Depictions of social media: Conversations Prism (left) and Social Media Starfish
As I wrote in an earlier blog post, in the of social media, we need to be as daring and adventurous as Sinbad. Like the legendary sailor of Baghdad, we have to take our chances and venture into unknown seas. Instead of maps or GPS or other tools, we must rely on our ingenuity, intuition and imagination.
During his seven voyages in the Indian Ocean, Sinbad had fantastic adventures going to magical places, surviving assorted monsters, and encountering a host of supernatural phenomena. Armed simply with his guts, wits and wanderlust, he sailed to places where no man had gone before, and certainly none had returned alive from!
Preparing for my Beijing session last week on using social media to communicate in the public interest, I did a good deal of web browsing and online reading. I came across many attempts to map or visually depict the social media (including two shown above). I also found some interesting lists and guidelines – my favourite so far is 10 Things Your Grandmother can Teach You about Social Media.
This inspired me to come up with my own rough guide to get you started and keep you going. As a salute to Sinbad’s seven voyages, I call it the 7-‘ups’.
• Turn up. As Woody Allen famously remarked, eighty per cent of success is just…showing up. You won’t get anywhere by simply observing or critiquing from the sidelines. You have to wade in and set sail — for better or worse.
• Once we join the planetary conversation, we need to do some catch up. Find your feet – and niche – in the online world. The Internet turned 40 in 2009, and its graphical interface – the World Wide Web – is now 20. So much has happened in that time – and a lot has also been superseded. You need to know what’s on, and what’s not.
What's your winning combination?• After catching up, we also need to keep up — at least with the mega trends. Large companies like Google – as well as hundreds of individual geeks – keep releasing new applications frequently, many for free use. Popular websites (such as Wired, Mashable and their local equivalents) help us navigate through these depths and currents.
• Next one is harder. We have to give up our baggage of old habits and attitudes picked up over the years. For many Digital Immigrants, leaving the comfort zone of paper was scary enough. How can we let go of complete control over our communication products and processes? But that’s just what the social media demand. It’s not a choice, but an imperative.
• It’s also helpful – though not quite essential – if we are less glum, prim, exacting and academic in how we relate to others in social media. In short, ease up, mate! There are some basic norms for online behaviour, but crusty intellectuals or matronly bureaucrats don’t gain much traction. Keep things short, focused and simple. And hey, it’s okay to be funny, cheeky and irreverent…
• Conversations in this realm can last for weeks, months or longer. Some topics and discussions tend to have ‘long tails’. When we start something online, we have to be clear when to engage whom and how. Equally important is knowing when to shut up. (A bore is a bore, offline or online!).
• And if all this is making you feel dizzy…just cheer up: there are no real experts in this field. No one is an authority. Everything is ‘in beta’. We are all learning by doing. Neither is there a definitive road map to the social media world. In fact, in this partly Undiscovered Country, there is plenty of scope to explore, innovate and be original.
Are you a land-lubber who doesn’t trust any seas? Let me then offer you another metaphor. Think of this as hitchhiking or back-packing online. Take your chances. Be adventurous. Discover a whole new world!
We have some advantages over Sinbad. The virtual world poses no real danger to our lives. But beware: social media can be very time-consuming and even addictive.
You have been warned.
Here, for some edu-tainment, is an interesting video on social media that I found on…YouTube:
“Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software!”
This is one of the less known, but more entertaining, dicta by Arthur C Clarke – he called it ‘Clarke’s 64th Law’, and I personally know he used to bring it up when meeting with particularly crusty or glum intellectuals. (Not all were amused.)
Clarke’s words kept turning in my mind as I moderated and spoke at a session on social media at Asia Media Summit 2010 held in Beijing China from 24 to 26 May 2010. The country with the world’s largest media market is not exactly the world’s most open or free – and certainly when it comes to social media, it’s a very different landscape to what we are used to…
These days, International visitors arriving in China discover quickly that access to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook is completely blocked. Apparently the brief ‘thaw’ in restrictions, seen before and during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is now over — the current restrictions have been in place since the spring of 2009.
This doesn’t mean there is no social media in China. In fact, I heard from several Chinese friends and colleagues that there is a very large, dynamic and fast-evolving social media scene in China. For the most part, however, it’s not based on globally used and familiar platforms, and is happening in a digital universe of China’s own — under the watchful eye of the government.
