Existentialism and (insert witty joke here)

The final lecture of the first semester was on Existentialism, a subject which I found a little difficult to understand at first. I think I now have a grasp on the basic principles but some subjects such as nihilism still stump me. A lot of existentialism comes from Phenomenology, the objective perception of things, one of the best examples of this is Husserl's Duck-Rabbit picture which you can see here. You can only see the duck if you want to see it, and the same with the rabbit; the University of Winchester logo it was pointed out, also has a duck rabbit situation going on, probably inadvertently but you can see first the cathedral, and then if you look again, a little Scottie dog (have a look for yourself). The choice of what we want to see is the fundamental activity of human existence.

One existentialist thinker was Heidegger, a student of the aforementioned Husserl, whose main book: Being in Time, examined how personality changes over time. We constantly look forward to the future, to what's going to happen or be said; but we dread the future, we have a feeling of angst similar to Freud's idea of ordinary misery. Heidegger pioneered the idea of Dasein or being; our dasein keeps us from the dread of the future, so if you're a carpenter you just think to yourself, "I'll keep banging in these nails and it'll be the same next week so I needn't worry about dread."
Time for Heidegger went a little like this: 1. The past - guilt
2. The future - unknown
3. The present - dread
It is our dasein that keeps us from this dread and enables us to carry on. Heidegger though is often criticised for being, well, a bit of a Nazi. In fact he would reject this, as he felt the Nazi's weren't Nazi enough! He wanted a return to nature, a bit like Rousseau but with genocide. He eventually fell out with the Nazi's because they loved technology.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a student of Heidegger, but was a far left thinker. One of the few ideas he took from the far right Heidegger was dasein. His most famous phrase, "Hell is other people", came from his play No Exit. A kind of salvation for Sartre was being brutally honest all the time: he called this good faith. We're doomed in this existential mess, but so is everyone else! Really, you should just let people get on with things, there is no particular way in existentialism for people to live, no real way for people to be. If someones dasein is a priest, you should let them be even if you are an atheist. You've been thrown into this pointless existence at a pointless time, so just get on with it. It's a little bit angst-y but that's how existentialism is.

Finally, I'm going to try and briefly and basically explain nihilism, using the internet. Good old Wikipedia tells us "Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value." Cheers for that Wikipedia, other free to edit encyclopedias are available, probably.

Until Next Time (and next year). Stay Classy Internet.

The Last WINOL of the Year

It's a sad day writing this blog as it means we've had the last WINOL of this year. It's been a long but enjoyable year so far; whilst WINOL has been difficult sometimes, and there's no doubt it has, I think everyone on the team can take a few lessons from our mistakes and our triumphs.

The week on WINOL started like any other, a debrief from our November 30th extravaganza gave us some confidence to go into a normal WINOL as prepared as we've ever been. The news was a little slow that week, meaning our stories weren't necessarily as big as they had been in previous bulletins, (there was no Hampshire Police story that's for sure). But even so, the news reporters got their stories in as quick as they could and the show ran almost too smoothly. I kept assuming something would go wrong but we had calm direction from Dan who never seems fazed even when everything is going wrong around us, as it often does. I actually spent the bulletin down on the floor in the studio, cuing Aimee on sport who was without talkback, one of our few actual issues. It gave me a different perspective on the bulletin as I was being directed on the camera and wasn't a part of the gallery and the goings on in there. I was pretty pleased with my part on the bulletin, (of course I did straplines again, I de-centered the names and titles because I thought it looked better and no one complained so happy days), the framing on camera 3 was wrong but that is something that should have been sorted before we started. I was on camera 2 and did the move before and after the handover successfully and cued Aimee at the right time so I don't think anyone can expect more than that on camera.

I also filmed the last WINOL Games of the year, not quite as auspicious but I've really enjoyed working on that and hopefully it'll continue after the New Year.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

WINOL Games 4

The final episode this year, it's slightly Christmas themed, (the slightly being the first few seconds, the hats, and of course the music). Hope you've enjoyed them all.



Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

P.S. If you're into that sort of thing we also put together our bloopers from all our recordings. What are we without our funny, funny jokes.

WINOL Games 3

This time it's bigger and better than ever!! Actually that's probably a lie, the format is essentially the same, but I think we're getting slicker.



Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Total Totalitarianism (geddit?)

The penultimate lecture this year (i.e. before Christmas, we sure as hell aren't done in this year of Uni) focused on the subject of Totalitarianism and both the lecture and the seminar had a heavy focus towards Hannah Arendt's book, Origins of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt's approach is like Hume's, she doesn't believe things follow a simplistic order, she believes in causality. Totalitarian regimes believe that everything is possible, they sound positive, but the regimes seek out power of which the inevitable price is destruction of human plurality. To destroy individuality, two methods were used; state terror and ideology. The essence of a totalitarian government is 'total terror', they need to destroy not only the people who are acting out but also the thought to act. Ideology eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves so for example the Nazi's who actually ran the concentration camps and were directly involved with murdering on a daily basis, their excuses stretch to just following orders and the totalitarian ideology frees the mind from the constraints of common sense and reality. Ideology and state terror break down normal social and psychological barriers that set limits on what is possible.

Hannah Arendt sees genocide as logical for a totalitarian state as it is an extension of the trajectory of mass society where meaning is provided by ideology. Genocide isn't an exercise of power for totalitarianism, power grows from a group of people, but it is key to enforcing ideology and is part of the social contract for totalitarian states. Totalitarian states also need a victim, so in the case of the Nazi's, making the Jews stateless and rights-less made them perfect victims. There is no real end to Totalitarianism in Arendt's eyes, the law of killing would continue and remain a law even if all humanity was subject to it.

One case in the world of Totalitarianism that it is worth looking at is the Eichmann case, a series of articles published originally in the New Yorker about a man named Eichmann who was a Nazi and who took part in the holocaust. It poses the question, would you collaborate? Captured by the Israeli Secret Service in Australia in 1960, he was a bureaucrat, involved in the transport of millions of Jews from across Europe to concentration camps which he carried out with zeal and efficiency. Eichmann spoke in court in endless cliches, saying how he was proud of being a "law abiding citizen", distancing himself from his actual crime. This shocked Arendt to see how ordinary he was, this helped her to see the banality of evil. Whilst she agreed in the decision to put Eichmann to death, she did not believe his greatest crime was his part in the holocaust, but that his greatest crime was non-thinking. No thinking man could carry out genocide she reasoned, and although Eichmann claimed he was acting from obedience and his reading of Kant, Arendt refuted this arguing that Kant is all about judgement. You cannot argue that Kant's categorical imperative is any use here as although Kant was all about following the law so society could continue, even if 80 million Germans had done as he did, that would not excuse him for Arendt.

