event mechanics

EDIT 22/02/12: Annabel Crabb has a new show on the ABC: Kitchen Cabinet. Blurb from the show’s ‘About’ page:

A half-hour entertainment series that serves up a delectable combination of political discussion and good food. Each week one of Australia’s most respected political commentators – Annabel Crabb – takes a plate and leads us into the homes and hearts of some of our most notable and engaging politicians. She sits down and talks food, recipes and carbon tax with MPs from both sides of the fence.

Food and politics are never separated for long. The best plots are hatched over lunch. The best stories are told over dinner. In Canberra, dinner bookings are an anthropological study in themselves. If you go for a walk around Manuka or Kingston during a sitting week, you see a graphic illustration of the capital’s power shifts. Why is that minister sharing noodles with that factional opponent? What is that disenfranchised bunch of back benchers plotting? And the best way to get to know a politician is to break bread with one.

Kitchen Cabinet will deliver a refreshing human touch, as we watch our politicians drop their guard and go about their daily life at home.

I transcribed part of a panel discussion from last year’s #NewsNews event at the Melbourne Writers Festival primarily for the students in my online news classes. The panel was titled Outsiders and involved Belinda Hawkins, Greg Jericho and Jay Rosen. I took an interest in the panel when following the hastag for the #NewNews event and noted much tweeting and retweeting when Belinda Hawkins joked that to get people to engage with political journalism parliament should be turned into a cooking show. I downloaded all tweets with the #newnews hashtag using The Archivist software. It allowed me to figure out precisely what was tweeted and when, then track down the panel name and eventually the video of he panel. The video of the panel is here. Below is the transcript of the relevant sections of the panel. It begins with a section from Rosen about how his keynote to the panel, which he had made publicly available before delivering it, has been critiqued by a working political journalist (I think this is the critique Rosen is referencing). It is this comment that is later referred back to when an audience member asks the panel about engagement. It is worth reading both sections to get a proper sense of Rosen’s example (at the end of the transcription below) from This American Life.

Video Time: 30:13 -35:08

Jay Rosen

In this piece, and it’s kind of a long analysis from someone who does political journalism, and he makes the point that you make, he says “Look… what lots of these academics don’t understand…” And I knew it was going to be good when someone starts lecturing me about journalism, this is going to be good… “is that the market for political journalism is actually very small. It’s a small number of people, often you hear this phrase ‘political junkies’…” You know, ‘For all those political junkies out there’ who sort of really, really care about politics. You could never really build a business on it, because it is such a tiny percentage, and most people, you know the larger percentage of the public, is, you know, watching other spectacles, is interested in entertainment, whatever… umm, and when you realise that you’re reporting for this small group of people who are intensely interested, then what the insiders are doing to manoeuvre and manipulate this larger body of people is actually what these political junkies want to know about.”

And so he’s saying is that ‘people like Rosen don’t understand how political journalism works because they think the entire public is like hanging on our every word, when actually we’re just addressing this…’ ok? He has a very elaborate defence, even though, yes, much of the time it is a bunch of crap… I think this is really interesting, because it goes back to like classic debates in the 1920s about the nature of the democratic public. I think there is a tension when we come upon a tension like this when we come across two different ways of perceiving this.

One is to say, basically, he’s right. Most people don’t care. They’ve got lives to lead and they’ve got other things to do and basically the best they’re going to do is pay attention a little bit for the vote. Yeah, they’re going to be shaped by advertising and stereotypes, but that’s just the nature of the world and we have to be mature and admit it. Right… And then we can found our ideas about politics and journalism on an honest assessment of them. So that’s one point of view.

Then the other point of view is.. Well, wait a second; in a democracy the only legitimate basis for government is the consent for the government and if you are actually saying that people can’t actually know enough to give their consent, then what you are really saying is that we don’t have a democracy, we have a kind of aristocracy which has the appearance of the consent from the governed is there, but actually most people are just manipulated masses.

