In the spirit of being: an ingrate, an awesome-resistant European and just plain contrary, what follows are my hopefully not un-constructive, or at least not merely rude, comments (they made me do it! It’s being marked! I even have a word limit!) on the last week of MOJO lectures.
#1 Please Could The Medium Stop Being The Message Now ?
Mr. Raskin. I am concerned that striving from the first for a better presentation of one’s idea (in order to get people agree on its value, and, presumably, resource it) skews it towards a path of least resistance / greatest acceptance which might very well warp its very essence. If you will allow me the idea of a fickle zone in which good looks and ‘polish’ are all too readily rewarded, then you may imagine the potential to ‘iterate’ not towards ‘solution’, but towards triviality. In which kind of world, I want to ask, would every solution immediately be presentable as a UI?
#2 Resist Aimless Hypervelocity!
‘Aim to finish the first–pass in a day’. It’s at least possible that applying said heuristic (don’t you love the word ‘heuristic!’ it’s like ‘iterate’! It makes us sound like scientists!) has as much chance of collapsing a vision than expanding it. (But never mind! It appeals to the breakneck velocity with which everything needs to be executed today!) Would it be utterly contrary to suggest that most valuable ideas might precisely be those that no-fucking-way could-be-prototyped-in-a-day?
(Having said that, I love this.)
#3 An ill-favoured thing Sir… but mine own.
So then, if you can’t communicate it – to an investor, your company, MOJO – never mind, find a way! Execute it with the only lunatics in the world that’ll work with you. Make it ugly! They are often wrong and that is the whole point of them! While they iterate heuristics, you will have made your imperfect thing. May it prosper.
#4 Iterate this, Buster?
Here (from 1 minute in) journalist Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, adroitly describes the problems with the entire enterprise of news today, and how we (that is developers of technology) are implicated in them:
Problems arising from our consolidated , streamlined, technologised ‘news’ machine:
- Most news these days comes from news agencies (Reuters, Press Association etc);
- Of the remainder, a very high proportion comes from PR sources (corporate or governmental), with a high degree of inherent bias;
- Perhaps as little as 12% of the news we read is actually generated by reporters.
- News websites run by media firms recycle 50% of their stories from the two international wire agencies, Associated Press and Reuters; those run by internet firms recycle 85% of their stories from those two.
- Compounding the problem the wires are reducing their stringers, getting their material from PR’s too! PR people now outnumber journalists.
When we think about solving a problem of this magnitude (‘news’ just doesn’t exist in the way we might imagine!), I would argue that we need to think deeply, slowly and towards a goal that can benefit the entire ecosystem. Recognising the critical nature of the infrastructure we are aiming to operate on, it seems to me okay if, at the beginning at least, we are not immediately polished, slick and presentable. It would be okay, actually, to be downright unpopular!
(British playwright) Dennis Potter is instructive, just before his death and prescient on the topic of Rupert Murdoch! Awesome!
Very interesting videos, thanks for posting.
Could we not use some plagiarism-style detection software to reveal the chunks of PR rewrites? And indeed other-sources/wire rewrites, perhaps also cover some aspects of multimedia reuse? We could make the churnalism more obvious to the readers ….
Actually, have just rootled around and found this: http://churnalism.com/ – just covers the press release side of things but interesting nonetheless
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Jamie,
So, my question is — whether you agree with the ideas, or not — how do the lessons of Aza’s and Burt’s lectures apply to your final project idea? If prototyping the idea is a day is not feasible, what is your next step?
How will you take on the challenge of the “consolidated , streamlined, technologised ‘news’ machine”?
– Phillip.
Phillip, thanks for the comment, and I hope I don’t seem unappealingly negative.
The point of last week’s post was probably to point out that it is at least a little bit worrying that we can have a series of lectures about ‘inventing the future of news’ without analysis of the currently trajectory news is on, and the critical natrue of a reinvention, given news’ heightened function in promoting certain agendas – Murdoch, Fox, etc.; The “Case For War” fiasco would have been two obvious examples.
There was not space to go into this in detail, but the implication was that beginning at the level of presentation might cause us to not to be able to root down to big problems. Though I know we haven’t been asked me to critique the Learning Labs, and this is probably terribly annoying, I’d love to have seen some critical analysis of news production as such.
Granted there is an odd relationship between tools available and creative thinking. You have to know what tools there are to be able to think creatively, but if you are mesmerised by the tools, your solutions will be completely determined by them. (To a man with a hammer/HTML5 everything looks like a nail/presentation issue.)
I hope this week’s post will provide some more literally constructive thinking
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