November 30th - S Day... as in strikes... nevermind

To really understand the week we've just had you need to go a little further back, possibly even to last year when the current third years and those who've now graduated covered the General Election long into the night. With that in mind, we sort of needed an event which would be our General Election and a General strike seemed the way to go. In the weeks preceding the broadcast we assigned roles, started to gather packages and interviews and just generally got ready to put on one of the best productions of our time here at Uni. Unfortunately, we suddenly realised all our best laid plans were pointless if the picket lines at the university would stop our guests from making it to our studio. Where would be open on a day of strikes then? The Unite the Union offices in Southampton? Oh alright then. It did make a difficult day more difficult but it probably couldn't have been helped.

So on the Tuesday we headed down to set up the rooms we'd been allocated so they were as good as our very own TV studio and I think we did a great job. The Tricaster which is a piece of kit I should really learn how to use works as a vision mixer, sound desk and VT machine so in one 'computer' we had most of our studio. A few PD170s and 150s were hooked up to it as our cameras and a desk was appropriated for the presenters with another section off to side for guest discussion (with comfier chairs). I think this day was useful for us as we were able to rehearse without the stress of any of the content going out on air. We practiced live OBs from some of our news team who'd taken themselves off to McDonald's for the free Wi-Fi. They worked fairly well but of course this was without the pressure of a show, so any mistakes in the rehearsal could hopefully be ironed out before the big day. We had a few sound issues but we felt we'd sorted them by days end

The big day came around and we got in bright and early to set up and do some run throughs. As part of the 'breaking news team', me, Ewan and Henry set up shop upstairs with our laptops, suddenly realising that with a lack of internet ports, we wouldn't be able to access the breaking news sites. Fortunately, all our phones have wi-fi capability and we were able to access the internet on the laptops by using the 3G internet from our phones. It meant we were able to perform an essential function in providing George with updates throughout the day and also we could recycle those into headlines at the top of the hour. The wi-fi from our phones also reached George downstairs who was using an iPad to keep up on events via Twitter. I really think we did well to keep the presenters informed as the live OBs didn't necessarily work perfectly and often the conversation was thrown back to George as a back up, in fact he was used whenever anything went wrong so keeping him updated was vital.

There were other issues that forced us off air at times but our university connections and our superb reporters out in the field kept the program on air and I am extremely proud of the work we did and the day on the whole.

Edited highlights of the day below


Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

HCJ Economics Lecture - Keynes and stuff

Our lecture and seminar combo for HCJ concerned Economics, a bit of a departure for what has essentially been philosophy until now. Chris started by saying that Schopenhauer believed music made life, as an economist he disagreed saying that it is money which makes life (the world go round). As you may know, economics is a about money... alright that was a bit obvious but I don't know who reads this. It's often referred to as The Dismal Science, a derogatory term for economics devised in the 19th Century by historian Thomas Carlyle. The main problem is economics is this; the more you consume, the more you want. How can economics solve this? Humans don't need anything really, OK so we need to eat and drink to live, but why do we need to do that? To exist we don't need anything, economics ignores needs and focuses on wants. How much you are prepared to pay for something shows a persons wants. So for example, if a piano costs £5000 and Biro costs one pound, why is a piano worth a thousand pens? It doesn't cost that much more to make surely, so it must be because people want it more. Utility is the fundamental, measurable, verifiable phenomena of human wants. It is the measure of satisfaction from a consumer after consuming a good or service. Over time people will try to maximise their utility, as in Utilitarianism.

!!!Now it's time for a quote without context!!!
"There are people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Oscar Wilde

I'm going to put this next note in just as I've written it because I know it's important I just can't remember how it works out. It's an equation.

Y = C + I + G
Household Spending (C)
Investments (I)
Government Spending (G)

If Y decreases (Is Y like the amount of money overall?) then there isn't enough money for people to keep working without pay cuts.

SUPER HAPPY FUN TIME BONUS SEMINAR NOTES!!!

The seminar had a huge focus on Keynes and it was interesting to discuss his theories given the current economic climate. Keynes was an extremely influential economist, so much so that we could all be termed Keynesian. His most crucial innovation was taking apart Say's law, a classical economic principle named after French economist and businessman Jean-Baptiste Say. Essentially the principle was that "supply creates its own demand," but Keynes refutes this. If people save their money then this breaks Say's law. The thing that I remember most from this seminar about Keynes is that he would rather have people just digging pointless holes than have people unemployed; when faced with a depression he wouldn't ask why there is a depression, he'd ask ask how we lower unemployment. He believed that to get out of a recession the government should spend so that the public sector will spend; this is the multiplier effect, if I have £1000, spend 900 and save 100, the next person can save 100 and spend 800 and so on. When economics suffers from low demand, unemployment rises.

You often hear people say of the global debt and recession that "in the long run, this debt is going to have to be paid." Keynes would ask why. Why can't we just keep metaphorically kicking the can down the road? Money isn't real anyway. All a 5 pound note tells you is that it's meant to signify the value of 5 pound. It tells you right there on the note itself that it's worthless, it's just given value by us. So let's kick the can down the road, how about all the wars in the middle east? The USA is Keynesian in its military by knocking down and rebuilding countries like Iraq and Afghanistan every few years. The current economic crisis was caused by borrowing yes, it was caused by banks loaning money they didn't have but this had been happening for years, why not carry on? Liquidity is the technical term for giving people spending money, let's just liquidise? everything in sight. When the Lehman Brothers went bankrupt it wasn't necessarily because they're horrible people, I don't know them personally, it was a chain of mismanaged loans which have mangled the economy. Small banks borrowed from big banks who then borrowed from banks like Lehman Brothers, when the small banks can't pay the big banks their money back, then the big banks have no money to pay to Lehman Brothers. Bust. So then vast amounts of money were printed in an attempt to pretend everything was OK.

I've completely lost track of where I'm going with all this so here's some notes about the credit creation ratio (CCR). If the bank has £100 and the CCR is 1:10 then it can create ten bank accounts with £100. Still following? It's basically just magic. So once this money is gone, the bank goes and borrows money from the government who pay the bonds to cover all of these loans. The economic crash was caused because the CCR was too high. Now that it's been lowered though, no one can get a loan because no one can possibly pay them back.

A sobering end to a blog so here's a picture of some kittens in a barrel. The one of the left's Phillip.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

P.S. Bonus picture: Occupy Wall Street

WINOL Games 2

Completely forgot to post this. Just thought I'd throw up the second WINOL Games on the blog in a shameless attempt to get it more hits. Tell your friends!




Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

WINOL No. 819411771380228...

It's getting to the stage in the year when WINOL is becoming much more of a drag. We've been working hard on making WINOL the best it can be and now, here we are nearing the Christmas break and knowing that the 3rd years will be done with WINOL soon doesn't make this any easy for them or us. Still, we had a bulletin to do and nothing has stopped us from doing one yet. After directing the week before I took a bit of a backseat for this WINOL, going back to doing strap lines and collecting packages etc.