So this journalist says “No, is true that it’s hard to get people engaged in politics. It’s true that there’s many competing interests, it’s true that we have to be realistic and modest in our expectations we also have to continually try to interest the broader public in what matters to them. If you work in politics, if you work in journalism and you don’t think that’s important anymore, because really it’s a small group of people who are interested in politics, then you’re in the wrong business… Ok? And I tend to come from the second perspective and a lot of people in political journalism really take the first perspective, which is why they’re always telling me you don’t understand how it works.

Video time: 46:44

Question from Audience

I just had a question about what Jay was talking about before, about how it is too difficult to get… to engage people, umm… I wanted the panel’s thoughts on how you actually… ‘cause, in a sense, we’re all here today, because we’re actually, you know, on a Saturday morning talking [Jay Rosen starts nodding] about media and politics and [inaudible, ‘blogging issues’?]… the people who are living in middle… middle Australia , I’m not sure how interested they’d be, so how do we reach out to the people…

Belinda Hawkins

[Interrupting] I know the answer… I’m telling you I have the answer [Rosen looks very sceptical, Greg Jericho is amused] In television you’ll gauge whether people are watching you or not by ratings. Stories about certain topics do not rate, we know they do not rate, we run them, we look at them, we go into them because there is a wider purpose at the ABC than just thinking about ratings, um…

The story on Four Corners about abuse of animals in abattoirs in Indonesia did not rate, there was a huge turn off factor, and yet it generated an enormous amount of discussion and it was invaluable because of that.
Stories on Australian Story that I do about politicians, we know.. we go into it… except for the one about Julia Gillard before she was Prime Minister, every story I’ve done on politicians didn’t particularly rate… Politics is a turn off. So what do you do to fix that?

You turn parliament house into a cooking program. [audience laughter] MasterChef… [audience laughter] MasterChef is destroying current affairs on a nightly [inaudible] on the ABC. Everything needs to be couched in terms of a cooking program… and there’s no reason why parliament couldn’t be done that way [audience laughter]
No but seriously what do you… [gesturing]

Jay Rosen

I think that this is a really really hard problem for the reasons that you just heard articulated and I go back and forth on it. This American Life is probably the best radio program in the United States by the brilliant Iva Glass is a story-telling program and lots of times the show will be about… people have bizarre relationships with their mothers… people that cross cultures. It’ll be people… This American Life is about stories of real people. But every once and a while they’ll do something completely different than that and their most famous recent program, actually its older that than that it is three years old now, which was The Giant Pool of Money. Which was a one hour documentary on the [inaudible, ‘bank crisis’?].

It started when Ira Glass, who’s the host, kept hearing these stories in the news about sub-prime mortgages and the collapse of banks and they didn’t know what was going on and they were befuddled like any other citizen would be, because they’re not economics correspondents and so they decided to try and explain – what was happening and why we had this crisis that ultimately cost the treasury hundreds of billions of dollars – to themselves. And their one hour documentary, The Giant Pool of Money, is overwhelmingly, by a factor of ten to one, the most downloaded program they’ve ever done and it’s about the intricacies of the mortgage market. So when you come upon things like that, it makes me think, ‘Well there is a way to engage a larger audience, you just have to help them understand and that that’s actually harder than reporting the news, because that’s what that program was, ‘We’re going to help you understand this really complex, strange, bizarre event that cost you hundreds of billions of dollars, right… And the key to the program was that the people making it began in the same position as the overwhelmed ignorant public and they travelled to competence [inaudible, ‘by observation’?] and looking back to where they were when they started, and how they achieved mastery, they told the story so others could have mastery as well. So sometimes I think that if sometimes we had journalism like that we could expand the circle.

This passage from unknowing to knowing (and the affective character of the non-formal knowledges produced) is best captured in the ‘how to’ or ‘instructionable’ style of article. My current work is begins to develop an archaeology of ‘how to’ articles. Why are there not far more socio-political ‘how to’ articles? ‘Pol Inst’ anyone?

