Comment on this blog with the line of the song which references the French Revolution which has been the focus of a few of my blogs lately, and also, stick an idea in for a blog, current affairs story, thoughts on journalism or philosophy, anything. I need ideas.
Link here---> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xfdGXA62ZM
Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.
Friday, 25 February 2011
News of the World - Still with the phone hacking
Although this term I'm not studying Media Law, it's always nice to keep metaphorically fit when it comes to the law for journalists and as I had already covered some aspects of the 'Phone Hacking Scandal' as it often written; this story particularly caught my eye.
Link here ---> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/25/phone-hacking-case-mulcaire-coogan
Essentially, Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator on whom this case currently centers is being asked to reveal the names of the executives who commissioned him to hack celebrities' phones. Actor and comedian Steve Coogan is suing the private investigator and News Group, (a subsidiary company to News International) and so the case has moved on with judges ruling Mulcaire cannot refuse to answer on the grounds of self-incrimination.
This is big news in the journalism world as it has huge implications on our code of conduct (which does by the way ask very nicely that we don't engage in subterfuge unless the story can't be attained in any other way).
Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.
Link here ---> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/25/phone-hacking-case-mulcaire-coogan
Essentially, Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator on whom this case currently centers is being asked to reveal the names of the executives who commissioned him to hack celebrities' phones. Actor and comedian Steve Coogan is suing the private investigator and News Group, (a subsidiary company to News International) and so the case has moved on with judges ruling Mulcaire cannot refuse to answer on the grounds of self-incrimination.
This is big news in the journalism world as it has huge implications on our code of conduct (which does by the way ask very nicely that we don't engage in subterfuge unless the story can't be attained in any other way).
Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.
Lecture 8 - Romanticism (but mostly this dude Prometheus)
A lecture doesn't often start with music from a Beethoven opera but it makes a nice change. The music in question was the Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, composed in 1801, right in the heart of the Romantic movement. This week's lecture was delivered by a guest, Dr Gary Farnell of the British Association for Romantic Studies who also doubles up as the head of English Literature at the University of Winchester. He began by telling us all about the legend of Prometheus, how he stole fire from the Gods to give it to mankind, how he was punished by Jupiter, chained to a rock and a vulture tearing out his liver for 30 years. Prometheus then is a symbol of the Romantic movement, all about the renewal of humanity and the creation of mankind; the themes at the heart of the Prometheus legend.
Prometheus is an extremely old story, dating back to Greek Mythology, who came back to the fore during the Romantic movement and was adopted as a God of Romanticism. Several figures in the movement used the legend as the basis of their works; for example Lord Byron's Prometheus (inventive name), Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and his other half, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, often known as The Modern Prometheus. The character of Prometheus is the champion of oppressed human kind according to Romanticism, a God who embodies the spirit of 'liberty, equality and fraternity', a quote from the French Revolution of 1789. On a slightly related topic, Percy Shelley is quoted as having said to Byron in 1816 that "the French Revolution is the master theme of the epoch in which we live." This doesn't seem so ridiculous if you've read my previous blog but it is quite interesting to note that Percy Shelley was not even born until 1792. The revolution passed him by without direct effect on his life and even he knows how important it is.
*Note to self: Do more study on the Revolution, I'm sensing a theme emerging*
Continuing with our new found friend Percy Shelley I'm going to briefly look at one of his poems, written in 1818, which links directly to Prometheus in its themes, maybe his most famous poem, Ozymandias. The poem is infused with a revolutionary spirit within the form of a sonnet (the form will become more relevant later) and focuses on the 13th Century BC Egyptian Pharaoh Ozymandias, better known as Rameses II. It was composed after a visit to the British Museum where there stands a huge bust of Rameses II and is written as a critique of Empires like that of Ozymandias which were 'built on sand' quite literally and, if you were trying to be clever which I do every now and then, also could link to the imperial power at the time of the British Empire. Bit of a curveball there but there is a suggestion in the poem of a link between the Museum and Empire, the whole notion of taking artefacts from their natural home to exhibit them for their own purposes is rejected by Shelley, linking back to the 'empires on the sand' idea, it suggests that however powerful an Empire is, their time will always come to an end. Shelley uses the form of a sonnet ironically as sonnets usually elevate their subject, such as in the form of all the Shakespearean love sonnets, and reverses it, critiquing the whole idea of Empires and calling for a new beginning; very revolutionary. As a side note, you can see the poem resonating in connection to the Egyptian revolution of the last month in which a tyrannical 'King of Kings' type character was overthrown; the spirit of Prometheanism is alive in Egypt.