We had a few really good pieces but we started with an in studio guest (Becky) talking about youth unemployment which was a good story but why didn't we have a package was the question Angus asked. We finally got a court story into the bulletin which was brilliant but what we had wasn't really a story for television, essentially it was the conviction of a paedophile and all we could do was show a picture of him and have Flick doing her piece to camera which was a very difficult thing for her to do. It had to be legally watertight which it was but during the debrief on Monday it emerged that something wasn't quite right. As we did last year, the first years watch WINOL on Thursday or Friday with Brian and during Gareth's link they all looked interested and the tone of the piece was right but Brian said some of the first years sniggered during Flick's piece to camera. I instantly went "They laughed at paedophiles" but Brian went on to say they laughed because the tone was wrong, and it was in a way, perhaps it needed a touch more gravitas but it's a hard skill to learn to do an effective piece to camera on a story like that. Laughing at it just seems wrong, even though the tone was slightly off.

I think generally we've been getting better week after week. I'm really pleased to have worked on a programme like WINOL. You really do feel part of a team and hopefully that will help when it comes to our November 30th production, a whole day almost of broadcasting. I'm sure everything we've done this year will stand us in good stead when it comes down to it.

I honestly don't have anything more to say on this week. We had some other comments about a possible Section 8 issue but it was never going to be a problem.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

WINOL 9/11/11 - I dun directed

Another week of WINOL is upon us and this time, like George and Daniel before me. I had to direct. Well since all (and all is a pretty odd term to use here as there's only three of us, it's technically correct but yeah, stuff) the newbies in the production team had directed bar me, it was only fair I step up. Not that I wanted to though. I was terrified at the thought of having to be in control of the bulletin. OK so I was relying on others to do their job so that we could get the best rehearsal time in possible, but when it came to the actual bulletin I had about 10 or so people relying completely on me. We tried to do some fairly complicated things as well which didn't quite come off but as an exercise for the 30th were very valuable. The most useful and also the most complicated was having Tom live in London for an outside broadcast (OB). To do this, Tom had to be by an internet connection and in fact, used the free Wi-Fi of a popular coffee shop chain. During the day this seemed to be fine, the connection was good, sound was good and Tom seemed in high spirits. By the end of the broadcast it was a different matter. The connection to Tom had worsened significantly by the time WINOL went out and the answers Tom gave, whilst we knew they were good, were near impossible to understand. It meant we had to use footage that Tom recorded in the day of the protesters and his piece to camera.

The rest of the bulletin went fairly smoothly until the sports handover, it went well handing from news to sport but on the way back, a miscommunication from the gallery to Jack who was on camera 2 meant we had camera 2 zooming out and then swinging round and zooming in on the news presenter again. As I remember it, I said camera 3 and cue Cara and George, but it may have stayed on camera 2. We have the luxury of post production however and were able to re-film the handover after finishing the rest of the bulletin. It's good to have this luxury but we need to only use it if it's absolutely necessary. BBC News at 10 doesn't have that luxury and we're aiming to be as professional as we possibly can as students with near industry standard equipment.

I practiced the directing that week on Sportsweek on the Tuesday which was a lot of fun. It's a professional program the same as WINOL but because you're just recording the links it tends to be a lot more relaxed in the gallery. I was very nervous about directing but I'm glad I've done it. I feel I could have done better but maybe that will just inspire me to do it again and do a much better job of it.

With WINOL we have a very split audience. The stories that we ran worked well but the people watching can range from students like ourselves to Professors of politics. OK so a story about Chris Huhne's opinion on the eurozone is great from our perspective and someone interested in politics would love it, but we didn't sell it right. We said 'Eastleigh MP' which of course he is but Brian was telling us what the first years thought and some of them just assumed he was a random local MP rather than a cabinet minister which is a big deal for us.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Sepp Blatter - Step Ladder

Pretty self explanatory title there, I'm going to talk about Sepp Blatter, the FIFA President since 1998 and at the moment caught in a storm of controversy over comments he made about racism in football. Essentially he said that football doesn't have a problem with racism, or at least that's the way his words have been interpreted. "There is no racism [on the field], but maybe there is a word or gesture that is not correct," Blatter told CNN. "The one affected by this should say this is a game and shake hands." Now whilst this may seem harmless enough what you have here is the president of an international football federation saying that any racism on the pitch can be solved with a handshake.

The BBC reported the angry reaction of some footballers including England Defender Rio Ferdinand who tweeted "Tell me I have just read Sepp Blatter's comments on racism in football wrong....if not then I am astonished." Former Spurs striker Garth Crooks also commented saying "Clearly Sepp Blatter is a man who's never suffered from racism," he went on to say "I'm shocked and somewhat dismayed." The original statement from Blatter came on the same day as Liveverpool striker Luis Suarez was charged by the FA for alleged racist comments made towards Manchester United defender Patrice Evra. The accusation is denied by both player and club and Suarez says he will plead not guilty to the charge. England and Chelsea captain John Terry is also at the centre of an investigation following allegations made against the player that he used a racist slur towards QPR defender Anton Ferdinand.

Today though Blatter has said he will not quit despite calls for his resignation from a large number of British players, managers, administrators and politicians. He has apologised to the BBC saying "It hurts and I am still hurting because I couldn't envisage such a reaction," he went on to say "When you have done something which was not totally correct, I can only say I am sorry for all those people affected by my declarations." Chelsea manager Andre Villas Boas is supportive of Blatter however, saying to the BBC "To put in doubt the leadership of Sepp Blatter as FIFA president is not for me to say or managers to say." Another supporter of Blatter's decision to stay on and fight is current Minister of Human Settlements of South Africa and anti-Apartheid activist, Tokyo Sexwale (no really). "It takes a big man to say 'I'm sorry'," said Sexwale "In Fifa, we kick the football and not the man."

What worried me most about the whole thing was not Blatter's comments, whilst ill-timed and possibly offensive. What worried me was that the media reportage of this incident has come almost entirely from this country. Why are other countries not as upset or affected? The BBC's chief football writer Phil McNulty tweeted "Getting quite a few tweets from people suggesting Blatter's words only headline news in England/Britain. In which case we should be proud." I think it's time people were a little more proud of the media we have in Britain.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/15782265.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/15757165.stm

WINOL Experiences - 1st and 2nd November

This weeks WINOL was one of the hardest so far technically. The three news headlines all had a piece of upsot in them, making the timing on the headlines extremely important. The rehearsal time for these was vital as the director, Daniel this week, had to cue our presenter in exactly the right place so that they could finish their headline by the time the upsot came in. Upsot is essentially a telly term for a piece of an interview in the headlines where the sound comes up after the newsreader has said their line. The production schedule we have is working well because even if we're slightly late on some of the deadlines, as long as we're aiming for those times the schedule does allow us to be up to half an hour late, maybe even an hour in some cases.