Jump in...but some conditions apply!For example, I found from this March 2010 blog post by Merritt Colaizzi that:
* 221 million people have blogs, largely in a diary-style.
* 176 million Chinese connect via social networking system (SNS) with their “real” friends and online networks.
* 117 million connect anonymously via bulletin board system (BBS). These interactive online message boards are the heart of social media in China. They’re where people go to find topic-based communities and where consumers talk about products and services.
There are lots of other blogs, mainstream media reports and research commentary on social media in China — just Google and see (now that’s another thing with limited – and uneven – access in China: Google itself is available, but search results come with lots of links that simply aren’t accessible). Much or all of this interaction happens in Chinese, of course. It’s a significant part of the web and social media landscapes, but if you’re in China on a short visit and want to stay connected to your own social media networks, that’s not at all helpful.
And, of course, it undermines one of the key attributes of a globally integrated information society: the interoperability of systems and platforms.
Luckily for me, perhaps, I can survive a few days without my social media fix: I have an appalling record of updating my Facebook account: days pass without me even going there. For the moment, at least, I’m also taking a break from regular blogging (well, sort of). But I’m more regular in my micro-blogging on Twitter, and visit YouTube at least once a day, sometimes more often. I could do neither during the few days in Beijing – and that was frustrating.
So imagine having to talk about social media as a new media phenomenon in such a setting. That’s only a tiny bit better than reading computer manuals without the hardware…But this is just what I did, with all the eagerness that I typically bring into everything I do. I planned and moderated a 90-minute session on Social Media: Navigating choppy seas in search of Treasures?
With access to key global social media platforms denied, we visitors and Chinese colleagues in the audience could speak mostly generically, theoretically and aspirationally. I didn’t want to place my hosts and seminar organisers in difficulty by harping on what was missing. Instead, we focused on what is possible and happening: how development communicators are increasingly social media networks and platforms to get their messages out, and to create online communities and campaigns in the public interest.
The thrust of my own opening remarks to the session was this: In the brave new world of social media, we all have to be as daring as Sinbad. Like the legendary sailor of Baghdad, we have to take our chances and venture into unknown seas. Instead of maps or GPS or other tools, we have to rely on our ingenuity, intuition and imagination.
More about the session itself in future blog posts.
For now, I want to share this TED Talk by American watcher of the Internet Clay Shirky on how cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history. Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
Where the island of Sri Lanka was concerned, it was the first solar eclipse of the broadband internet era — and that showed.
The last solar eclipse seen in Sri Lanka was two generations ago, on 20 June 1955. That was almost pre-historic in mass media terms. The newly independent Ceylon had a single, state-owned radio station and a handful of newspapers. There was no television, and the internet was not even conceived.
Yet, paradoxically, the media’s influence over the 8 million people then living on the island seem to have been greater at the time. As astronomer Dr Kavan Ratnatunga recalled: “A quack physician cum astrologer, recommended that women wanting to become fair and lovely should drink a decoction of which the main ingredient was “Vada Kaha” (Sweet Flag or Acorus Calamus) at the time of the total eclipse, preferably unseen by others. Many who took his advice ended up in hospital.”
Solar eclipse on 15 Jan 2010 seen in Anuradhapura, north-central Sri Lanka - photos by ReutersIn contrast, in 21st Century Sri Lanka, the January 15 eclipse was not much of a news story. I don’t claim to have done a systematic analysis, but my impressions are drawn from scanning the major newspaper websites in English and Sinhala, and surfing the dozen or more terrestrial (free-to-air, not cable) TV channels that were on the air during the three hours or so of the eclipse. (Sorry: I missed out radio, and I’m not proficient in Tamil.)
Broadcast television was my biggest disappointment. Solar eclipses are a visual spectacular, and literally heaven-sent for live television. Yet, not a single Lankan TV channel carried a live broadcast of the event, either from northern Sri Lanka where it was best seen (in its annular form, with ‘ring of fire’ effect), or from elsewhere on the island as a partial eclipse.
