Live from the park… Georges Seurat… NPR
New technologies drive new ideas….but it often isn’t a pretty.. or obvious process.
The advent of photography toward the end of the 19th Century spelled the death knell for a generation of portraitsts. Suddenly, the ability to reproduce an image with paint and canvass, a mainstay of art for more than 1,000 years, had been wiped away.
No one was interested.
I have no doubt that great painters were decrying the collapse of the painting business the way that journalists today are decrying the collapse of the newspaper business. The end of the world as we know it.
Good.
Photographic reproduction on an industrical scale freed artists to begin to push the boundaries of what painting was. We begin with Impressionism and end with Jackson Pollack, Robert Ryman and Damian Hurst.
What made journalism of any value was its rarity.
A journalist who could make the voyage to Egypt when hardly anyone else could report from there grabbed the attention of the world. I am old enough to remember the ‘live’ broadcast of Winston Churchill’s funeral from London via Telstar. Amazing stuff. And not easy to come by.
Today, in a world of twitter, there is hardly any information that is so rare. Hence, journalism, or rather specific journalism has lost its value. If one person isn’t there covering it, another will be. How much is that worth?
Not much. The competitive market for information (and soon for images) is flooded second by second. In short, journalism, at least as it was once practiced, has no value.
Sorry for the journalists.
Sorry for the portraitists.
But what is beginning to emerge is a new kind of journalism. Yet is is one as upsetting to conventional journalists as pointalism was to conventional artists.
Instead of one person bravely and boldly going to China to report on conditions there, there are now thousands and thousands of people reporting on China, or Iraq, or the economy, all the time.
What the public begins to receive, instead of an NBC White Paper or CBS Reports, (an hour devoted to one subject that the whole nation watched); is instead, an ‘impression’ of the news, created as an amalgam of thousands of bits of information.
Impressionist Journalism.
The points of information – news stories, blogs, articles, opinions and so on don’t have to be uniform. In fact, it is better if, like the points of color in a Seurat painting, they are a wide range of opinions and even facts.
Yet when seen from a distance, they begin to offer a coherent ‘impression’ of journalism.
Take the Sotomayor coverage.
Positive… negative.. positive… positive… negative…
blips of information and opinion.. but they coalesce into a kind of impressionist journalism and ultimately a form of coherent coverage.
now.. and here is the interesting part… is it possible to control the canvas? That is, is it possible to drive a particuar perspective and view in this new world of impressionist journalism?
Let’s return to Gaza.
The days of one documentary filmmaker going to Gaza to make the definitive Gaza Film are over. There is just too much clutter in the media world to ever again see a Harvest of Shame.
But….
Suppose we were to empower 1,000 Gazans with flipcams and unleash them to feed the blogosphere daily with images of what their life is like.
Could we create a Seurat-like Impression of what life is like in Gaza for millions?