First though we had WINOL Life which as a whole is less stressful beforehand, no struggling for packages and straplines for example, but during the broadcast it's a completely different beast. The One Show like style we're going for means the guest editor and guest on the show really could say anything and it's up to our presenters to deal with it. This week our guest was the lovely Elizabeth Barnett, the editor of Hampshire Life magazine. Having a guest on is great and makes it seem a lot more professional in a way as it's not just us going, "Look how lovely our features look." You can watch WINOL Life here and it's definitely worth a watch, especially if you think the only output this University has is the Wednesday bulletin. The episode is technically difficult because of the amount of cameras and microphones we use. It means the director has to be really on the ball with a good team around them, someone who really knows how to use the vision mixer is essential as the camera switches from a close up on the guest to a shot of both sofas, and then close ups of the presenters. We even plugged another camera in to the system in order to have one of feature writers, Becky and George one of presenters get up to do some yoga. The sound desk is complicated on a WINOL Life as well. I was on sound that week and I remember someone saying to me the other day that sound must be easy on WINOL Life because you can just leave the mics up. If anything it's the opposite. The only mics that are practically on the whole time are the presenters Hannah and George and the guest, although during packages even theirs have to be taken down. Becky started on one mic and Ewan off camera had another, once Becky finished her yoga piece her mic had to be taken down straight away as she swapped it to either Cara or Jake and the same goes for Ewan after he chatted about WINOL Games. The sound of the VTs also have to be tweaked as they all have completely varying sound levels. In the yoga piece I had to keep a close eye on the levels as the piece swapped between voice overs and natural sound and interviews actually recorded at the time instead of being dubbed over.

The actual WINOL broadcast was quite smooth this week and we were fairly pleased with how it all went. The stories we had with an exclusive interview with local MP Steve Brine and the coverage of Occupy Bournemouth showed a really good side to WINOL. We had a BJTC inspection on that day with the head of the BJTC and at one point he said we were really lucky to have got those stories. Thankfully Angus stepped in at this point to say it was anything but luck. We all work really hard on WINOL and when Julie brings in an interview with Steve Brine it's not luck it's serious hard graft. Same goes for stories like the Occupy Bournemouth package, Ali went down two days in a row with Flick helping one day and George the next. I'd like to make clear though now about an issue nearly all the first years picked up on which sadly wasn't an issue. In the Steve Brine interview he makes a throwaway comment when asked about whether the voting 'rebellion' was a humiliation for the Tories saying, "Ed Miliband has his own humiliations on a daily basis in this place." A huge amount of the first years then went on to blog about how we had defamed Red Ed and were in serious trouble. Firstly, had there been any real issue of defaming Miliband then Chris and Brian wouldn't have let the story go ahead. Secondly he is an MP and whilst this doesn't mean he can say what he likes, standing on the Parliament grounds he is near enough covered by parliamentary privilege. Lastly and I think most importantly, someone saying that Ed Miliband is humiliated on a daily basis is comment, he's not stating it as a fact with bogus information, he's just commenting and 'Fair Comment' is one of the best defences in a libel case. Not the absolute best of course, for a refresher on libel and defamation, head this way OBVIOUS LINK. I was on the usual jobs, making straplines, collecting headline clips or packages and the like. I really feel now that I could do any job on production, only directing left to try.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Philosophy of Language - My 100th Post

My my, has it really been 100 blogs full to the brim with Anchorman references and pseudo intelligent ramblings? Well according to my Blogger, yes it has. Some of these blogs were published and then taken away in a more lucid moment once I'd seen how terrible the writing was, but 100 blogs nonetheless. To continue the trend, here's yet another blog in which I attempt to understand philosophy and boy was this one difficult.

I'm going to throw you in right at the deep end by asking you to think about this statement for a second: 'The present King of France is bald'. May not seem earth shattering on your first look but is the statement true or false? Is it even meaningless? The first thing to consider is that there is no present King of France, making the statement false, but the negation of this statement, 'It is not true that the present King of France is bald' and its logical equivalent 'The present King of France is not bald' are no more true than the original statement, even though that is also false. Some philosophers would suggest this makes the statement meaningless, especially since it fails to refer, even though it seems to mean something we can clearly understand. Confused yet, because by this point in Anthony Kenny's book, my head was spinning. This is without a doubt the hardest philosophy we've had to do so far but it's also one of the most important. The logic that you need to solve problems like this was what gave us the ability to programme today's computers. Whenever your computer crashes, you have to ctrl+alt+delete, you get the spinning wheel of death or the computer just gives up on you, it probably means you asked to do something that it couldn't process logically.

I really enjoyed the seminar this week though as the discussion we had really helped me gain an understanding of the subject. The lecture and the reading only succeeded in confusing me but the examples we used in the seminar, whilst still confusing, definitely helped me. I felt that the most interesting thing whilst looking at the philosophy of language was its influence on the computer world. To think that if we had stuck with the Aristotelian logic of, 'All men are mortal, Aristotle is mortal therefore Aristotle is a man' you wouldn't be reading this blog, and arguably you'd be better off. It helped me understand the sense and reference mode of logic that can make even nonsense statements have sense... yeah exactly, that shouldn't work. The phrase, "The morning star is the same as the evening star" is stupid when viewed logically because the morning star and the evening star are both Venus, however you can understand it. You take the sign and the word and come up with the sense with a reference which is the connection you make in your mind. In works of fiction we force a reference onto things that can have no reference to make them understandable. The meaning of a sentence arises from its structure, the predicate (or an object) gives the subject meaning and then we are able to understand it.

To deal with this sort of logic and the philosophy of language, you can't become hung up on the nominal meaning of words like a school teacher would. You need to be thinking about it with cold hard logic of a computer. The phrase "There is nobody on the road" seems simple enough, but it could mean a whole host of things to a computer, it is not logical enough. If there's nobody on the road does that mean there's somebody? Is it just this road or all roads? This can only work if you say "For all possible roads, on this one there is a man. False." Computers work in true or false, in binary in fact. Phrases like "you're evil" have absolutely no meaning to a computer, first you would have to define what evil is. You need to have the three elements of language (words, grammar and syntax) for a sentence to make any sense at all. The main philosophers of language, Frege, Wittgenstein and Russell all see music as the perfect language because it is logical and has grammar and syntax.

As a final point, a statement becomes truer with the more sources of verification there are so if, as in the seminar, you decide that all people who wear blue shirts are evil (I was wearing a blue shirt, read what you will into that) the statement would need to define what evil was, but if you could do that then you would only need to find more examples of where someone in a blue shirt was evil to make your statement truer. It was AJ Ayres who said "The truth of the statement is the verification." Probably with the italics.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

WINOL Games

Just an extremely short post to say I was a part of a possible new WINOL programme, a currently irregular gaming review show called WINOL Games.

You can give it a cheeky look here and I'd appreciate any feedback.