We now move from Shelley's Political Prometheanism to Aesthetic Prometheanism, the notion of making or creating things, like humankind, which further inspires Romantic writers. Writers like John Keats for example and, in particular, his 1819 poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn which rather inconveniently for him has now turned out to be a Roman 2nd Century AD urn, known as the Townley Vase, but never mind. Once again, it is a poem inspired by a visit to the British Museum but instead of looking at the notion of empires, it examines the art of the vase. Its form acknowledges an element of self conscious artifice in the artistic set of creation, and is an opportunity for Keats to demonstrate his poetic skills in celebrating the artistry of the urn. In the poem it is worth noting the finely turned phrases, use of personification, artificially alternating line length, all evident within the first lines
Prometheus is an extremely old story, dating back to Greek Mythology, who came back to the fore during the Romantic movement and was adopted as a God of Romanticism. Several figures in the movement used the legend as the basis of their works; for example Lord Byron's Prometheus (inventive name), Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and his other half, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, often known as The Modern Prometheus. The character of Prometheus is the champion of oppressed human kind according to Romanticism, a God who embodies the spirit of 'liberty, equality and fraternity', a quote from the French Revolution of 1789. On a slightly related topic, Percy Shelley is quoted as having said to Byron in 1816 that "the French Revolution is the master theme of the epoch in which we live." This doesn't seem so ridiculous if you've read my previous blog but it is quite interesting to note that Percy Shelley was not even born until 1792. The revolution passed him by without direct effect on his life and even he knows how important it is.
*Note to self: Do more study on the Revolution, I'm sensing a theme emerging*
Continuing with our new found friend Percy Shelley I'm going to briefly look at one of his poems, written in 1818, which links directly to Prometheus in its themes, maybe his most famous poem, Ozymandias. The poem is infused with a revolutionary spirit within the form of a sonnet (the form will become more relevant later) and focuses on the 13th Century BC Egyptian Pharaoh Ozymandias, better known as Rameses II. It was composed after a visit to the British Museum where there stands a huge bust of Rameses II and is written as a critique of Empires like that of Ozymandias which were 'built on sand' quite literally and, if you were trying to be clever which I do every now and then, also could link to the imperial power at the time of the British Empire. Bit of a curveball there but there is a suggestion in the poem of a link between the Museum and Empire, the whole notion of taking artefacts from their natural home to exhibit them for their own purposes is rejected by Shelley, linking back to the 'empires on the sand' idea, it suggests that however powerful an Empire is, their time will always come to an end. Shelley uses the form of a sonnet ironically as sonnets usually elevate their subject, such as in the form of all the Shakespearean love sonnets, and reverses it, critiquing the whole idea of Empires and calling for a new beginning; very revolutionary. As a side note, you can see the poem resonating in connection to the Egyptian revolution of the last month in which a tyrannical 'King of Kings' type character was overthrown; the spirit of Prometheanism is alive in Egypt.
We now move from Shelley's Political Prometheanism to Aesthetic Prometheanism, the notion of making or creating things, like humankind, which further inspires Romantic writers. Writers like John Keats for example and, in particular, his 1819 poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn which rather inconveniently for him has now turned out to be a Roman 2nd Century AD urn, known as the Townley Vase, but never mind. Once again, it is a poem inspired by a visit to the British Museum but instead of looking at the notion of empires, it examines the art of the vase. Its form acknowledges an element of self conscious artifice in the artistic set of creation, and is an opportunity for Keats to demonstrate his poetic skills in celebrating the artistry of the urn. In the poem it is worth noting the finely turned phrases, use of personification, artificially alternating line length, all evident within the first lines
"Thou still unravished bride of quietness and slow time
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme –"
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme –"
These are all signifiers of Keats' creativity and this creativity in turn is an example of the sanctification of the human ability to make or create. The final lines of the poem, '"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know' illustrate the poem better than I ever could.
