Huxley, Orwell and Postman

I wanted to talk a little bit about this quote from the Neil Postman book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not
prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally
imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to
deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people
will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their
capacities to think.

Remember, the paragraph and the book were written pre-Internet explosion. But I wonder how that quote relates to right now and what Postman, if he were alive, would be writing about the Internet and convergence journalism.

Let's talk about that a bit in today's class.

The Last Class

For the final class of the semester, we will spend the first 45 minutes, looking over the videos you created and talking about the texts and coming up with some general conclusions about Convergence Journalism.

Then, I have a few people coming in to talk about convergence journalism and jobs in online journalism and how to get them.

We will start that conversation in the classroom and then continue it somewhere where food is available with those folks. (It is always a good idea to bring your resume on such occasions.)

Also, Steve Silva, a producer at Boston.com and the founding editor of BostonDirtDogs.com reluctantly can't make it to this class. But he has promised to send in his thoughts on landing an online journalism job. I will post those here when he sends them.

Final Assignments

To recap, final assignments:

1. Write a blog entry, summarizing your semester-long tracking of the blog you have been following. It should be a final critique with links, quoted material and your thoughts on whether or not you will continue to be either an active or passive member of its community. This should be between 500 ann 1,000 words.

2. You are doing a one-minute video journalism piece, with you in front of the camera, on whatever story you want to cover. You are working with a partner --Courtney and Owen, you are partners -- to help edit the script and shoot the video (hold the camera). Then you will post links to your videos -- each partnership will yield two videos -- on YouTube or somewhere else on your blog.

3. Read Smart Mobs Chapter 8 and Amusing Ourselves Foreword, Chapter 1 and Chapter 11. We will use this as the focus of our final class discussion.

The Clampdown

The U.S. Army has decided to censor blogging from its ranks. Pre-approved blog posts? Whose job would that be? I wonder if that would be a fun job in some ways.

'So, What's the Mood on Campus?'

This is a very interesting column from Dan Radmacher, a Virginia-based writer, that asks some of the same questions we were thinking about in class about the quality of media coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Feeding the Beast

Journalist Amy Gahran gives tips on how to feed the blog beast.

Project 3

The third and final mini-project of the year is due in two weeks -- on May 3. That assignment is to pick a piece of convergence journalism on the Web and to critique that project, using multimedia to tell your story. That means you can use whatever elements of blogging, photojournalism, video, audio, podcasting or whatever other convergence journalism tools of the trade to tell your story.

If you want to borrow class equipment, let me know, and we will set up a sign-out sheet over the next two weeks.

How'd They Do?

Writing an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, media critic Tim Rutten says the media by and large did a good job in covering the Virginia Tech tragedy.

He writes:

Taken as a whole, the news media did a thorough, competent and humane job of
covering the massacre at Virginia Tech, particularly over the story's first 24
hours, when facts were most in demand and hardest to come by.

Today in class, we will look at the coverage from a more student-centric point of view.

To Air or Not To Air

NBC had a tough decision on whether or not to and when to air the video of the Virginia Tech shooter. Here is the background on that.

Two Quotes for Today

For the first part of class today, I want us to consider two quotes from the Henry Jenkins book Convergence Culture.

The first one actually is from historian Michael Schudson who is quoted in the book on page 226. Schudson says:

Monitorial citizens tend to be defensive rather than pro-active... The
monitorial citizen engages in environmental surveillance more than
information-gathering. Picture parents watching small children at the community
pool. They are not gathering information; they are keeping an eye on the scene.
They look inactive, but they are poised for action if action is required. The
monitorial citizen is not an absentee citizen but watchful, even while he or she
is doing something else... [They] are perhaps better informed than citizens of
the past in that, somewhere in their heads, [while] they have more bits of
information, there is no assurance that they know at all what to do with what
they know.

That is an interesting comment and something Andrew Shelffo should be able to talk about first hand today.

The other quote comes from the very end of Convergence Culture. Jenkins writes:

Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where
grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer
and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways. Convergence
culture is the future, but it is taking shape now. Consumers will be more
powerful within convergence culture -- but only if they recognize and use that
power as both consumers and citizens, as full participants in our culture.

