According to this week’s Economist, “YouTube is now taking in 35-hours’ worth of video content every minute of the day, up from about six hours’-worth in June 2007”.
Category Archives: Media ecology
Wot — no links?
The website Catholic Online has an excellent precis of my Guardian piece about the significance of the WikiLeaks row. But strangely, one thing is missing: a link to the piece itself.
This doesn’t stop the site recommending that readers pass on its own piece to friends, including a link to Catholic.org.
This is not just discourteous; it’s also insulting to readers because it doesn’t give them an easy way of reading the original piece. After all, they might not agree with Deacon Fournier’s summary of my views. They might even think he had been too complimentary. All in all, bad Karma.
WikiLeaks: the choice
From my piece in today’s Guardian.
The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.
But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.
The Tobermory Effect
Brooding on the latest outbreak of Wikileaks, the only thing that came to mind was Ambrose Bierce’s definition of diplomacy as “the patriotic act of lying for one’s country”. And then I came upon The Tobermory Effect, another thoughtful post by Henry Farrell.
My small addition to the piles of verbiage on the newest Wikileaks revelations is to suggest that Saki’s classic short story Tobermory tells you most of what you need to know. Tobermory – the story of a cat that learns to talk, is really about how a small group of people deal with the collapse of the polite fictions through which they paper over individual self-interest and mutual dislike. No-one guards what they say in front of a cat, leading to consternation when Tobermory suddenly learns the English language.
I didn’t know the Saki story until the moment I read that. Now I do. And I recommend it. Perfect for reading over coffee on a cold December morning.
Why the Establishment hates the Net
This morning’s Observer column.
Two disconnected events last week showed how far we still have to go in understanding our new communications environment. In one, an Anglican bishop was suspended for some remarks he made on his Facebook page about the forthcoming wedding of two graduates of St Andrews University. In the other, a 27-year-old accountant had his appeal against a conviction for posting a joke message on Twitter dismissed.
First, the bishop…
Live blogging works
Mick Fealty’s Live Blog of the count in the Donegal South West by-election is absolutely riveting.
3,050 photographs a minute!
Gives an indication of the scale of user-generated content on the Web.
Amazing, amazing, amazing….(yawn)
If, like me, you get pissed off by the complacency of His Steveness’s Keynotes, then you’ll enjoy this.
And if you do, you might also like this.
Thanks to John Paczkowski for the first link, and to Tom Naughton for the second.
How to be a journalist
Aw, shucks. Almost made me go all sentimental for those good ol’ days.
Er, almost.
Thanks to Jay Rosen for the link.
Not getting it
It’s comical to watch guys who have been big names in steam media trying to catch on to online media — and getting the tone completely wrong, as with Yawnsley here. They just don’t get it. Irony, elusiveness and understatement are what works here. I know another really good print journalist who sometimes ventures onto Twitter. But he never links to anything he’s written or finds interesting. I’m fond of him and challenged him gently about it when we met at a conference. “Why don’t you link to stuff?”, I said. He looked sheepishly at me. “Because I don’t know how to do it,” he replied. I offered to help, but he hasn’t come back to me. Sigh.