It seemed as if the Colombo-based media were completely preoccupied with the intense build-up to the presidential election scheduled for 26 January 2010 — a case of politics eclipsing the solar eclipse?
Jaffna school children view the solar eclipse - Photo courtesy Virakesari
But there were a couple of honourable exceptions – and thank heavens for that! One was the leading Tamil daily Virakesari, which sponsored an expedition to Jaffna, in northern Sri Lanka, by a group of professional and amateur astronomers from SkyLk.com. According to one member of this expedition, Thilina Heenatigala, this newspaper provided the widest and most uptodate coverage of the annular eclipse from Jaffna.
SkyLk.com collaborated with the Hindu College in Jaffna, whose playground was converted into an open air observation camp. Thilina says over 2,000 people – including school children and adults – had converged to witness the event. A large screen was set up on to which the live image from a telescope was projected.
Not far from there, a group of engineering students and teachers from the University of Moratuwa was doing a more scientific observation. Later that day, team leader Dr Rohan Munasinghe reported in an email: “We have recorded the solar eclipse from Kayts (lat 9d,37m N, Long 79d,58 E), the biggest island off Jaffna Sri Lanka. We have timestamped the video with GPS (Garmin 18) accuracy.”
University of Moratuwa team observing the clipse - photo courtesy Dr Rohan Munasinghe
Elsewhere across the island of Sri Lanka, there was plenty of interest among the people from all walks of life — as seen from the thousands who stepped out during mid-day to take a peek at the celestial phenomenon. Not all of them followed the safety precautions to prevent eye damage, disseminating which the media had done a good job in the preceding days.
Clearly, this high level of public interest was not reflected in how the rest of Lankan mainstream media covered the eclipse. But if the mainstream media’s gaze was firmly fixed on the gathering election storm on the ground, the new media created opportunities for others to step into that void. Citizen scientists joined hands with citizen journalists to capture and share the eclipse with each other — and the world. These unpaid enthusiasts used commonly available digital tools and online platforms for this purpose.
Some of them uploaded dozens of photos for public viewing on image sharing sites like Flickr. A good example is what Shehal Joseph and Romayne Anthony did. There were many others.
SkyLk.com group was more ambitious: they actually webcast the eclipse live online from their public observation camp at Hindu College grounds. Stuck in Colombo with its sub-optimal viewing conditions for this eclipse, this was the best chance for people like myself to catch the annular part of the phenomenon.
“We were struggling with bandwidth limitations most of the time,” Thilina Heenatigala says. “We used a Dialog HSPA modem to connect to the web, and line speeds kept fluctuating. We were not the only ones uploading still photos or video to the web from different locations in northern Sri Lanka — and apparently all of us were slowing down each other.”
Being the tech-savvy planner he is, Thilina had alerted Dialog telecom company about the likely peaking of bandwidth demand. But he is not sure if any temporary enhancing was done, even though Dialog currently claims to be the ‘first and best’ to offer telecom coverage in the north. Certainly, the live eclipse webcast was not of uniform quality — it’s a small miracle it happened at all: until a few months ago, this was part of the theatre of war in northern Sri Lanka.
In fact, SkyLk.com had used the web to build up public awareness and interest using video trailers on YouTube. Here is one of several simulations they had up from December, thus one for Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka (simulation):
In the end, however, SkyLk.com became a victim of its own success. The live webcast was followed by hundreds, and then thousands of online visitors from different parts of the world. This apparently overshot the usual allocations provided by the offshore hosting company (in the US), which suspended the account. Right now SkyLk.com website is not accessible (as at 16 January 2010, 15:00 UTC/GMT).
Within hours of the eclipse, several individuals and groups also uploaded highlights of their eclipse videos on to the YouTube. Here are the most striking ones I came across in a quick search:
Solar Eclipse 2010 Sri Lanka Scientific Record – by University of Moratuwa
Scientific recording of the annular solar eclipse on 15 January 2010 was carried out from the Island Kayts (Lat +09d 37m North and Long +79d 58m East) of Sri Lanka.
Orion Video’s coverage from Nallur, Jaffna:
Not in the same league as the above two videos, this was Nishan Perera’s personal observations from Ratnapura, south-western Sri Lanka:
It’s too early to draw firm conclusions from this random evidence, but in all likelihood, we passed thresholds in both citizen journalism and citizen science with this eclipse. Clearly, the mainstream media’s monopoly/domination over reporting of such an event has been shattered: their indifference will no longer stand in the way of information and images being disseminated.