As a final point, the superiority of art in Romantic Aestheticism is in obvious relation with Hegel and Kant of the German idealist school of philosophy but for more on that, you'll just have to wait for my seminar paper which will be posted sometime in the next week. Returning to Prometheus, he signifies the bringing together of the two elements of Romanticism, the political and the aesthetic. I'll leave you with a quote from Lord Byron's Prometheus, "Thou art a symbol and a sign / To mortals of their fate and force."
Until next time. Stay Classy Internet
Sunday, 20 February 2011
Journalism and The Internet
Underestimating the Internet is a fools game. Since its invention it has grown from a military tool to a social networking phenomenon where anything goes and has in recent times become an important force in Journalism. From where I'm standing (well sitting at the moment) I believe Twitter to be the most important tool in my Journalistic toolbox. It alerts me to the breaking news, updates me with the latest developments and connects me with like minded people. You only need to look back through my blog posts to see the amount of times I've been able to take a story from Twitter and turn it into a blog.
Recently though I was struck by how important Twitter became in the events surrounding Hosni Mubarak's eventual resignation in Egypt. In the early days of the the revolution, Internet traffic was interrupted and there were reports of disruption to Twitter, but of course there were already some journalists out there, able to report using their phones, connecting them to the Internet and therefore the world. The Twitter hash tag #Jan25 became the place to look for news concerning Egypt and soon reports were flooding in, all with eyewitness accounts built up from Tweets. Even today I saw a call from one journalist for eyewitnesses on Twitter of the problems (possibly an understatement) in Libya.
The Internet. Just another tool in journalism as we strive to find the truth.
This blog was inspired by a piece in The Observer with the link below:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/20/what-effect-internet-on-journalism
P.S. I know it says Guardian but if you weren't already aware that The Observer is essentially The Guardian on Sunday then you need to do a bit more research.
Recently though I was struck by how important Twitter became in the events surrounding Hosni Mubarak's eventual resignation in Egypt. In the early days of the the revolution, Internet traffic was interrupted and there were reports of disruption to Twitter, but of course there were already some journalists out there, able to report using their phones, connecting them to the Internet and therefore the world. The Twitter hash tag #Jan25 became the place to look for news concerning Egypt and soon reports were flooding in, all with eyewitness accounts built up from Tweets. Even today I saw a call from one journalist for eyewitnesses on Twitter of the problems (possibly an understatement) in Libya.
The Internet. Just another tool in journalism as we strive to find the truth.
This blog was inspired by a piece in The Observer with the link below:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/20/what-effect-internet-on-journalism
P.S. I know it says Guardian but if you weren't already aware that The Observer is essentially The Guardian on Sunday then you need to do a bit more research.
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Lecture 7 - Rousseau, Romanticism and the rights of Women.
It was our first lecture of the new semester this week and our main focus was Rousseau and the Romantic movement which he inspired. We were told what to expect from this latest module of HCJ with the focus moving from the Enlightenment and Empiricists of last semester, i.e Locke and Hume, to Romanticism, Rousseau and Revolution.
