News from Outside

Adrian Miles

Valerie Keller on change, and organisations. Why is this relevant? Some of you will begin your own companies, and you need to understand this. Most of you will work in other companies, and while you might start at the bottom most will rise quickly. Change, how to manage it but also do it successfully, is the currency that will let you survive. As we’ve said, change is the one constant. Given that, we end up with two groups. Or three. Those who notice the change afterwards, then try to catch up. Those who notice the change then think it doesn’t matter (and then it’s too late – once upon a time the Saturday Age newspaper was phone book thick – oh, bad example because, um, Sensis, the directory business in Telstra that once made millions from the Yellow Pages, well, they’re kinda in trouble too – anyway the Age was phone book thick, it was full of classified ads, in Melbourne if you were looking for a house to rent, buy, a car, pets, old furniture, factory equipment, the Saturday Age was to the go to paper, it was literally described as “Fairfax’s rivers of gold”, and made so much money they could afford high quality journalism and made them the flagship newspaper in Australia, they ignored the rise of the internet until they had lost pretty much all of their classified advertising, been on the back foot ever since), and those who initiate the change. We want you to be in that first group.

Then hot on its heels a story about Evan Williams (Blogger, Twitter, and now Medium) and how Medium – which is doing amazing things – is a company with no managers. Read it, deep double loop learning. This IS the model of this subject. Not that there is no senior teacher, or perfectly mapped out curriculum, but who you are as people and what you become is more important than any naff content of the subject. Learning and beginning to create knowledge (which is already happening via the blogs) is the first big change that the network enables. You are already doing it, and in a rather odd way (a nice odd way is what I mean), many of you haven’t realised it yet…

Missed Marks

Adrian Miles

Yes, my diatribe was only aimed at those wondering why. It was using a very broad channel to talk to very few people. The joy, expression, and use of institutional power.

James notes that the question wasn’t answered. Fair enough. Edward ready to move on. James wants more involvement (always good, let’s see if we can get it happening), Arthur’s essentially a thumbs down (and to be fair, I could have let the question slide, it was one question only, but it is a question that if left unattended can grow virus like legs), Daniel is I think on the fence but I like that the expectations and differences from before to now are becoming clearer, Danielle liked some ideas but is unconvinced by the format (trust me, I really share that concern), Blaire sees possibilities but remains a no

Louisa sees the challenge, for Anna it was preaching for the converted. Laura pulled out some good points. Another Anna find some useful bits, Shannen liked Elliot’s outline of the importance of future thinking (which I also thought was an excellent explanation of why being able to think the future was so important for media graduates). Kevin generally a plus, misses Brian (we all do). Alexandra joins the lecture with a job advertisement with curatorial thinking (a term recently coined about what we now do online, a term that will turn up in coming weeks) with networked media. Patrick sort of yes, sort of let’s get on with it. Miguel, aprés-ski, likes the idea of boogie, and what it might bring, Lauren’s a plus but frustrated, and prefers typing to writing,

The takeaway? Simple, your view, my view, is one view of the experience and it is a mistake to think that my joy, or disappointment, is every body’s.

Danish Authority

Adrian Miles

Ditte describes the Danish Janteloven, which is one of ways in which Denmark (and Sweden and Norway) are very unusual, open, and ‘flat’ societies (income distribution is very even compared to other western democracies, most social services are free – I used to work in Norway and one of my favourite bits was the group of junkies in the park behind the university, you’ve never seen a healthier bunch of junkies, happily chatting and saying good morning as you walked past). Anyway, Ditte contrasts this to social media. Two things. I was introduced to the importance of blogging by Scandanavians, precisely because it fits so well with these social democratic ideals. You can be an expert on a blog because you are an expert, not because someone else made you so, and you do this not by claiming to be an expert (which is what I get to do simply because I am employed by a university) but by contributing, freely, and letting others figure it out.

Important lesson about the emergence of authority (and therefore reputation) online: others grant it to you, you cannot claim it for yourself, no matter who you are. This is one of the most important ways in which it is a reputation network, you earn it through what you do.

