Johann Hari and the misleading quotes

Well Johann Hari is in a bit of trouble at the moment and I can't be the only one who's a little confused as to why it's created as much fuss as it has. From what I can tell and from what some journalists have been quick to say is that Hari has lifted quotes from other peoples interviews with his own subjects and in some cases books. The excuse Hari has given is as follows in a quote he didn't say to me, but wrote on his blog.

"When I’ve interviewed a writer, it’s quite common that they will express an idea or sentiment to me that they have expressed before in their writing – and, almost always, they’ve said it more clearly in writing than in speech. (I know I write much more clearly than I speak – whenever I read a transcript of what I’ve said, or it always seems less clear and more clotted. I think we’ve all had that sensation in one form or another).

"So occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech."

All seems fair enough I guess, it's not straightforward plagiarism at least but the main gripe many have with Hari's excuse is that whilst this would be bad form for Hari but not unforgivable, he has on some occasions passed off a quote that his subject said in another interview as something said to him at the time. With a delicious irony I am now going to copy and paste one such example straight from the Telegraph Blog of Toby Young (which can be viewed here).

'Take this passage from his interview with [Tony] Negri:

Negri recently described the Soviet Union as “a society criss-crossed with extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom”, which is more than he has ever said for any democracy. He even says that the Soviet Union fell because it was too successful. I point this out, and he replies: “Now you are talking about memory. Who controls memory? Faced with the weight of memory, one must be unreasonable! Reason amounts to eternal Cartesianism. The most beautiful thing is to think ‘against’, to think ‘new’. Memory prevents revolt, rejection, invention, revolution.”

Compare this to what Negri said to [Anne] Dufourmentelle:

Who controls memory? Faced with the weight of memory, one must be unreasonable! Reason amounts to eternal Cartesianism.

It’s the use of a phrase like “I point this out, and he replies” that marks Hari out as a special case. That appears to stray beyond the merely misleading.'

If you know your history it's not the first time Hari has been accused of such misdeeds. You need only to go back to an article in a 2003 issue of Private Eye to find such accusations (archived here).

On Twitter the story exploded with millions of people taking up the hashtag #interviewsbyhari with the most humorous being an example I found on the Al Jazeera blog (read it here) where Twitter user @mattwithers tweeted about an imagined encounter between Hari and ex-England international, John Barnes, it reads "Barnes articulated his footballing philosophy. 'You've got to hold and give,' he said, 'but do it at the right time'. #interviewsbyhari." The line of course coming from the infamous rap in England's 1990 World Cup song World In Motion by New Order (if you don't know it, give it a listen here).

Give the man his due though, he has responded in a thoroughly honest way and it would be wrong of me not to include his views, readable on his blog here.

Articles are being written and updated on the subject almost continuously at the moment so if you want the latest on the subject your best bet is to follow any hashtags on Twitter for articles from a whole range of different perspectives and keep an eye on Hari's blog.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Hacking - Dangerous Stuff

So today, a story came out about a 19 year old man from Wickford, Essex, (quite literally down the road from me) was arrested on computer misuse charges in a raid organised by Scotland Yard and the FBI. Yeah the FBI. The man in question is thought to be part of the LulzSec hacker group which was similar to the hacking group, Anonymous, affiliated with the Wikileaks group. He was named as Ryan Cleary by most news services and his mother confirmed he had been arrested.

The raid followed a series of Denial of Service attacks, (Wikipedia article here). BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said the Metropolitan Police's e-crimes unit had confirmed the raid was linked to the recent intrusion attacks on the websites of the CIA and Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca). (BBC article here).

What made the story interesting to me was that I quite possibly went to Secondary school with this guy. From what I can remember, the guy was just another pupil. Nothing there to make me think that he was going to become a well known Internet hacker and enemy of Anonymous. They're painting him as the leader of LulzSec but as far as I can see he was just another guy mixed up in it all. Time will tell.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Doctor Who and Convergence - Media Assignment

As part of our journalism course we also have to take a media module. Our final assignment in this was a case study on the media text of our choosing with a focus on convergence. I chose Doctor Who and here is the outcome.