Perhaps just as important, it is no longer possible for a couple of self-appointed ‘public astronomers’ to dominate the public information channels on an occasion like this, mostly for shameless self-promotion. As Dr Kavan Ratnatunga, President of the Sri Lanka Astronomical Association, noted in an article: “I am amazed as to how many who have never even seen a Solar Eclipse, will gladly talk about it to an equally ignorant journalist, resulting in some totally misleading and sometimes hilarious information being published in both the English and Sinhala media. In a nation which believes in pseudo astrology, I am sure it is just a matter of time before quacks start using it to predict influence on local events and politics. However, there is absolutely no influence on any person by any of these celestial events.”
At the end of the day, however, astronomy aficionados are emphatic that no amount of media coverage can really substitute the experience of being there and experiencing it ourselves. As Kavan says: “A solar Eclipse is event which must be experience and observed. No video can do justice to that experience. It can also become addictive. In the modern age when the Internet and TV can bring events to your home, one may wonder why some Eclipse chasers travel round the world to see an Eclipse of the Sun.”
The next solar eclipse visible from Sri Lanka will be on 26 December 2019. I wonder what kind of media and ICT landscape would cover that event…
When I was in my early teens (back in the early 1980s), I developed a great interest in radio. Not just in listening to radio broadcasts, which I did regularly while growing up in a country that had no television, but also in building a radio that could both receive and transmit signals.
My school teacher father, who encouraged me in many of my diverse pursuits, bought transistors, condensers and other ‘building blocks’ for a basic radio set. With the help of an amateur radio handbook, and through trial and error, he and I actually built a functional transmitter. It was exhilarating to listen to local and shortwave broadcasts on a home-made radio set, but even more exciting to be able to transmit rudimentary signals.
Even as a kid, I was not contented in being a passive recipient of information; I wanted to give out as much as I received…
That particular fancy didn’t last long: I soon moved on to other challenges, and never persisted with being a serious amateur radio enthusiast (or ‘radio ham’), but it left a lasting impression. A few years later, after leaving high school, I became a regular freelancer at the local radio station. By age 23, I was hosting my own weekly show on national radio, and my association with the radio medium would last for much of my 20s.
The humble low tech that saved the day...My interest in amateur radio lay dormant — until five years ago, when I read reports about how radio hams helped revive emergency communications in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami.
The decades old practice was hailed as the ‘low tech’ miracle that literally helped save lives. Where electricity and telephone services — both fixed and mobile — had been knocked down, radio hams restored the first communication links. They were at the forefront of relief efforts, for example, in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in India, and in Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka.
This intrigued Sir Arthur C Clarke, inventor of the communications satellite and long time resident of Sri Lanka. Shortly afterwards, he wrote in Wired magazine: “We might never know how many lives they saved and how many minds they put at ease, but we owe a debt to Marconi’s faithful followers.”
If Sir Arthur were alive, he would have been dismayed to find what has happened since. Notwithstanding their celebrated role after the tsunami, radio hams have been sidelined in Sri Lanka. Their very hobby is being frowned upon by the state on the grounds of…national security.
Looking back, it seems like the public-spirited radio hams were given their 15 minutes of fame and then soundly ignored. Worse, the short-lived prominence may have attracted new bureaucratic hurdles.
“As the applause died away, everything was forgotten,” I quote Victor Goonetilleke, one time President and current Secretary of the Radio Society of Sri Lanka, which networks amateur radio practitioners in the country.
One reason for this bureaucratic fear and negativity, I argue, may be simple ignorance of what amateur radio really is — reflecting the disturbingly low levels of media literacy in Sri Lanka.
Read the full essay, and join the conversation on Groundviews, or on this blog.
Hopenhagen?As the UN climate conference culminates today in Copenhagen, there seem to be lots of angry people in the Danish capital. Many civil society and environmental activists, and some journalists, have been frustrated by the inter-governmental bickering process and the occasionally tough crowd control measures by the Danish police.