A pretty powerful ending and a call to action. What do you think?

Voice Gets a Face

This is a simple audio slideshow from the Herald Tribune in Florida that shows the face of one of the most famous voices of all-time. It is only about a minute long, but I like it a lot.

Assignment for the Week

Assignment this week: Read Chapter 6 and Conclusion of Convergence Culture.

Guest speaker this week will be Andrew Shelffo. His blog Prospect Perspective is very good. Check it out in advance, so you can be prepared to pepper him with insightful questions.

What Are You Doing Right Now?

At first I was skeptical. But after numerous visits, I will say Twitter.com can become fairly addicting. I mean, during my downtime, when I happen to be doing nothing the slightest bit captivating, I find it interesting to find people that are doing interesting things, even if many of them happen to be liars.

An Audience of One

Dan Barry wrote a funny piece on blogging for the Hartford Courant. He says he does not blog because of:

the fear that if I post my most intimate observations about, say, my all-time
favorite Abbott and Costello movies, no one will read them. I can just imagine
laboring over an appreciation of "Lost in a Harem," then checking in every hour
to monitor the number of visitors, only to find that any increase was because of
me and me alone: 0006; 0007; 0008..."

Funny stuff.

This Week's Assignments

In addition to reading Chapters 1 through 4 of Podcast Solutions, the assignment for this week: Listen to two podcasts and write 250-word reviews for each of them.

I am interested in independent podcasts, not podcasted versions of produced shows. For instance, professional organizations like ESPN and NPR offere podcasts of their shows. I am looking for people producing shows especially for podcasts.

Here is a list at Podcast Bunker where you can find a bunch.

Here is a directory list from Podcasting News.

And no, you do not have to download and listen on a portable device. If someone offers a streaming version or a version you can download to your computer, go ahead and listen that way.

If you have questions, e-mail me.

This American Life

The David Sedaris piece we listened to in class can be found here. Fast-forward to the 51-minute mark.

The story of the old Brooklyn man who takes in homeless prostitutes can be found here.

The This American Life homepage is here.

From the Horses' Mouths

A lot of fanfare has been made over Curt Schilling's new blog 38 Pitches. For the record, I like it a lot. Here is my full take on it.

I add it to a small but entertaining group of celebrities taking their unedited stories directly to the public.

Others...

---Dallas Mavericks owner and Internet guru Mark Cuban

---Actor/writer/director Zach Braff

---Singer-political activist Barbra Streisand

---Actor/writer Wil Wheaton

A Great Piece of Journalism

I don't know if you got a chance to read this soaring piece of journalism from Joshua Green that appeared in November's Atlantic Monthly. But if you have not, you should check it out.

Exaggerations or Lies?

Since we will be talking about audio and podcasting today in class, I thought I would point out this ongoing conversation/debate about truth in what you write and say to a national audience.

As you probably know, David Sedaris is a hilarious writer and commentator. His audio essays on This American Life are classics that people talk bring up years later. Well, in a story (subscription required) in the most recent issue of The New Republic, journalist Alex Heard questions the veracity of a number of Sedaris' pieces.

For the record, Sedaris has admitted to exaggerating for comedic effect.

More recently, J. Peder Zane, writing an opinion piece for the News and Observer newspaper, defends Sedaris and attacks the spirit of the Heard piece. Now Heard has written a letter to Romenesko, defending his own piece.

It brings up a very good question: Even as it applies to humorists, where do you draw the line on truthfulness?

Also, Jack Shafer at Slate looks at this little episode as part of his piece in Slate, titled: Lies and Memories: When Stories Read a Little Too Good.

Back Into the Loop

Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, did a project with his students with WearComp, computers equipped with "eye taps," which allowed them to broadcast everything they saw and heard on the Web.

Mann, quoted in Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs, says:

What my students and I did -- and continue to do -- is something far more
important than just providing "home movies" and "alternative" images for viewing
on the Internet. We are also engaging in a process of cultural reclamation,
where the individual is put back into the loop of information production and
dispensation.

What do you think of this quote?