Free Speech

Adrian Miles

While I did a brief outline of media law, something this post from David raises is harassment. The law in most democracies that have harassment (religious, sexual and so on) legislation follows the same model, and it is the opposite of the Facebook slanging match that David describes. The law is quite clear that intent is irrelevant – if someone experiences your comments or behaviour as offensive, or harassing, then they are. In other words, if I use some slang term to describe an ethnic group and someone finds it offensive, I cannot claim that I didn’t mean anything by it, that some of my best friends are ‘x’ and they don’t seem to mind the phrase, and so on. It is offensive as someone has found it so. Here, the rights are firmly on the side of the recipient, and you can see why, since intent (“but I didn’t mean anything by it”) is a licence to not have to acknowledge the rights of others. Remember, this includes harassment. So if I touch your shoulder as your teacher and you find that uncomfortable, whether I intended anything by it or not is irrelevant. The law takes this view as harassment and so on usually involves a power inequity, and so it is those in the inequitable position that need defending.

This means if you post something, and someone finds it offensive, it is. The test is whether a reasonable person would regard it as offensive, and this is a very broad test.

Fair Call

Adrian Miles

By Tess. To date the subject has concentrated on

  • learning
  • the experience of learning
  • how we might learn
  • why

Take aways are that the network is an emerging, self defining thing that learns (itself). And so changes. So before we get specific about what it is, we’re doing some cognitive reprocessing so we can approach it a bit differently. To begin to be in it, and not just learn about it. The second one, which I admit seems just weird but you need to trust us on this, is that right now the experiences you’re all having about the subject, the readings, the unlectures, the labs, and so on. This experience is what you need to notice because this is what the network feels like. Not what it is like from the outside making claims about what it might be, but to be a member or participant in it.

The Shirky Principle

Adrian Miles

Why does double loop learning matter? Why did we have to read it in a subject I thought was about computers? Double loop learning is about recognising the assumptions we bring to our learning and being able to look at these. Not because they are wrong – they might be ideal – but because these are, in Arygris’ terms – ‘constraining variables’. They provide constraint, and they can change. We always need constraints, but the wrong ones get in the way.

The internet is causing immense disruption to media industries. The ‘constraining variables’ these industries use to address how to evolve to survive in an online, distributed, deeply networked age is why they are struggling. Let’s use journalism and newspapers as an example. Step one: ignore the internet, since we are ‘real’ news, with professionals and so on, not just amateur opinion. Step two: oh, that didn’t work, so we need a big web presence, and maybe even a blog or two (which won’t be a real blog, the best journalism blogs are by journalists blogging outside of newspapers). Step three, still loosing market share and audience, we’ll berate and yell that all that other stuff isn’t really journalism, yes some of it is being written by the same people that, as journalists, we’d interview for the story, but that’s different (followed by self serving list of why it is different, where different = not as good). Step four, redesign web site for mobile and tablet, but still don’t have easy/automatic interconnection between stories, or let readers drill down into more detail and complexity – even leave the site for that sort of content – since, you know, it’s actually about page views for advertisers. Step five, still in decline, revert to old media model of a paying for content because, you know people will. (Except if I have to pay for online news will I subscribe to The Age or, perhaps, The Guardian, or The New York Times? Oh, perhaps you think I’ll go for The Age for local sport, but if I’m an AFL, soccer or cycling nut then in each case the newspaper’s coverage is a small sliver of what I’m actually interested in, and able to get, online, so really, it is only a generalist news service in an age of specialised media. And now of course the once maligned public broadcaster finds themselves in the box seat since their charter is to provide the service for their citizens, as a state funded right, which means once I charge for my content my readers move sideways to the ABC, or even the free news services from the BBC.)

Model I single loop learning all the way along. At no point has ‘what is journalism’ or ‘what is news’ been reconsidered. That remains the constraining variable (how it is produced, by who, and its forms and then mode of presentation). To make this visible to you, imagine news media didn’t exist (this is speculative design), but the internet did. If you were inventing journalism and news media today, from scratch, with mobile media and the internet as it technological beginning (and not the printing press), what would it be, what forms would it take? Answer that well, and you have a future business, and why most traditional media companies are slowly dying.

As internet theorist Clay Shirky rather astutely observed “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” (this is the Shirky principle). For journalism, the problem is going away (discussing and presenting what is happening in the world) because we all sort of know what is happening, but rather than respond to that, journalism/the press will simply become more shrill about its own validity as ‘truth’ mistaking that as its purpose and future.

Ethics?

Adrian Miles

Dear Ditte,

It is absolute an ethical question. Teaching begins from an ethical question of address and relation. And learning how to be, on and in the network, as students, and as one day soon media professionals I would like to be always considered as an ethical question. What to make, why?