In the course of our Media in the 21st Century module, we have looked at convergence quite often. The term is a fairly common one in media, most often referring to the coming together of old and new media. For this assignment I will be looking at the television show Doctor Who, but as this is convergence I’ll be looking at how the text converges across other media like the internet, books, video games and the like. Convergence is a controversial thing to some media types; in our lectures we saw how some believed that new media should have swept away the old media, making it obsolete. Instead, whilst online media players like 4oD, iPlayer and even YouTube are examples of pioneering new media, its old media counterpart the TV still rumbles on, as Curran and Seaton said in 2001, people are “watching it for the same reasons they watched it in the past.” In Kackman’s book Flow TV he states that television has survived by adapting to become a converged technology. Convergence however means more than just multi-platform delivery, it means “new textual practices, branding and marketing strategies, industrial arrangements, technological synergies, and audience behaviours enabled and propelled by the emergence of digital media.”[1]

The television show Doctor Who is a long lived brand and as such its recent reboot has meant a much loved programme, despite its flaws, was suddenly right at the zeitgeist, one of the most popular shows on the box. It did this through a whole host of ways but I believe that one particular way was its use of new media, not available to the original wobbly set show of the 60s, through to the 80s. The show in its current form has a website which has multiple functions, first of all it connects to iPlayer so you can catch up with past episodes but also watch prequels to episodes that are not available on old media. There is also a gaming functionality, asking the audience to participate in the text in a new way. Audience participation is not welcomed by all, in fact in December 2000, columnist Charlie Brooker wrote about convergence saying: “Having made your choice, the programme begins – except it isn’t a normal programme at all. No: thanks to ‘convergence’ it’s a magical cross between TV, the Internet and the most sophisticated arcade game you’ve ever seen. If you’re watching Ground Force 2006, for example, you’ll be able to push a button to digitally graft Alan Titchmarsh’s head onto the body of a dancing cat, and take potshots at it with a light gun, earning Amazon tokens for each paw you blow off.”[2]

It’s fair to say that convergence in general is a difficult subject, but in the context of Doctor Who, I believe it enhances the audience experience of the show. During the years when David Tennant was playing The Doctor, there was an online interactive game which encouraged you to ‘Become the Doctor’s Companion and save the world’. The game is still available on the website and is played from a point of view which allows the player to feel they are actually involved in the story. This kind of audience participation can be viewed under the uses and gratifications model. Whilst the show itself is simply that, something to be watched, the online content adds a new interactive dimension which comes to enhance the text as a whole. Doctor Who’s creators have been quite clever in this respect; they have created a range of products that encourage audiences to continue their involvement in the show, long beyond the actual programme. The show produces a magazine, novels, graphic novels (i.e. comic books), toys, animated series, video games and spin-off television shows like Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures which extend the story’s canon outside of the main show creating flexi narratives. [3]

Looking at the show from a media histories point of view, it is interesting to note that Doctor Who was rebooted not just through popular opinion but because new technology had come along in the years since its cancellation. The special effects in the show give what used to be a slightly laughable show which became a cult classic a new edge, making it more relevant to a media savvy audience. This is an example of technological determinism, with the new technology driving media forward as opposed to the technology having to find its place in the old media. The famous technological determinist, Marshall McLuhan said of new technology, in particular looking at the Gutenberg press, “If a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody.”[4] You could also look at Doctor Who from a Free Market version of history, the show has strived to become something that the consumers want to secure the largest profit, innovating along the way. The free market media history and technological determinist history can run side by side as the technology could be introduced in an attempt to make the text more consumer friendly and in turn more cost effective.

Convergence is not a new thing; it was happening even 100 years ago in Lord Reith’s BBC with old media like plays converging with the radio, just emerging as a media type. What is driving the new technology though? The Internet emerged because of wars, the army needed a way of communicating and eventually it spread to the general public; the economic boom of the 80s also drove technology forward which in turn would lead to convergence. Old media can only survive by adapting to new media. The arrival of radio terrified the newspaper industry but papers adapted with radio becoming an important source of news copy. The same can be said of cinema and television; television threatened to kill off cinema but cinema adapted and now TV has learnt to feed off of cinema instead i.e. BBC Film Night 2011.