I’ve been reading Michael Polanyi‘s book Personal Knowledge (1958). Some aspects of Polanyi’s work have been popular in organisational studies primarily due to his conceptualisation of ‘tacit knowledge’. I have been reading Polanyi’s work for the purposes of the article I am currently writing on an ‘economy of know-how’. Maybe I’ll write another post engaging with how organisational studies have used Polanyi’s ‘tacit knowledge’, at the moment I need to finish this article I am writing.

The subtitle of the book Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy indicates Polanyi’s general program of locating affirmation as a central element of the discovery and development of scientific knowledge. Indeed, instead of a heuristic of doubt or a suspension of belief, Polanyi argues for a heuristic of passion premised on belief. Although deployed in any number of occasions in his argument the character of passion is a given and is nearly always described in terms of its function. In those occasions where Polanyi does discuss the character of this passion it is largely through analogy with what he calls the inarticulate intellect of animals and also in the context of instinctual drives. Silvan Tomkins’s work on the ‘analog’ ontology of affect as compared to the ‘digital’ ontology of drives enables contemporary readers of Polanyi’s to explicate what Tomkins calls a “co-assembly of affects” as characterizing the motivational drive of the ‘passion’ he describes.

For Polayni, ‘intellectual passion’ is an integral element in the process of scientific discovery and development of scientific knowledge. He argues that “into every act of knowing there enters into a tacit and passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection, but a necessary component of all knowledge” (329). The passion coefficient of knowledge is necessary for the process of discovery. In his discussion of explorers , Polanyi describes commitment to belief as an integral element of intellectual passion that is satisfied by discovery. The explorer enjoys a “daring anticipation of reality” (327). He isolates this as the creative dimension of scientific progress, and this creative dimension relies on ‘heuristic passion’:

“We have to cross the logical gap between a problem and its solution by relying on the unspecifiable impulse of our heuristic passion, and must undergo as we do so a change of our intellectual personality. Like all ventures in which we comprehensively dispose of ourselves, such an intentional change of our personality requires a passionate motive to accomplish it. Originality must be passionate.” (151)

Polanyi argues that the gratification of instinctual appetites (hunger, sex and fear) is a manner of verification. There is a parallel to intellectual passions in that “all passions animating and shaping discovery imply a belief in the possibility of a knowledge of which these passions declare the value” (183). That is, Polanyi suggests, a (not infallible) ‘competence’ of intellectual passions is to recognise truth. The satisfaction of intellectual passions is a kind of verification of discovery, as discovery “terminates the problem from which it started” and “leaves behind knowledge” (183). The knowledge is expressed as part of the ongoing development of an “articulate framework” (183).

He argues that the interpretative framework built upon previous discoveries is changed by future discoveries; hence it is “logically impossible to arrive [at future discoveries] by the continued application of our previous interpretative framework” (151). This insight is troubled, however, by his use of ‘recognition’ in the process by which problems are identified:

“To see a problem is a definite addition to knowledge, as much as it is to see a tree, or to see a mathematical proof—or a joke. It is a surmise which can be true or false, depending on whether the hidden possibilities of which it assumes the existence do actually exist or not. To recognize a problem which can be solved and is worth solving is in fact a discovery in its own right.” (127)

There is a contradiction of discovery based on ‘recognition’. This is not a question of mere semantics, but relates to the functioning of ‘intellectual passion’ itself. Useful here is Deleuze’s development of a post-Kantian philosophy of the Idea as essentially ‘problematic’ instead of ‘regulatory’. That is, without regulatory universality ideas become problematic, and ‘recognition’ in the way Polanyi discusses it here is no longer straightforward. Polanyi himself argues that radical manifestations of this process of breaking with conceptual frameworks dissolves a “screen” between us and things and in doing so dissolves the subjective into experience itself as a form of radical contemplation distinct to our normative experience of experience: “as observers or manipulators of experience we are guided by experience and pass through experience without experiencing it in itself” (209). Perception itself is co-assembled though experience…

Polanyi is primarily concerned with the freedom of intellectual passion necessary for scientific discovery. There is an “essential restlessness” of the human mind expressed through the scientist in terms of pondering new problems and discovering solutions to them (209), but it is not only the scientist that enjoys that satisfaction of discovery. The scientist, in Polanyi’s analysis, is concerned with the “natural order,” while another, for example, the technician or technologist, although working within a similar framework of discovery, has a far more focused heuristic passion.