The 4th and 5th WINOL - It's different from one week to the next

Last weeks WINOL went extremely well in some aspects, in fact some would say the most important aspects as we got the broadcast out on time with no legal issues. We had no guest editor on the fourth WINOL but we were run in a more hands on way than usual by Brian and Angus. Brian took control of the newsroom, spiking any stories that weren't good enough to be broadcast on the BBC and cutting most things to OOV's because they weren't quite good enough but weren't bad enough to be spiked. I had a slightly less stressful job than the week before, back on the straplines writing headlines which is always fun, (favourite was Princess and the PC, wish it was me who'd written that, well played George). We used a different format script this week when it came to WINOL time, one more like the standard you'd get on an actual news show. It looked very much like the scripts I saw on my trip to Al Jazeera last year which makes sense really as Angus took control of it and directed from the gallery, showing us production people how it should be done really.

The week didn't begin with WINOL however, on Tuesday we filmed the first WINOL Life of the year. A One Show style programme in which our presenters are joined by a guest, usually related to feature production, and talk to our features team after being shown their efforts. The guest we had was Sally Churchward, a local journalist on the Southern Daily Echo and a features writer primarily. We had so many technical difficulties in the run up to the actual show, the vision mixer was just impossible to get working although eventually one of of tech friends managed to work their magic just in time for us to get a rehearsal in before the actual recorded broadcast. Unfortunately however, one of our questions suggested that music features were Sally's specialty and in Ewan's package about girl gamers he may have suggested girls only want to play games with unicorns and flowers. Sally is also a vocal feminist. This made things a little awkward to say the least. We persevered though and got a decent broadcast out and with the sound issues we had to deal with, Justina did amazingly to make it sound as good as it did in post production.

Sportsweek went as well as it always does. It's such a fun and easy thing to film and it's great experience for people who want to direct on the Wednesday so they can do it without the pressure of being live. It also gave a George a chance to do what he loves, speaking terrible French phrases to Julie.

When we finally made it to WINOL on the Wednesday we were feeling pretty confident. We'd had a few decent weeks and the production schedule that Dom put together a few weeks back had been great for us on production and I think helps the rest of the team to keep on track as well. I wanted to be on vision mixer again as for some reason, even though it can be stressful trying to set up green screens and making sure the camera changes at the right moments on handover and there are no black holes between VTs. I also took charge of the hard drive for another week on which we collect the headlines and the packages for the bulletin. I personally find that job really stressful but I had all the headlines ready in time to record them and I had the packages ready long before rehearsals started so I should really calm down. The stories themselves weren't particularly strong. Technically our news team is getting better week by week and we've ironed out a lot of issues that we encountered in the early editions. We're still pretty new though and that side of things will keep improving. The stories themselves however are different. We need to all be thinking about stories, reading local papers and asking questions, listening to local people and going to meetings in the hope of securing a story.

All in a all a good couple of weeks on WINOL. I'm going to add a bit more to this blog during the week as I misplaced my debrief notes. Once they're found I'll mention a bit more constructive criticism.

Seminar Paper - Sigmund Freud

Let me make it clear before the paper that I was always a bigger fan of Clement Freud, Sigmund's grandson, for his appearances on Just A Minute, but I guess that's not as relevant to the course.

Sigmund Freud Seminar

This week we’re looking mainly at Sigmund Freud, one of the first thinkers in psychoanalysis. It would be wrong to say he was the founder, as philosophers like Schopenhauer looked at that side of human behaviour before him; but you could say he was the mother, I mean father of the psychoanalytical movement of the late 1800’s and into the 20^th century.

As in last week’s lecture I think one of the most important aspects of Freud’s work to look at is the idea of a tripartite self. Freud looks at human behaviour in much the same way as Plato and Marx but where Plato had reason, spirit and desire as his three parts of the self, with reason controlling desire, Freud saw it as weak because people are irrational. Plato used the allegory of the chariot rider to explain how he saw the self, with desire and the spirit as the horses and reason as the rider, reining them in. I think, seeing the pessimistic way in which Freud tended to approach life, he would either reason as a weak rider, or desire at the reins, driving human behaviour like his Id. More of which later.

Freud’s theories are all encompassing; you cannot just take one aspect, as his psychoanalysis is a theory of everything, or at least it attempts to understand everything. In today’s psychology, Freud has less relevance to its practical application but in the lecture Brian pointed to a quote which sadly I forgot to note down who said it, “We all speak Freud now.” The influence of Freud on popular culture and media, even down to certain rules from society that we now take for granted, is we all have a similar construct now in our minds if we think about a therapist, we see the patient on a couch and some pseudo-Freud character sitting back asking odd questions until suddenly it’s about your mother. It was this, his obsession with infancy and sex being the cause of all psychological traumas that led to a breach with a former colleague Joseph Breuer. It was around this time, in isolation from his medical colleagues, that he published what Anthony Kenny calls the “most important of his works”, The Interpretation of Dreams. In this he argued that dreams were nothing more than neurotic symptoms which were actually a coded expression of sexual desires that we are repressing. The usual assumption here is that once again, as it’s Freud, all interpretations of dreams must be sexual, Freud himself debunked this saying, “The assertion that all dreams require a sexual interpretation, against which critics rage so incessantly, occurs nowhere in my Interpretation of Dreams ... and is in obvious contradiction to other views expressed in it.”According to the citation on the website where I found this quote, it was printed in the back of his 1919 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams.

When it comes to interpreting the pattern of the unconscious mind however, Freud goes back on all the nice things I’ve said and goes straight back to sex, and more importantly sexual development. Yes, we’re getting onto all things Oedipus and phallic. Freud believed sexual development is the key to the pattern of the unconscious mind. He looked at infantile sexuality, something the Daily Mail would get you done for, and concluded that it starts with an oral phase, in which pleasure is focused on the mouth. An anal stage follows, although this is not entirely explained in Kenny’s book. A little focused internet searching and a feeling of gladness that I didn’t just type “Anal Stage” into Google, turned up this “Toilet training is the child's key anal-stage experience, occurring at about the age of two years, and results in conflict between the Id (demanding immediate gratification) and the Ego (demanding delayed gratification) in eliminating bodily wastes.” If you’ve ever really enjoyed dropping the kids off at the pool, then this is why. Thanks Freud! He went on to say that the parental demands put on the child at this stage will affect them later in life. So if the parents make immoderate demands of the child, by over-emphasizing toilet training, it might lead to the development of a compulsive personality, a person too concerned with neatness and order. Toilet training can make you OCD, you heard it here last. We’ve now made it to the phallic stage where the child becomes focused on its genitals where, according to Freud, we suddenly become attracted to our mothers, jealous at our father’s possession of her. This is generally the most ridiculed of Freud’s ideas but he’d probably just say it was an unconscious desire, and the Ego is preventing the Id from getting what it wants. Fortunately for us, (and our mums), our hostility towards our fathers eventually makes us worry that he’ll castrate us, so we abandon any designs we might have on our mothers, (are you freaked out yet?) and gradually identify with our fathers. Freud did recognize that there was almost certainly a feminine equivalent of the Oedipus complex but it was never fully worked out in a convincing manner. I think he was right though, based purely on the fact that his own daughter Anna followed him into psychoanalysis to finish the work he started.