As author and activist Naomi Klein wrote at the end of the first week: “By the end, around 1,100 people had been arrested. That’s just nuts. Saturday’s march of roughly 100,000 people came at a crucial juncture in the climate negotiations, a time when all signs point either to break down or a dangerously weak deal. The march was festive and peaceful but also tough. ‘The Climate Doesn’t Negotiate’ was the message, and Western negotiators need to head it.”
I’m not in Copenhagen for uptodate news, but the 5,000+ journalists and over 10,000 activists are keeping us well informed on what’s happening (or not happening). Perhaps part of their anger can be dissipated by heeding a creative call to Dance for the Climate.
It’s an alternative way of demonstration, made into an inspiring and hopeful video clip by award winning Belgian film director Nic Balthazar. It shows 12 000 people on a Belgium beach in a truly spectacular simultaneous choreography dancing to the U2 hit single ‘Magnificent’. Bono and his band graciously gave the rights to their music. The message of the clip to politicians in Copenhagen is to ‘start moving, together, before it’s too late. The time is now to change climate change’.
In a recent email, Seppe Verbist, handling international distribution of “Dance for the Climate” clip, wrote: “We believe that the chances of success of the UN Conference are influenced by the clear signals from ordinary people to their politicians. The ‘Dance for the Climate-clip’ wants to contribute to this, and we sincerely hope we can count on your support!”
According to her, the clip has been released three weeks ago and they are now trying to spread it worldwide. In Europe the distribution goes pretty well as the European Broadcasters Network (EBU) offered the clip to all her members. They are picking up the offer and integrating the clip into their Copenhagen content. In Canada weather forecasters from different broadcast networks are organizing an imitation of Dance For The Climate, and the clip will be shown 24/7 at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai in the Meteo World Pavilion. They’re expecting 100 000 visitors every day for six months. The Al Gore Climate Project also supported the clip and shared it with their network. It’s been on TV in Brazil and Mexico as well.
Dancing can be a powerful way to express not just joy, but a range of emotions. One of my favourite calls to action came from Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian poet, author, environmentalist and minority rights activist (for his Ogoni people) who was executed by Nigeria’s military on 10 November 1995. While in jail facing an uncertain future, he wrote these momentous words: “Dance your anger and your joys,
Dance the military guns to silence,
Dance oppression and injustice to death,
Dance my people,
For we have seen tomorrow
And there is an Ogoni star in the sky.”
And today, we must also dance for saving our climate.
As I later heard, some in my audience had mistakenly believed that I was advocating everything going entirely online. Actually, I wasn’t. I like to think that both the physical and virtual media experiences enrich us in their own ways. Real world is never black and white; it’s always a mix or hybrid of multiple processes or influences.
So I’ve just revisited the topic. I adapted part of the talk, and included more personalised insights, and wrote an essay titled ‘Confessions of a Digital Immigrant‘, which has just been published on Groundviews, the path-breaking citizen journalism initiative.
It opens with these words:
“My daughter Dhara, 13, finds it incredible that I had never seen a working television until I had reached her current age — that’s when broadcast television was finally introduced in Sri Lanka, in April 1979. It is also totally inconceivable to her that my entire pre-teen media experience was limited to newspapers and a single, state-owned radio station.
“And she simply doesn’t believe me when I say — in all honesty and humility — that I was already 20 when I first used a personal computer, 29 when I bought my first mobile phone, and 30 when I finally got wired. In fact, my first home Internet connectivity — using a 33kbps dial-up modem — and our daughter arrived just a few weeks apart in mid 1996. I have never been able to decide which was more disruptive…
“Dhara (photographed above, in mid 2007) is growing up taking completely for granted the digital media and tools of our time. My Christmas presents to her in the past three years have been a basic digital camera, an i-pod and a mobile phone, each of which she mastered with such dexterity and speed. It amazes me how she keeps up with her Facebook, chats with friends overseas on Skype and maintains various online accounts for images, designs and interactive games. Yet she is a very ordinary child, not a female Jimmy Neutron.
“Despite my own long and varied association with information and communication technologies (ICTs), I know I can never be the digital native that Dhara so effortlessly is. No matter how well I mimic the native ‘accent’ or how much I fit into the bewildering new world that I now find myself in, I shall forever be a digital immigrant.”