“He follows the intimations, not of a natural order, but of a possibility for making things work in a new way for an acceptable purpose, and cheaply enough to show a profit. In feeling his way towards new problems, in collecting clues and pondering perspectives, the technologist must keep in mind a whole panorama of advantages and disadvantages which the scientist ignores. He must be keenly susceptible to people’s wants and able to assess the price at which they would be prepared to satisfy them. A passionate interest in such momentary constellations is foreign to the scientist, whose eye is fixed on the inner law of nature.” (188)

The constellation of interests organized around the focused heuristic passion of the technician is in part determined by the set of material advantages afforded by a technology; what Polanyi calls a technology’s “operational principle”: the rules by which a technology “teaches us actions undertaken for material advantages” if we “imputed [in the technologist] the purpose of achieving the consequence of this action” (186). My interest is in ‘know how’ which describes a form of knowledge that engages with such ‘operational principles’ and their material instantiation in a particular technological state of affairs. Unlike the knowledge of qualified technicians however, ‘know-how’ is the accumulation of partial understandings, but full appreciations of such “operational principles”. I call ‘enthusiasm’ the heuristic passion that is in-acted as a constituent element of the experience of discovering the operative principles of technology.

Currently finishing off a paper titled ‘Towards an economy of know-how’ based on PhD work. Extending Negri and Hardt’s arguments regarding the subsumption of the social and the way the ‘general intellect’ is used as a resource from which to extract rent I explore how print magazines have lost their monopoly rentier position on know-how produced through the cyclical valorisation of products of know-how in cultures of enthusiasm.
Anyway, I found this footnote in my PhD. Yep!

With reference to an ‘Aristotelian logic’, Whitehead (1978: 61-82) critically summarises the ‘error’ of mistaking the potentiality of the extensive ‘time and space continuum’, which he agrees is very useful for everyday living, for the ‘reality’ of the ‘creative process’ of events. What Whitehead calls an ‘actual occasion’ (of a realisation in a spatiotemporal state of affairs) is a “limiting type of event”(80).

I am preparing the first lectures for the two units I am teaching this semester. One is an introductory media studies unit and the other is an advanced online journalism unit. In both units I am grappling with the concept of ‘permanent beta’ for the first lectures. ‘Permanent beta’ is a phrase that I picked up somewhere, I am not sure where. Tim ‘Web 2.0′ O’Reilly discussed the concept of ‘perpetual beta’ to account for ways users were being reconfigured as co-developers. Others have picked this up and talked about ‘perpetual beta’ as a design approach for releasing unperfected products into the wild. Essentially this changes the process of satisficing (making sacrifices while satisfying basic design outcomes) to incorporate an expectation of users that while a product will not be ‘perfect’, it will be ‘useful’ and therefore can be ‘used’. There is a documentary called Life in Permanent Beta that brings together a discussion of technological developments and the question of whether technologies can serve as the locus for an ‘authentic’ life.

I am thinking about ‘permanent beta’ in slightly different way and it is essentially due to being in an educational context. I am using ‘permanent beta’ to describe a situation for preparing students for a future that is only partially defined. In the past, as is the case for most of what I have prepared in the syllabi in both units, students were taught so as to be literate in a given discipline and/or prepared for a certain workplace. ‘Permanent beta’ indicates a situation ‘to come’, one which never actually arrives, and yet affects the current situation. Why doesn’t it arrive? Because there is another situation on the horizon ‘to come’. A Derridean ‘permanent beta’. (On Derrida’s concept of the future, see this.)

