount of webular digging that had to happen just for him to correctly caption a photograph, and exactly why he did it.

“So why go to all the trouble? Why not succumb to the hordes of people who don’t give a fuck? Well, someone’s gotta give a fuck, and I wouldn’t want my own photographs, designs or anything else I’ve made floating around on the internet without people being able to find out who made it or where it came from. I would like to think it makes my blog all the better for going that extra mile, and I can only hope anyone who reads this blog can feel that extra care I try to put into it.”

I read this. I mulled it over. And now some thoughts:

1.
Damn right. I agree with everything ck/ck says. It’s called a web for a reason. It’s strength is in its connections. If you don’t bother connecting backwards (source) as well as forward (readers), then that’s where the whole thing starts to lose any value. The ideal of connected information is becoming fractured, and it’s happening more and more with the increased popularity of simple blogging engines like Tumblr. This trend is of no use to creators or readers. It’s easier to throw a photo into a shoe box with other photos than it is to carefully catalogue it and store it with some consideration. The more people blindly post things without the associated information, the more the web becomes a massive, useless shoebox.

2.
(You’re probably already thinking this). I’m 100% guilty of all those charges. I know this. I’m being a complete hypocrite. I’ve received a bit of flack for the lack of captions on Concrete Proof. I can try to justify this by claiming it’s an exercise in aesthetics, or it’s minimal, or it’s just for personal use really, so what if there’s no credits? But no. It’s easy. That’s all. I’m guilty of valuing quantity (and the associated traffic that brings) over quality. So I’m going to have a big rethink about how I do these things.

3.
This is slightly tangential, but if we’re talking about creator-data, credit, identity, and the crimes of simplified blogging, then there’s another matter to discuss. Who the heck are you ck/ck? Your blog is great, your photos are without exception astonishing, and so far you’re the only person in the world who’s managed to make a decent iTunes icon. But you don’t give any information about yourself. No about page. No name. Nothing. How am I supposed to adequately credit your images, should I repost them, with no actual information about you? And surely the value of content is increased significantly if you know a little something about the creator? Otherwise, why not just post everything without credit? (See also: Khoi’s post on shallow identity.)

So I’ll make you a deal: I’m going to make an effort to give credit where credit is due. In return, could all you anonymous bloggers give yourselves some credit?

IMDb fail

I use IMDb a lot. It’s great. However, the design of it has always had one major flaw, and the fact that they haven’t fixed it in the latest redesign would seem to suggest that it isn’t a flaw at all, but a cynical ploy to boost advertising revenue.

The problem is this: upon arriving at IMDb, there are a few vital seconds between the page loading and the banner ad at the top of the page loading. When it appears, the entire page gets shuffled down by about 200px, so the search box you’ve just tried to click into is now an advert, and you get whisked away to be sold something you have no interest in whatsoever. It infuriates the visitor at the beginning of their journey through the site and provides shamelessly inaccurate data to the advertisers.

This is just downright nasty, cynical, greedy web design.