Evolution or revolution?
I was born three years before the Internet (which turned 40 a few weeks ago), and raised entirely on newspapers and radio in a country where broadcast television didn’t arrive until I was 13.
From the time I could read and write, I always wanted to be a media publisher. In that pre-history of the Personal Computer and Internet, my choices were pretty limited: I published a hand-written household newspaper and was its editor, reporter, printer and distributor all rolled into one. But I was obsessive in my work even then, and the newspaper lasted a couple of years in which over two dozen issues were released (all of them now mercifully lost).
My school teacher parents were my first patrons, supplying me with plenty of paper, pencils and ink. But there must have times when they rather wished that I didn’t indulge in my own brand of independent journalism. I loved to criticise and lampoon the ‘management’ in my editorials — even as a kid, I was already critical of the establishment!
Fortunately for me, the ‘management’ left me alone and to my own devices, but most independent editors in history haven’t been so lucky. As the American journalist A.J. Leibling (1904 -1963) once said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” In his time, this was perfectly true.
There was a time, until recently, when press barons and media moguls led, and the rest of society followed. In our topsy-turvy times, however, the reverse is increasingly true.
In theory, at least, anyone can be a global broadcaster and publisher in less than two hours using free tools that can be downloaded and activated in minutes.
David Brewer (photo from http://www.i-m-s.dk)My British media activist friend David Brewer has just published an online guide on how to become a publisher or broadcaster in 100 minutes. (Okay, the non-geeks among us might need a bit longer than that, but still, you can be in business in just a few hours.)
David Brewer’s journalistic and managerial experience spans newspapers, radio, television, and online, and he now runs Media Ideas International Ltd, a media strategy consultancy with clients in Europe, the Balkans, the CIS, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Central America.
David has worked with what I like to call the A-B-C of global broadcasting. He was the launch managing editor of BBC News Online in 1997, and moved to CNN, as managing editor, to set up CNN.com Europe, Middle East and Africa and CNNArabic.com. He was an editorial consultant for the launch of Al Jazeera English in 2006 and continues to work with Al Jazeera English as a new media consultant.
In his spare time, he runs Media Helping Media , a network and online resource to support media in areas where freedom of expression is under threat.
Clip, clip, clip...I’m usually happy and eager to explain my work to anyone who asks. I keep cool when people mix up technicalities related to film and video – after all, I don’t know the finer points in other professions and industries.
One thing I’m a bit tired of hearing is the wide-spread misuse of the term ‘video clip’. I try to keep a straight face when well-meaning people ask me about recent ‘video clips’ I’ve made. The truth is, I don’t make any: I make fully edited films – sometimes long, sometimes short, but always finished (That is, if a film can ever be called ‘finished’. An industry giant once told me that no film is ever finished; it’s only abandoned…)
For example, my latest climate film Small Islands – Big Impact is slightly under 6 minutes, yet it’s a complete product. I spent two months working on actually making it, and almost 20 years covering the story itself.
But the distinction between film and clip is not widely understood. In fact, the digital revolution seems to have added to the confusion.
The Wikipedia says a media clip is a short segment of media either an audio clip or a video clip. In other words, a part of something bigger.
It further explains: “Media clips may be promotional in nature, as with movie clips. For example, to promote upcoming movies, many actors are accompanied by movie clips on their circuits. Additionally, media clips may be raw materials of other productions, such as audio clips used for sound effects.”
Video clips are short clips of video, usually part of a longer piece. Wikipedia adds, however, that this term is “also more loosely used to mean any short video less than the length of a traditional television program.”
That’s part of the confusion. With the spread of broadband Internet , which enabled greater bandwidth to both content creators and users, video clips have become very popular online.
About.com, another widely used online reference, says: “A video clip is a small section of a larger video presentation. A series of video frames are run in succession to produce a short, animated video. This compilation of video frames results in a video clip.”
But that’s not all. While the TV/video industry widely accepts the above definition, the computer industry seems to use ‘video clip’ generically to mean any short video, processed or otherwise. This is how video clip is defined, for example, by YourDictionary.com and PC Magazine’s online encyclopedia.