For example, Jay Rosen has noted that journalism schools used to prepare students for a certain production culture (broadcast television, radio or print), where the ‘production cycle was god’. He implies that current journalism schools fail if they do not also prepare students for making news useful (and the weird ill-defined workplace of online journalism). I am taking this a step further and experimenting with helping students develop an entrepreneurial disposition to embrace opportunities that may or may not exist yet. (Some previous writing on what I mean by ‘opportunity’ here, but the everyday meaning of the word is suitable.)

Concrete example: We shouldn’t teach journalism students how to use a CMS, but how a CMS is used in different ways. They should be familiar with a range of content management systems and how these different systems afford different ways of representing and producing news, engaging with the audience and so on. Why? They will eventually use a CMS that hasn’t been invented yet, so they need to develop skills for developing best practice to incorporate the ‘new’. Or, better, they will assist the media enterprise where they work (or, better, own (or, even better, have created)) in creating a CMS that features the specific production and publishing affordances that enables them to make the news as useful as possible for the audience represented by the area of interest they are servicing.

Future utility informs current practice all the time in the media industry. Especially in negative ways where I am aware of publishers who have ‘opted up’ of updating sites because they are anxious about constant changes. Rather than developing a production cycle that can incorporate change and then developing a structured and measured approach to changing the production cycle to produce content in its most useful way, they have narrowed their markets (audience and advertisers) until the bare essentials are left, all in the name of retaining existing business models and all the while profit and audiences are rapidly diminishing.

For the media studies unit I am grappling with the question of media literacy. Part of this has been an update from what William Merrin has described as the shift from Media Studies 1.0 to Media Studies 2.0. In his journal article on the subject he describes a disjunction between the ‘world’ of the media studies academic and the ‘world’ of the current crop of students. I am half a generation younger than Merrin (at least, in relation to media engagement habits) so luckily most of what he describes as belonging to his students’ world belongs to mine. But this is not good enough for me. Updating media studies is one thing, and retaining elements of the past broadcast-based media studies disciplinary model is important, but media studies in the age of permanent beta means preparing students to be media literate not in the ‘world’ they already exist in, but for a ‘world’ to come.

It means a big shift has to occur so students can appreciate change as a necessary element of navigating the complex media ecologies of their worlds. My solution has to go with an ‘issues’ based unit design. This does not mean ‘issues’ in a normative political sense. For example, in the second lecture I discuss stupidity. Stupidity is a problem; not too many people want to be stupid. In different ways ‘the media’ has often been blamed for making audiences stupid. Why? How? From critiques of mass-culture to anxieties around social network over-exposure, the ‘idiot’ has been subject to constant critique. But surely some advertisers and media producers want consumers to be stupid, so as to not think too much about what they are about to purchase or watch? So who wants to make us stupid? I run through a history of anxieties around the media and whether it can produce stupidity or not, and if so in what ways. I identify my own stupidities.

I have tried this once before, when teaching print journalism, and it failed miserably. I only focused on the negative side of this process. My failure began with observing that very few, if any, of the students in the lecture would get jobs as traditional journalists. I did not focus on, because I did not see how it was possible myself, how the students were going to be tasked wih the awesome opportunity and responsibility of rejuvenating journalism itself. Part of the reason for framing the journalism unit in particular like this (so students learn to appreciate media-based opportunity) is so students should feel empowered when they enter the job market. I did not want to hobble students with a burden of having a skill set that managers do not have, thus making the now-worker graduates forever be the little worker bee content producers. Or inherit a dystopic view of the industry in general. I want them to be able to see and harness opportunities when they emerge. This is a question of ethics. Yes, they will need to learn the ropes and pay their dues if they work in an established media enterprise. They should also feel empowered to pitch good ideas to management and help isolate and harness opportunities when they emerge for their own survival, if not for the survival of the media enterprise.

