Mass Media

Which one is the truth?

An exchange of tweets yesterday with BurmaVJ among others got me thinking about journalism and the web.

Not in the usual way, however.

It made me think about a completely new kind of journalism….

In the 1980s, MIT Professor Tom Malone began to see that the web would ‘deconstruct’ conventional industry.  That large companies such as ATT would eventually break up into not a few, but hundreds of thousands of small different companies, all profitable.  Malone told WIRED in a July 1998 interview, “This sort of voluntary, radical disaggreagation is an attractive alternative for some large organizations.”

Perhaps television journalism (or journalism in general for that matter) should undergo the same kind of disaggregation.

How accurate a picture of the world, or of any given event, can we actually get when we send one person to cover a story?

How much less accurate when that one person that we send is an American or British journalist, who, even with the best of intentions, does not speak the language, know the culture, the history, the politics or where anything besides the Intercontinental Hotel bar is located.

And now, in the collapsing world of newspapers and journalism in general, even they are being withdrawn.

Perhaps then it is time to create (or foster the creation) of an entirely new kind of journalism, one that is much more akin to the way in which the web works and informs our world.

A true Mass Media.

I was deeply impressed by BurmaVJ. It gives a powerful insight to the travails of a nation that is off the western radar and inaccessable to almost all western journalists, and it does it through the vehicle of empowering local journalists with the tools of the VJ kit – small cameras and laptops.

Now I am wondering if we can’t take that concept and push it a bit further.

Here’s my idea, in a nutshell:

Let’s take 1,000 flipcams and give them out to 1,000 people in Gaza, to record and upload daily what their life is like, on a constant basis.

Why?

1.  Conditions in Gaza are absolutely appalling.

So appalling in fact that the population is driven to radicalism and violence, as I think would most people who were forced to live under those conditions.  Palestinians strap explosives on themselves and walk into Israeli cafes to blow themselves up not because they are protesting Israeli cafes, but because they want to draw the attention of the world’s media to their plight, if only for a moment.

Let’s by pass the violence.

Empowering 1,000 of their people with cameras and a place to ‘publish’ on a daily basis gives them an opportunity to show the world, ‘here is my problem’.  It’s a nonviolent outlet for change.

I also believe that the Israelis, who only made harder by terrorist attacks will be moved by what they see as well.  And 1,000 cameras recording every day, day after day, what real life in Gaza, will indeed move them to act.

2.  Gaza is a mess, but it is a mess that the world little understands.

We little understand it because the only time we go there is when there is an invasion or an explosion.  We get the momentary shot, but we don’t get the reasons why it explodes.

No television network in the world could unleash 1,000 camera crews in Gaza for months on end, but we could.

3.  The ‘truth’ is not to be found in the one ‘breakout’ documentary film that one dedicated filmmaker will create, but now, in the world of the web, rather in a ‘social movement’, a kind of Gaza Facebook with a purpose.  It’s an unrelenting wave of reality that keeps on coming, video after video after video.  And like a wave upon a rock, slowly, over time, it begins to erode even granite.

This is not the old journalism of The New York Times or NBC sending their ace reporter to Gaza (or Burma or anywhere else for that matter) to do an important story, which was read or aired once and was then promptly forgotten.

This is a new kind of journalism.  It’s a mass journalism.  It’s a journalism that captures not a moment but a reality and translates it back into a ‘feeling’ as opposed to a ‘story’.  It’s a shifting of world view over time, driven there by a mosaic of ‘realities’ unrelentingly released over and over and over again.

This rendition of a ‘feeling’ is to journalism what Impressionism was to art. A shift in how the medium conveys information.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be Gaza.

It could be a thousand Americans without health care; a thousand native Americans living on reservations; a thousand illegal immigrants.

In a way, we have been here before.

The Vietnam War was the first televised war, and the cumulative effect of night after night after night of story after story of burning villages or napalmed children slowly yet surely built a wave of revulsion and resistance to America’s policies in SE Asia – the Anti War Movement that ultimately toppled Lyndon Johnson.

The Civil Rights movement in this country was also the cumulative effect of thousands of stories of Bull Connor like characters spraying black Americans with firehouses for the temerity to demand to sit in the ‘whites only’ section of a coffee shop.  It was not one event, but the cumulative effect of television coverage of naked racism that led most Americans to say ‘enough’.

Now, we can seize on this true Mass Media. The technology is here to re-invent television journalism in a very different, but I think much  more dynamic an interesting way.

This is something I am going to try and do.

If you are interested, please let me know.