Doctor Who has gone from a cult TV show to something of a television phenomenon. The show is one of the most successful on British screens picking up a huge number of awards on the way. It is quite something for a science fiction text to become such a hit amongst a mainstream audience, and I believe it is the way in which it has adopted a combination of old and new media which has brought it such success. The show produces a number of novels and graphic novels, which run in a non linear way to the actual series, providing a set of paratexts with an implication for narrative theory as it means you can have stories with the characters from the series outside of the main story arc. Another way Doctor Who has embraced convergence is its acceptance of the convention culture of its most ardent fans. The convention circuit gives the fans of the show another chance to be a part of it and engage with it on a different level; for example people can talk to the actors, producers, directors and writers and gain a new level of understanding for the show, enhancing their experience of it.

In short, convergence is everywhere in today’s media. It is inherent in TV as much as radio and in cinema as much as the Internet. Whilst convergence is often old media incorporating new media into old media, such as BBC’s iPlayer which is the incorporation of the Internet with TV, it can also be new media taking on aspects of the old like Twitter and news agencies. Doctor Who is a media text which uses a wide range of new media, which I hope I have shown in this essay whilst keeping the heart of its old media roots. With using so many converged technologies, podcasts, video blogs meta-textual websites and red button adventures is it all working together as s richer entertainment experience or is it merely an economic exercise. Can these media really work together to create a satisfying whole?[5] My belief is they can, as Doctor Who continues to be such a media institution, the convergence that it so heartily embraces will on serve to make it bigger and better.

Word Count: 1390
References:
[1] Kackman, A et al (2010). Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence. : Routledge. p1.
[2] Brooker, C (2005). Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn. London: Faber and Faber Limited. p36.
[3] Wikipedia. ( ). Doctor Who. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who. Last accessed 29th May 2011.
[4] Wikipedia. ( ). Marshall McLuhan. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan. Last accessed 30th May 2011.
[5] Perryman, N. (2008). Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media A Case Study in `Transmedia Storytelling'. Available: http://con.sagepub.com/content/14/1/21.refs. Last accessed 31st May 2011



Until next time. Stay classy Internet.

Day Trip!!! - To London's Al Jazeera Studios

Well first of all this blog needs to start with a thank you to anyone and everyone who has ever read this blog as the reason I was able to visit Al Jazeera, was on the basis that my blog had reached a ridiculously high Alexa Ranking for a student blog and there had been a bit of a competition amongst the class to try and a) topple me from the top of the rankings and b) win the competition and claim the glory. If you're unaware of Alexa Rankings it may be worth giving my earlier blogs on SEO a look, here and here.

So the day itself started with an early morning journey with fellow journo George Berridge, who was so close to my ranking in the blog competition it almost didn't matter that I won (it totally did matter). We felt like we were commuting, I remember turning to George in our fancy shirts and ties and going, "Somehow this feels like we're proper journalists." And in some way we were, commuting to London for our day at a professional television studio, covering the FA Cup final. Even stopping for a coffee because we were too early to head to the studios made me feel like I was a working journalist. It's the little things I guess. Once we arrived we were still a little bit early, some would call it over eager, I'd say punctual, (and I'd be lying). We waited outside for a little while, wondering at the building when up pulls the shiniest black generic luxury vehicle you have ever seen. It actually seemed to glide. Who should step out of it then but our University lecturer and star of Al Jazeera's English speaking sports coverage but Angus Scott. Suffice to say we were pretty impressed but it only got better from there.