The Romantic movement was a gradual change to more subjectivity, emotion and intuition in philosophy in almost direct contrast to the Enlightenment's resistance to the idea of only divine intervention, held throughout the middle ages. The vacuum formed by this idea was filled by the belief in a divinity of nature which Rousseau endorsed. The Romantic movement is often remembered for its art and literature, Gabriel Rossetti, William Wordsworth and William Blake were all exponents of the Romantic school. The enlightenment gave us such rational thinkers as Locke and Hume and taught us to aspire to know everything; it taught us that with experience and testing you could. This really should be the end of History and Context but I'm still typing, and that means we've got a whole lot more to cover
Rousseau was an early exponent of Romantic philosophy and could be seen as the original romantic, at least in terms of the movement. In the pre-Enlightenment period the creative force was Christianity. Paintings, poems and books all based on the teachings and stories of the Christian church. After the waves caused by the Enlightenment, the divinity of nature became the driving creative force. It was a political time bomb and created a kind of cult of sensibility which all came from one personal experience for Rousseau. He had an intense experience whilst listening to the waves where all worries and painful memories about the past and anxieties for the future melted away, leaving only the sense of being. He decided that nothing true had come before, citing nature as the only real truth. This belief in the beauty and innocence of nature extended to man as natural man was virtuous, i.e. the idea of 'the noble savage'. He saw the people of Tahiti, still living primitively as a kind of paradise, untouched by the corruption of the 18th Century. This is in complete contrast to Hobbes whom we studied last semester who acknowledged the state of nature, but thought it horrible rather than beautiful. Rousseau's philosophy was similar in part to Locke who believed that people were generally pretty good but that a limited government is needed for problems with things like property.
Rousseau's main philosophical idea was his belief in the supremacy of emotion. He said that "man is born free, but everywhere is in chains." His philosophy asks us to make a move back to nature by "taking men as they are, and laws as they might be" so we can get out of the trap of self esteem. Rousseau's problem: "Find a form of association which defends and protects with all the common force, the person and goods of each associate and by means of which each one while uniting with all obeys only himself and remains as free as before." Rousseau developed the idea of The General Will which states that there are certain laws that we can agree on but as long as we all agree on them, there is no loss of freedom; we are just obeying ourselves. This contrasts with a liberal philosophy as public and private are the same and does contain the danger of becoming a new type of dictatorship. By this I mean that Rousseau explicitly states that anyone refusing to follow the general will, will be "forced to be free" in a way. Freedom exists in Rousseau's world only in service.
These ideas lead to one of the most important events in world history, the French Revolution. When the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Enlai (1949-76) was asked about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, he replied, "It is too soon to say." I'll go into more detail of the revolution in a later blog perhaps, but for this blog and its focus of Rousseau it is important to note the Declaration of the rights of man which says we should be born free, remain free and be equal in rights with the law being the expression of general will. All this, the Tennis Court oath and the National Assembly was attractive to rebels in England who followed Rousseau's philosophy carefully, the poet William Wordsworth was quoted as saying, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." Behind all that malarkey though, Wordsworth was expressing the feelings of many young revolutionaries who were seeing the Romantic movement and Rousseau's idea of natural man in reality. In the revolution, a new world was seemingly created, with nothing having come before it. The King and other royals were executed through the new 'egalitarian' method of the guillotine, one of the enduring images of the revolution and paranoia spread, leaving them in almost a worse place than before. Revolutions rarely go smoothly and often do not end as planned.
I'm going to finish this blog by talking briefly about Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist writer whose ideas were in places very much a reaction to Rousseau's; a kind of love/hate relationship between their ideals. Education at the time was at the time quite superficial for women and they were taught mainly to focus on their appearance but Wollstonecraft looked at education from a similar perspective as Locke's Tabula Rasa, reasoning that if you educate people properly, you can make them into rational and responsible citizens. Rousseau's influence on her work was that she also called for a more egalitarian society, where a hatred of sophistication was the norm. She wasn't asking for a return to nature but asked purely that Men and Women be treated just as human beings; asexual or non-sexual until they are in love, when they assume a gendered identity. This last point is the one most often criticised as it contrasts her otherwise staunchly feminist views.
Thanks for reading my first blog of this new semester, please visit as often as you like, there will always be something interesting to read. Tell your friends.
Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.