If Freud did anything he helped pioneer a philosophy of mind, he probably wouldn’t thank us for including him in a course where philosophy is the key topic, but like the empiricists he tried to understand everything and so his place here is valid. Freud would have seen himself as a scientist rather than a philosopher although when his theories have been made precise enough to allow for experimental testing, they have been shown to lack foundation. In Kenny’s book he claims that medical professionals disagree how far psychoanalytic techniques are effective forms of therapy and, if they are, where they derive their worth from. Freud has had an enormous effect on society though, in our understanding of mental illness, our appreciation of art and literature, and on interpersonal relationships of many kinds. All of us directly or indirectly have taken in a good deal of psychoanalytic theory. We often, with friends or with family, have talked unself-consciously of repression and sublimation. People who have never read Freud can quite easily identify their own and others’ Freudian slips. Kenny claims that no philosopher since Aristotle has made a greater contribution to the everyday vocabulary of psychology and morality and says that it is hard to fault the judgement of W.H. Auden who mourned Freud’s death in 28 intricate quatrains one of which he quotes and that is how I’ll end my seminar.

“If often he was wrong, and, at times, absurd,

To us he is no more a person

Now but a whole climate of opinion.”

Third WINOL - It had to get better eventually

We're not quite perfect yet but after the shambles of last week, the on time, full with packages and legal issue free WINOL we put out last Wednesday was a relief and a release. The atmosphere in the gallery and in the newsroom after the broadcast, and even the debrief, was such a contrast to the way we all felt last week.

There was some good constructive criticism to take away though. Whilst we were better prepared, something I pretty much contribute to the large amount of lists drawn up by Dom, we didn't meet all our deadline. OK so at least the broadcast went out on time this week but there's no harm in being even more prepared, the rehearsals which we missed out on last week proved invaluable even if the main outcome was the delightfully cheesy snow puns (Scores were frozen, snow way we can continue, on this this slippery slope etc). They were probably too much, even for the regional news style that we're going for but at least we weren't so stressed that we couldn't have fun with the script. We do need to do some extra work on the script though, I know for a fact that me and Dan were panicking slightly when the script didn't arrive for Dan to type into the autocue. When we got the script we attempted to copy and paste it into the autocue program which wouldn't work at first; a quick bit of computer know how and George managed to convert the word file to a compatible version using an online converter. A simple enough thing to do but well done to him for being calm and collected and sorting the issue out as quick as possible.

I learnt another skill on production as I worked on the sound desk during the broadcast. My main job in the day though was getting the headline clips and packages from the news reporters and sports which is one of the worst jobs, not because it's particularly difficult, but because you spend your entire day just bugging everyone to get the clips. I lost count of the amount of times I said, "I'm really sorry, but..." I probably didn't make any friends doing that job but at least I got it done.

In summary... YAY!! We got a good WINOL out. You can watch it here.

Second WINOL. Have we improved?

The simple answer to that question is probably a no. We had more technical issues than even the most vindictive person could imagine, I even remember Ali at one point exclaiming "I've had every technical difficulty imaginable, haven't I?" Well despite those, we still managed to get the WINOL bulletin done on ti- Oh wait no it wasn't on time either. Balls.

Remember those technical difficulties? Well they plagued us in the studio as well. We couldn't get the talkback feature working on the headsets meaning the newsreaders couldn't hear a word that was being said in the gallery. Eventually we found one headset that worked, attached to one of the cameras, meaning our editor Will had to cue the newsreaders from what he was being told by production editor Jack up in the Gallery. It wasn't an ideal situation to say the least.

We'll learn from this though and I think that's all you can do from a situation like that. We messed up. But we're still only two weeks in and we can't be perfect this early on, it's just ridiculous to put that sort of pressure on ourselves. The third years had this all last year and hopefully they understand that we can only really get better, the mistakes we make will help us to put better packages together and to pull together as a WINOL news team much better than we have done so far. In our debrief Angus said there was no sense of urgency and he was right, we're putting out a news broadcast in the hope that it becomes a real source of news for the students of Winchester and beyond, we can't let our deadlines slip.

On my part I was doing the straplines again and working from the template we had last week, I had them all finished by about 11, too late for a start but at least they were done. Suddenly though I was informed we had a new logo, meaning new straps and that I'd have to do all of them again. Annoying yes but I think I managed to pull together well and get the new straps out and to the reporters, learning a new skill in the process as I'm now able to make the straplines and put them into the reports for the reporters or show them if they're willing to take a minute to learn, (although it's bloody hard to find a moment sometimes when you're rushing to get something edited on time).

This week will be better. I'm going to really try my hardest to do my jobs as soon as I possibly can so that I'm not at fault, and then help anyone who is struggling because WINOL is a team effort, we're a news team in a news room. News team! Assemble!! (http://youtu.be/PVlXYoVZHfA)

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

First Week. First HCJ. We're back baby!

Woooooooo!!! Spring Break!!! I mean, erm, HCJ!!!! Well we're back at university and of course, it's not all fun and games. The lectures return and this year HCJ is going hard. If we thought we'd seen it all with Romanticism, Empiricism and the rest, we haven't seen anything yet.

If we're going with definitions, I'm going to need some help from my old friend Collin(s online dictionary). Modernism is defined as an early and mid twentieth century movement in art, literature and music that rejected traditional styles and techniques. Well that's all very well and good but what does it mean to us in our HCJ course and in a wider context of journalism?

The lecture had a fairly loose structure to it, taking in many of the topics we will cover in more detail later on in the course. Firstly we looked to William Randolph Hearst, one of the most influential men in the history of Journalism. To give him a brief (and I mean very brief) history, he was an extremely successful businessman, owning a newspaper chain with nearly 30 titles in major American cities at its peak, expanding later to magazines. His life story was the inspiration for the Orson Welles film, Citizen Kane which we watched after the lecture and which I will talk slightly more about after the main thrust, (possibly a poor choice of word) of my blog.

The 19th century was the paradigm of change. The paradigm of modern movement where everything relates, no idea is right and there is no real self. A lot of angst and Schopenhauer concluding that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled, (more on him later in the course, nothing like a bit of suspense). We also looked at Wagner, and heard Wagner a whole lot of a Wagner. With good reason though as we discovered his place as the overarching figure of high modernity. Head of the course Chris Horrie called Wagner's The Ring Cycle the central artefact of western culture.

The final most important character we looked at in brief was Friedrich Nietzsche whose most famous work is arguably God is Dead. I'll admit that at the moment I don't really know much about Nietzsche but I hope through the reading we have been set and the lectures I'll get to know more. I think I'll definitely need to read the Nietzsche chapters from Anthony Kenny's book and also go back to our reading from last year and Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

Lastly, I really rather enjoyed Citizen Kane. It has clearly aged but as an 'almost' documentary of William Randolph Hearst it's a invaluable source of information for us in his study. Also, Orson Welles is amazing.