Following Axel Bruns tweeting of the QUT Industry Conversations: The future of journalism in Australia where Sally Young was making some good observations about the current state of the journalism industry. Sally examines political communication and the media industry. What sparked my interest in this was Axel’s tweet:

Of course, one response to this is to note, as Axel reports Sally as noting, that alternative spaces have emerged primarily online:

This got me thinking about power relations and the media and precisely what is the character of media power in this shifting media environment. I replied to Axel with:

In the past, media power was largely defined in terms of being the power to direct attention (by controlling media channels, hence the problem with media ownership) combined with the power to represent newsworthy events (people, activities, objects, etc.) with a particular ideological bias. Media power was largely collapsed into the politics of media representation. This was combatted on two fronts. Firstly by advocating for increased diversity in media ownership and secondly by advocating for an increased diversity of ‘media voices’ to give expression and self-representation to populations outside of the ideological representive frame. At stake in all this was the reproduction of a hegemonic social order, where ‘common sense’ itself was felt to be programmed by whichever interests held the most media power.

Something has changed however. The above still holds true, but only in limited circumstances as it no longer (if it ever did) defines the entire field of mediated representation. There is a different logic to media power in these ‘alternative spaces’ that Sally and many other people have noted, and that is what I started thinking about based on Sally’s reported comments.

In March 2010 she gave a paper as part of the Papers in Parliament program of the Senate on “Politics on the Media Today“. In it she presents an account of the decreasing audience share for ‘politics’ through traditional media channels (broadcast and print) and the apparent trend of increasing prevalence of ‘politics’ found on the internet. In response to a question at the lecture for the Senate paper, Sally notes that in the context of the coverage of politics that “the people who aren’t interested already, and they are harder to capture”.

Sally is indicating that those holding on to the traditonal models in the media industry are finding it hard to adapt to the new media environment. The new media industry is governed by communities of interests with their own horizons of community engagement determined by these interests. It seems apparent to me (and others!) that a new form of media power is derived from the capacity to capture participants in such a way that the emerging alternative spaces of expression and conversation overlap with the the traditional audience. ‘Owning the conversation’ is what is at stake. How does this happen?

To understand how the audience participates in a community requires following the relations that lead the audience to the community and then hold their interest. Google Adwords is a classic example in the new media economy of media power. Gunther Kress argues that for any given text in a media environment dominated by writing (such as print journalism), the reading path (entry point) is predetermined. You begin at the ‘start’, hence the importance in journalism of a catchy lead. In what he calls ‘multi-modal’ texts the reading path is determined by the criteria of relevance that a reader (as part of a community) brings to the text. For example, on a web page or a new magazine layout, the reader may engage with a flashy image first and then read some text and then flick through more images. There is no single point of entry.

In Kress’s description the community is assumed, but what if one is looking for a ‘community’? Seeding search results with a commercial slant means that the virtual marketplace of ideas or products (or both as cultural commodities) has an ‘entry point’ that is largely determined. #hastags on twitter serve a similar function, they delineate a common thread in the conversation. Paid #hastags direct the conversation to be anchored to particular commercial interests. Social media serves as a driver to media content. Part of the participatory media models that Henry Jenkins and others have written about is that the audience is now an integral part of the mode of distribution.

Then there is the actual ‘space’ of conversation, that is the designed space of the website or blog. In the conservative news space Alan Jones is a strong media channel for disseminating ideologically biased opinion, for example. While Andrew Bolt’s blog is just one of the spaces that ‘owns’ the conversation. Both are ideological in the traditional sense, but Bolt’s blog is organised around and services the community of interest that fuels his large comment threads.

An emergent form of media power — ‘emergent’ only to the extent that the media environment is constantly changing with different players, it isn’t ‘emergent’ in the sense that structurally it is already established — is to be able to capture a particular community of interest so that (for the traditional media industry) it overlaps with audiences. Hence, Sally Young’s concern that the audience for political coverage in traditional media is falling, yet she is optimistic that engagement with political reportage in ‘alternative spaces’ is increasing. This connects with some of my other thinking about MasterChef (!!!), media and politics that I’ll return to at a later point.