The Romantic movement was a gradual change to more subjectivity, emotion and intuition in philosophy in almost direct contrast to the Enlightenment's resistance to the idea of only divine intervention, held throughout the middle ages. The vacuum formed by this idea was filled by the belief in a divinity of nature which Rousseau endorsed. The Romantic movement is often remembered for its art and literature, Gabriel Rossetti, William Wordsworth and William Blake were all exponents of the Romantic school. The enlightenment gave us such rational thinkers as Locke and Hume and taught us to aspire to know everything; it taught us that with experience and testing you could. This really should be the end of History and Context but I'm still typing, and that means we've got a whole lot more to cover
Rousseau was an early exponent of Romantic philosophy and could be seen as the original romantic, at least in terms of the movement. In the pre-Enlightenment period the creative force was Christianity. Paintings, poems and books all based on the teachings and stories of the Christian church. After the waves caused by the Enlightenment, the divinity of nature became the driving creative force. It was a political time bomb and created a kind of cult of sensibility which all came from one personal experience for Rousseau. He had an intense experience whilst listening to the waves where all worries and painful memories about the past and anxieties for the future melted away, leaving only the sense of being. He decided that nothing true had come before, citing nature as the only real truth. This belief in the beauty and innocence of nature extended to man as natural man was virtuous, i.e. the idea of 'the noble savage'. He saw the people of Tahiti, still living primitively as a kind of paradise, untouched by the corruption of the 18th Century. This is in complete contrast to Hobbes whom we studied last semester who acknowledged the state of nature, but thought it horrible rather than beautiful. Rousseau's philosophy was similar in part to Locke who believed that people were generally pretty good but that a limited government is needed for problems with things like property.
Rousseau's main philosophical idea was his belief in the supremacy of emotion. He said that "man is born free, but everywhere is in chains." His philosophy asks us to make a move back to nature by "taking men as they are, and laws as they might be" so we can get out of the trap of self esteem. Rousseau's problem: "Find a form of association which defends and protects with all the common force, the person and goods of each associate and by means of which each one while uniting with all obeys only himself and remains as free as before." Rousseau developed the idea of The General Will which states that there are certain laws that we can agree on but as long as we all agree on them, there is no loss of freedom; we are just obeying ourselves. This contrasts with a liberal philosophy as public and private are the same and does contain the danger of becoming a new type of dictatorship. By this I mean that Rousseau explicitly states that anyone refusing to follow the general will, will be "forced to be free" in a way. Freedom exists in Rousseau's world only in service.
These ideas lead to one of the most important events in world history, the French Revolution. When the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Enlai (1949-76) was asked about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, he replied, "It is too soon to say." I'll go into more detail of the revolution in a later blog perhaps, but for this blog and its focus of Rousseau it is important to note the Declaration of the rights of man which says we should be born free, remain free and be equal in rights with the law being the expression of general will. All this, the Tennis Court oath and the National Assembly was attractive to rebels in England who followed Rousseau's philosophy carefully, the poet William Wordsworth was quoted as saying, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." Behind all that malarkey though, Wordsworth was expressing the feelings of many young revolutionaries who were seeing the Romantic movement and Rousseau's idea of natural man in reality. In the revolution, a new world was seemingly created, with nothing having come before it. The King and other royals were executed through the new 'egalitarian' method of the guillotine, one of the enduring images of the revolution and paranoia spread, leaving them in almost a worse place than before. Revolutions rarely go smoothly and often do not end as planned.
I'm going to finish this blog by talking briefly about Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist writer whose ideas were in places very much a reaction to Rousseau's; a kind of love/hate relationship between their ideals. Education at the time was at the time quite superficial for women and they were taught mainly to focus on their appearance but Wollstonecraft looked at education from a similar perspective as Locke's Tabula Rasa, reasoning that if you educate people properly, you can make them into rational and responsible citizens. Rousseau's influence on her work was that she also called for a more egalitarian society, where a hatred of sophistication was the norm. She wasn't asking for a return to nature but asked purely that Men and Women be treated just as human beings; asexual or non-sexual until they are in love, when they assume a gendered identity. This last point is the one most often criticised as it contrasts her otherwise staunchly feminist views.
Thanks for reading my first blog of this new semester, please visit as often as you like, there will always be something interesting to read. Tell your friends.
Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.
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