This blog was slightly disjointed, as is the nature of a first lecture back. Hopefully they'll improve again and the Alexa rankings will soar or something.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Yay First WINOL

Well this week was our return to actual University work. I've been around for a few weeks just lazing around or going to work so I thought I was prepared for the trials and tribulations of WINOL. I was not. Monday was a shock to the system for more reasons than the 9 o'clock start, the briefing we were given set us up for the next year of our lives and the next two days gave us a sense of what being a working journalist could be like. It was tough at times but an amazing experience to be part of a news team that put out a half decent news programme, better than I expected considering we second years had never done anything quite like it before. We were thrown in at the deep end to an extent but we learnt to swim pretty quickly and we had the third years there to give us some inflatable armbands and, yeah. I shouldn't extend this metaphor any further.

We can only get better and amongst the constructive criticism we received there were a few high points. Chris joked that we were better starting the year than some had been at the end and whilst we all laughed there was a sense that even hitting our deadlines and getting the broadcast out on time was an achievement of sorts. OK so the packages weren't perfect yet but we're students, not professionals and it was an all second year news team who in two days had to go out and find a story, secure interviews and film it all to be edited together and put into the WINOL broadcast. Two days in which we experienced how tough it's going to be over this year.

When it came to the actual WINOL broadcast I was sat in the gallery on the Vision Mixer, a machine I had only learned how to use the day before. Suffice to say I was nervous, or as the cool kids say, bricking it. Just 10 minutes before we were due to 'air' we realised that the OOV for Ali's piece on train prices was actually the wrong video. Normally, we would probably have all entered into a panic but kudos to Ali who was calm and simply walked into the newsroom, got the correct piece of video and put it onto the VT machine just in time. I think the overriding theme of the day was probably calmness. Perhaps it was because it was a dummy run, with no one but possibly the First years seeing it. (By the way, if you're a first year reading this then I ask you to be merciless when Brian tells you to point out the mistakes. We did and yet we made the same mistakes in our first WINOL this year. Learn from that and note down every cock up so you can make sure you don't make the same mistakes). Or maybe we're just that awesome? I think perhaps the first option but it would be great to think that the atmosphere we had in the gallery and the studio will be something that will continue.

I think perhaps when WINOL gets up and running properly, I might leave some of the debrief comments on here and also start posting a few tutorials on how to do certain jobs on WINOL.

Don't Be Fooled

If the riots have bred one thing it's stupidity. Yeah I said it. Every time I log on to social networking sites to see how friends are doing and in the case of Twitter to sort of stalk celebs I am blinded by the stupidity on show. In the last few days of rioting, every day has brought about a fresh rumour that the riots have moved to my home county of Essex and in particular my home town, Basildon. Due to the nature of social networking these messages spread across the entire county and amongst some the fear sets in. Ridiculous rumours spread, "Primark is on fire" or "The town centre is burning." Gangs on the streets and clashes with police? It could be any normal night in Basildon and it is only in the context of the riots that these unrelated incidents appear anything out of the ordinary.

Don't let the rumours catch you out, follow these simple steps to put your mind at ease. (I'll be using Essex as an example but the steps can apply to anyone, anywhere and at anytime).
1) Just because a friend has texted you with some dodgy rumour, don't assume they know any better than you.
2) Use websites like Twitter to follow your local police and news outlets for example http://twitter.com/#!/EssexPoliceUK and http://twitter.com/#!/DailyEssex
3) Keep watching the news. Sounds simple but in all the news reports I've seen the only mention of Essex has been the outstanding work the police have done so far in supporting the Met and in keeping Essex from descending into riots.
4) Use this map from the Guardian, accessible here to confirm the riot sites. If you can't see anything new then the 'riot' you've heard about is nothing more than the usual activity in your area.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

A Country Up in Flames

On Friday a man named Mark Duggan, 29, was shot and killed in an attempted arrest by the police. The next day a peaceful protest at the manner in which this father of four was killed descended into violence and rioting in the Tottenham area the man called home. It was a politically minded riot, one which was born out of frustration at a system which allowed this to happen. Yes it wasn't all like this but there was a point to it. The following evening the rioting continued but it moved to more looting than rioting, forgetting the initial cause of the riots and instead just taking an opportunity to watch their community burn. Yesterday however the riots moved into far more terrifying territory, shops were looted, streets were on fire, cars burned to a cinder. It made the so called 'student riots' look positively tame by comparison and it was heartbreaking to see people in a community taking away the livelihoods of local shopkeepers and publicans.

Yesterday's events have been divisive. If there's one thing we're united on it is that they were wrong and they need to stop. However the reasons behind them have left most people stumped. Some seem to suggest that the riots were initially a politically charged reaction to the shooting of Mark Duggan before they descended into copycat riots which were bred on greed and lawless society. Theresa May described it best by calling it "sheer criminality." Monday's riots however were a different breed. The violence was disgusting, the images I've seen have made me angry and sick. There was a picture circulating on Twitter of a woman jumping out of her window to escape the flames and I among many others were quick to decry it as a fake. The sad truth of it was that it was genuine but it reflects how unexpected these scenes were to the majority of us that we were so quick to dismiss the image. Perhaps a naive view but I'd call it hopeful, back when I like many other still had hope that the riots would stop.

They didn't though, the images on the news and the Internet, especially Twitter, were a horrible sight. There is a video which you can watch if you you have a strong stomach here as a group of rioters appear to help a bleeding boy up before robbing him and leaving him to an unknown fate. The only piece of light in this was a startling video of a Hackney woman, standing up to rioters and delivering an astounding speech in the face of the looting and vandalism (you can watch that here). The media line on the riots has flitted from "blame social networking" to "why didn't Cameron come home quicker?" I think therefore in the interest of fairness that I should argue the other side of both of those arguments, regardless of my own opinions on the riots. Firstly the knee jerk reaction to blame social networking. Yes of course they used social networking to organise themselves, the Arab Spring has used social networking to organise its protests against oppressive regimes so why wouldn't people use social networking to organise which Greggs to burn and which Curry's to steal their new 42' TV from? Some ridiculous corners of the Internet and the media seemed to suggest it was new technology which started the rioting. Yes the Internet can be a breeding ground for such things but it has also become a breeding ground for hope. Today a Twitter account and website have been set, (@Riotcleanup and www.riotcleanup.co.uk respectively) with the aim of cleaning up the mess that the rioting youths have left behind and showing them the community spirit that they feel so disconnected from. They react against the community because they feel it has nothing to offer them and no place for them but it is young people again who have set up the sites and organised themselves to clean up and rebuild the broken society.