Snip, snip, snip...?In this era of media convergence, when films an TV programmes are made using non-linear technologies enabled by computers, it’s no wonder that ‘video clip’ means different things to different people.
Wikipedia also talks of an emerging clip culture: “The widespread popularity of video clips, with the aid of new distribution channels, has evolved into clip culture. It is compared to “lean-back” experience of seeing traditional movies, refers to an internet activity of sharing and viewing a short video, mostly less than 15 minutes. The culture began as early as the development of broadband network, but it sees the boom since 2005 when websites for uploading clips are emerging on the market, including Shockinghumor, YouTube, Google Video, MSN Video and Yahoo! Video. These video clips often show moments of significance, humour, oddity, or prodigy performance. Sources for video clips include news, movies, music video and amateur video shot. In addition to the clip recorded by high-quality camcorders, it is becoming common to produce clips with digital camera, webcam, and mobile phone.”
Until recently, I used to get irked when people ask me about ‘video clips’ I make. My stock answer has been: “We only make fully edited, self-contained short films of various durations…partly because less is more these days. We don’t, as a policy, make ‘clips’ which in TV industry terms means semi-edited or unedited extracts that are not self-contained.”
Maybe I should stop being such a purist. After all, as I keep reminding my colleagues, students and anyone else who cares to listen to me, media is a plural!
One thing is for sure. Literacy rates and computer literacy rates have been rising worldwide in recent decades. But when it comes to basic media literacy, our societies still have a long way to go.
How much can you pack in to one minute, or 60 seconds? That’s a lot of air time, as broadcasters and advertisers know very well.
‘One Minute to Midnight‘ has been a favourite metaphor of dooms-dayers – and is the title of a 2008 book. It was widely used in relation to the world drawing closer to nuclear war during the second half of the 20th century.
Now, as global climate change surpasses fears of global nuclear war, we are given just one minute to save the world.
One Minute to Save the World is an international short film competition to raise awareness of climate change. Entries are currently being sought from professionals and amateurs, with 31 October 2009 as the deadline. There is also a category for under 18s and for entries shot on mobile phones.
The idea is to enable anyone, anywhere, to deliver a short but powerful message to the world on climate change. The winning films will be sent around the world in November as an online campaign to raise awareness of the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009.
Good planets are hard to find...British TV presenter and adventurer Bruce Parry, a founder of the competition, says: “Together we will be looking for films that convey a powerful message about how climate change affects you and those around you. Were you a flood victim? Have you seen a change in the plants and wildlife in your garden? How has your world been affected and how can we address it?
He adds: “So, we hope you’ll all get thinking and shooting – whether you’re a seasoned pro or just someone who cares. Your planet needs you and your talents. One minute might not seem like a long time but it’s actually longer than many advertisers spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on. It’s also an easy length of time to hold people’s attention. And that is one of the things we urgently need to do if we’re going to turn things around for our planet before it’s too late.”
The winning entries will be judged by an international panel that includes Parry himself, award-winning director and climate change activist Shekhar Kapur; Franny Armstrong, director of Age of Stupid and The Guardian‘s environment editor John Vidal.
The website will become an online film festival which requires no travel or celebrity status to attend – all you need is access to a computer. “And as everyone knows, the power of the net can make the most unexpected video attract the attention of millions globally,” says Bruce Parry.
Location filming Saving the Planet in Nepal
I have written more than once in this blog about Radio Sagarmatha of Nepal, the first independent community broadcasting station in South Asia.
The six-episode series, which was 18 months in the making, features outstanding efforts in education for sustainable development in South and Southeast Asia.
It goes in search of answers to these key questions: Can ordinary people help save our planet under siege from multiple environmental crises? How can everyone change attitudes and lifestyles to consume less and generate less waste?
Here’s the official synopsis of the Nepal story, titled Voice of a Valley:
Tourism generates incomes, jobs and markets for the people of Nagarkot, a popular resort close to the Nepali capital Kathmandu. But it had a bumpy start when hoteliers initially bypassed local communities. These tensions were diffused by Radio Sagarmatha, the country’s first independent public radio station, which brought all interested parties together on the air. This example shows how media can do more than just report. By inspiring discussion and debate, media can help communities to find the best solutions or compromises for their development needs.
Open Minds! 