We wander over to the entrance, looking like the lost teenagers we are, walk up to the desk and in our manliest tones pronounce, "We're here to see Angus Scott", (autographs are signed, ladies swoon, lives are made). Unfortunately the man on the desk rather scuppers this by asking us questions, "Who are you here to see again?" "Erm Angus Scott" I squeak. "Al Jazeera" George adds helpfully, we may never have got any further if it wasn't for that. The security man says "OK." Takes our names and tells us to wait for someone to come and collect us, (there's a brief issue where George has the name tag Jorge - "Oh... sorry, I'm Spanish." Fair enough I thought. Jorge is much cooler anyway.) Soon a lovely lady comes downstairs and takes us, two rabbits caught in the headlights, up to the Al Jazeera offices. We could not be more nervous at this point and it's probably due to the nice words of this lady that I didn't break down and cry at some point (probably somewhere between the tour, and being smiled at by one of the star guests). We arrive in the office, wide eyed at just the idea of being in the building. Angus welcomes us and introduces us to the editor who is very accommodating, considering he's about to put out the coverage of the biggest game in English domestic cup football, but I guess you learn to deal with the pressure.

Midway through our tour Angus vaguely points in the direction of the guests green room saying, "Well today we've got Terry in and also Robbie and Tim." This is how nonchalant you get with experience in the business; he's talking about Ex-England and Spurs manager Terry Venables, Ex-Spurs player Tim Sherwood and Liverpool legend Robbie Fowler. My mind was blown even more when I sneaked a look in and Terry Venables smiled and waved at me (probably more so because I'm a Spurs fan). So what we did next was sit, in shock and awe, reading through the script for that afternoon. As we tried to figure out the more complex elements of it we decided to go on a little walk of our own, hoping we'd somehow be able to get the courage to say hello to the guests or walk into the studio. We realised we wouldn't be able to do this when we bumped into Terry Venables leaving the make-up room who said, "Alright lads!" The shock of being called a lad by Terry Venables nearly killed me. As George will tell you I spent most of the next half an hour reminding him what just happened although he was almost as awestruck as me, and he's not even really into football. True story. Finally though, we built up the courage to enter the studio and by all that is holy it was amazing. No disrespect to the equipment we have (it's the best a student could ask for, industry standard) but the backing of billionaire oil barons helps in areas like this. The set was so professional, the cameras were huge, the lighting expansive, everything was just bigger and that little bit better than anything I'd seen before.

The preparations for the programme were over, suddenly Angus and Co. were on air and we were sitting in on a professional at work, just doing his day job (which happens to be a pretty damn cool one for the record). We were there on the floor for every second of the broadcast and a massive thank you goes out to the floor manager and his crew for accommodating us and even bringing us headsets so we could hear the frantic work in the gallery as VTs were chopped, changed and thrown around to fit in with the chat from Angus and his guests. It was amazing to see and hear the studio at work and really gave me a sense of what working on WINOL this year will be like. Surprisingly it didn't scare me too much, it just made me more excited for what's ahead of me on the course and hopefully I'm up to the challenge.

During the first half of the match, we suddenly realised we were hungry and hadn't eaten all day, we'd actually been surviving on adrenaline more than anything else. We were taken down to the canteen where we suddenly realised that they also film QI and This Morning in the building. Practically buzzing at the very possible idea that Stephen Fry could wander in whilst we sit there chowing down on a baguette. After a sneaky look at a huge studio downstairs with seats for an audience as well, we headed back upstairs to rejoin the action in the studio.

The rest of the day went smoothly as well as we chatted to other staff in their green room, tried not to look too awestruck at the guests and dreaded the inevitable end of the day. The game ended, (Manchester City 1 - 0 Stoke City. If it hadn't been for the visit and I was just watching the game at home, I'd have had a shocker of a day) and we had to head home. Angus walked us to the door and then glided away in his shiny black car of awesomeness as we headed for the train. The noodles at one of the food stands in Waterloo station are godly. End blog.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

P.S. One final thank you to my University and Angus for making the whole trip possible, it was, as you might be able to tell, an absolutely amazing day in my eyes. Also a thank you to George for helping me to calm down after a brief encounter with Terry Venables. You can see George's blog here he's overtaken me by some ridiculous amount now due to slacking on my part. I shall return.