Now I'm going to talk about Cameron, a man of whom I am not a fan but of whom the media has vilified for all the wrong reasons in this. As the tension built and the rioters rioted, social commentators on Twitter and even the BBC questioned where Britain's Prime Minister was in all of this. The answer was that he was on holiday but he didn't go on holiday as the riots began, he didn't run away from the issue, he just happened to be on holiday when it started. The first night of rioting was terrible but seemed that it would end quickly and as has been the case, Tottenham has been the scene of less and less violence since that night. The areas in which rioting has taken place now are copycat riots, but not copycat in the sense of mindless looting (although in the case of some bragging about their exploits on Twitter I'm sure that's true) but the anger has come from the alienation of these people in their community, I cannot stress that enough. Anyway back to Cameron. The idea that he could not make decisions from Italy is ridiculous and shows a real ignorance of the workings of government. If the riots had not escalated further the Prime Minister would have made his decisions via telephone or e-mail but apparently we needed to see his face, his slimy, pudgy and not exactly inspiring face. For what purpose? Today his statements have essentially been him condemning the riots, as if the talk was that he might support them. The words are not enough and will not bring comfort to shopkeepers whose livelihood has been taken from them. What Cameron needs is action, he needs to question the workings of the police force not cut their budget. He needs to stand with the country, encouraging those in the community to be present, visible and not just spectators. His good friend Boris needs to be here more than Cameron if anything, as Mayor of London it is his time and his responsibility to be a strong figurehead, not necessarily something you'd expect of him, but forget politics, we need leading. Sadly it seems at the moment that the government is not up to that job.

We need to keep the riot clean up going long after the physical damage to our cities has been repaired. The government is out of ideas so now we're up. This started because people felt a lack of community, let us end it by building a new one. Sites like Twitter and Facebook may have been the breeding ground for braking windows but it can be used to do more than fix those windows, it will be needed to build community from the ground up. Like the Norwegians though after their recent tragedy, we need more democracy, not less.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

EDIT: Breaking news just as I wrote this article the Police confirm the first fatality in all this as a Croydon man, shot in his car, dies in hospital. It began with a death maybe it'll end with one but terrible that this had to happen for the events to sink in for some people.

Much better articles than I could ever write
Camila Batmanghelidjh - The Independent here
Mary Riddell - The Daily Telegraph here
and awlways worth a read, no matter your opinion of him. Littlejohn.

Goodbye, cruel World

Apologies to the Daily Telegraph for nicking their headline but it's a good one. So yes, as you may have heard, the News of the World phone hacking scandal rolls on taking it's biggest casualty yet as the paper is shut down. It was founded in 1843, bought by Rupert Murdoch and his News Ltd company in 1969 and is scheduled to close this Sunday the 10th of July in the wake of the phone hacking scandal.

Is the closure of the News of the World honestly addressing the problem? Already shouts have gone up from some media commentators at the cynical way in which the paper has been closed as a scapegoat for other, much more troubling issues. The first of which is Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade) still holds her job as head of News International when the majority of the hacking took place leading some to joke that Murdoch has gotten rid of the wrong red top (make the connections yourself, you're not stupid). I suppose you could be wondering what is so terrible about the hacking, after all, it was only celebrities hacked right? Sienna Miller won compensation, Andy Gray was hacked as was Hugh Grant (more on him later) and OK the odd politician like John Prescott but what's the big deal. Well I'll tell you. It wasn't just celebrities, in the last week alone we have discovered that the Private Investigators seemingly hired by the NotW hacked the then missing Milly Dowler's phone, the parents of one of the victims of the Soham murders, the families of those killed in the 7/7 bombings and families of soldiers killed on duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now this may seem bad enough or it may seem absolutely acceptable depending on your point of view but where they unequivocally crossed the line to me is when they deleted messages on Milly Dowler's phone to make room for more from worried family members, leading her family to believe she was still accessing her phone and therefore still alive which by this time she had sadly met her end.

The actions have been described variously as disgusting, unacceptable and all sorts of other big words which fail to actually bring about any real outcome. It seems that an enquiry will come but how soon and how independent, especially important given that there is a suggestion of corruption in the Metropolitan Police Force. The Police are currently holding their own enquiry and according to Chris Grayling, a judicial enquiry cannot run alongside it. Not knowing the law on this I cannot comment with much authority but I cannot understand why the two can not run concurrently. the suggestion by other panellists was that because the government is 'in bed with Murdoch' as the slightly sordid sounding phrase goes, they want to leave the enquiry as long as possible in the hope that we the public will somehow forget about it. And they are right. We need to act now to get to the bottom of this, this could be one of the most important times for the media, the government and even the public at large. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) have been criticised, seen as an ineffective way of controlling the press but as their Chairman has pointed out in various interviews and press conferences, you can't regulate a company which consistently lies to you.

In yesterday's Question Time, Hugh Grant, a victim of the hacking himself, went down very well amongst the general public with his views on the NotW, Murdoch and has become a crusader against the hacking which, if nothing else has ensured his movie career will continue for years to come. One thing however was brought to my attention after the programme that, as a training journalist bothered me. Grant at one point spoke of a change in the way in which the press are regulated, something which many would agree with but the draconian measures he seemed to suggest the like of which haven't been seen since the 1800s and although he resorted in the end to cheap digs about Grant's tabloid past, Jon Gaunt was right in saying that too much regulation on the press will mean we no longer have a free press. A free press being essential in a true democracy to hold to account politicians, businessmen and the like.

Something that worried me in all the accusations and revelations was the reaction of the other newspapers to the stories. On the day after the biggest revelations that Milly Dowler's phone was hacked and messages were deleted, the reaction was less than some expected. The Daily Mail for example had a small front page article, a page inside and a small piece in the comment section of the paper. You can be sure it was the same across the board. Take what you want from this but it suggests that the hacking practice was not limited to the News of the World. To think however as some do that this makes all journalists scum is to be more foolish and naive than you could imagine. With the closure of the News of the World we lose the biggest selling newspaper in this country and around 200 staff will lose their jobs as the paper closes. Not all of these people would have been involved in the hacking, most will be PR people and journalists who were just going about their own business doing quality journalism on what used to be a quality newspaper.

As a final thought what will happen with Rupert Murdoch's take over of BSkyB. The decision will obviously be postponed but surely recent events will stop the sale which appeared to be taking place despite laws which should prevent any one person owning such a high percentage of the media. Will Rebekah Brooks ever leave? Andy Coulson has today been arrested and how long can Murdoch protect Brooks with the comprehensive investigations and inquiries ahead of us. Her ability to stay on has lead to many speculating on what it she has (from a nuclear bomb to bikini pictures of Murdoch. Obviously a twitter source). What will it mean for journalists in the future? The phone hacking scandal has surely changed the face of journalism forever leaving common practices of journos in doubt. As always stick with this blog for any developments, as I'm writing this blog the story is no doubt already changing and I'll have missed some new revelation. Such is the nature of news in the new media age.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.
(and check your phone hasn't been hacked, the police are contacting over 4000 people so it might have been).

Some good links for you on the subject:
Daily Mail Cameron's response
Guardian NotW Closure
Fellow Student blogs. Ewan Kennerell and Daniel Mackrell

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.