The Ed Techie

VCR as formative technology

Having done a couple of DS106 radio shows with Jim Groom (which suffered rather from, erm, technical difficulties), the notion of the early video cassette recorder as a formative technology has emerged for me.

Here are some ways in which I think it was relevant:

It changed the film industry - home video was seen as a threat by the film studios back in the early 80s, with the fear that it would mean people would stop going to the cinema. This didn't happen, and gradually they realised that it was another very lucrative form of income. Many decent films got a second life on video, and an awful lot of crap ones went straight to it. Ironically, it is the protection of DVD rental and sales (the very things they fought against) that the film industry seeks to protect against the new interloper, the internet.

It created a new kind of aesthetics - this is my attempt at justifying my penchant for B-movie horror, but I think, that just as, say Dire Straits seemed made for CD, and Gladiator for DVD, so those 80s horror films such as The Evil Dead, The Thing and CHUD seemed to be the right mix of platform and content. Carpenter's The Thing was panned when it was released as being over the top, but I think he understood the type of aesthetics that worked on VHS.

It acted as a social object - I was one of the first kids to have a VHS, and so people would regularly convene round my house to watch films. We developed a library, a shared repertoire of dialogue, and a culture around the movies that we could watch repeatedly. We still went to the cinema, but being to see your collection of movies over and over, created a different type of interaction between school-friends.

It gave the viewer control - this was the main thing, it first of all liberated us from TV schedules or cinema listings - you could rent the film you wanted and watch it when you determined. But also it gave us control over the viewing process. You could fast forward, rewind, slow mo and pause. There were many films which we would skip to favourite scenes in (eg fight scenes in The Warriors), and particular ones we would watch in slow-motion (the head exploding in Scanners). This meant we were watching films in an entirely different way from that which was intended. 

[UPDATE] The birth of read/write - I didn't include this originally, but Scott's comment below set me thinking. I didn't do much creating with the VCR, as cameras were still expensive, but on reflection, Scott is right to highlight this. Even by recording from the TV you began to make your own creation - for instance, I had one tape for artists on Top of the Pops, so over the years created my own compilation (I wish I still had that tape now). And in the late 80s a bunch of us hired a camera for a weekend and made a video for a friend's 21st, with a bunch of comedy clips and film pastiches. So, even if we didn't do much, this technology marked a significant change - that from consumer to producer, which is one that has come to define the modern age.

I think all of these have resonance with what we are seeing now with internet culture - the threat of new technology, loss of control, greater choice and democratisation of process. The home computer is often cited as the influential technology for today, but I reckon the VHS home recorder was more significant. It taught us how to play around, reinterpret and take control. And it had great big buttons you could operate with your toes.

(don't watch this clip of you're a bit squeamish)

Social media in society roundup

I'd like to do this regularly, but probably won't, a review of stories and how social media has related to them. I think it would be interesting to chart the impact social media is having on actual society (not just the techie or ed techie one). Here are a few stories over the past month that caught my attention:

Rentokil news release - in March several newspapers ran a story about there being '2,000 bugs in every train carriage'. It was based on "Research by pest controllers Rentokil". Science journalist Ben Goldacre smelt (ahem) a rat and followed it up. Ben chased them up through twitter, email and phone but couldn't get access to the email which had been sent to journalists by Rentokil's PR company. But eventually the truth emerged:

"After a bit of prodding, their PR company Brands2Life explained how these bugs were counted. No buses were studied, and no trains were studied either. ... contrary to what was said earlier, wherever it came from, these numbers did not come from measurements and counts, they are actually based on a “theoretical model”.

...Rentokil’s model for the number of bugs on trains and buses made some interesting assumptions, and you will have your own view on whether they make for a reasonable approximation to the real world.

They assumed, for example, that the railway carriage or bus was left alone, by itself, in isolation. They assumed this isolated carriage was helpfully furnished with a plentiful food supply. They assumed that the ratio of male and female bugs was perfectly optimal for breeding.

They assumed – surprisingly for anyone involved in modelling populations, surprisingly for anyone, really – that the population of bugs would be left entirely unchecked, with no external factors to control the mortality rate. They assumed that the siding or garage was controlled at a constant temperature all day and night, with no extremes, they assumed there were no trampling commuters, no cruel vaccum cleaners, no anything. In fact they assumed there was no cleaning, ever, and no passengers, ever. This was their model of insect populations on commuter vehicles.

“On the above basis” Rentokil’s PR explained to me: “it is possible that the stated numbers of cockroaches and bed bugs/fleas could live on a train carriage or bus.”"

Anyone who has read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science will be familiar (if depressed) with this kind of PR story being taken up wholesale and unquestioningly by the press. What is interesting here is that listening to Ben on Radio 4 later that week he commented how the use of blogs and twitter allowed him the space to really track these stories down. In a newspaper column it would seem pedantic and picky, and there would be a word limit, but in the social media space he received information and encouragement from his twitter network. This means that, although they'll still try it, PR companies now have a space where they will be held to account, whereas previously no-one would get to hear about their exaggerations, assumptions or lies because of a complicit agreement in the mainstream press. The make it up and don't give a damn party is over.

Nestle - this was the subject of one of those twitter storms that brew up quickly (and I have to say, even when I agree with them, they have the whiff of a pitchfork wielding mob about them). Nestle have a Facebook page, which had been ticking along nicely for a couple of years, with people discussing how they eat their Kit-Kats. Then Greenpeace encouraged people to adapt Nestle logos, to support their anti-Nestle campaign, on the use of palm oil. Cnet covers the story here. People started doing this on the Facebook page and the Nestle representative came in heavy handed demanding they remove the copyright infringing logos, etc. Then it got going on twitter and became a trending topic, generating lots of bad publicity for Nestle.

What this demonstrates is that people will use an organisation's Facebook page as a means of demonstration and protest. The best defence against this is to be a 'nice' company, but even then some people may have differences of opinion. The difficulty then is knowing how to handle them. It's not clear who the Nestle representative was, but it could have been some untrained employee who was just given the page as part of their duty and responded brusquely. Such a response is worse than no response and for organisations the Nestle furore should be one of those case studies on handling new media.

Leader's debate - on 15th April in the UK we had our first televised leaders debate as part of the general election. It is widely acknowledged that the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg came out best in this. From a personal perspective it was the perfect twitter event TV. It wasn't particularly interesting, but the backchannel around twitter brought it to life. While the broadcast analysts were still pondering the big messages #Iagreewithnick was a trending topic, showing that the network had determined the main outcome (which the conventional broadcasters agreed upon over the ensuing few days). A tweet which got retweeted many times summed it up pithily: "What we learnt tonight: Clegg is a damn fine speaker, Cameron met a black man once and Brown agrees with Nick". In line with the first story here, it was also in online media that we saw many of the claims and anecdotes investigated over the coming few days (if you're interested, my colleague Simon Buckingham-Shum did an excellent analysis of the debate using Compendium, which was better than most of the expert analysis we saw).

What was interesting here was the way that humour was used to puncture the claims and careful gestures of the leaders in a way that serious analysis failed to do. For instance, David Cameron came equipped with a range of anecdotes aimed at demonstrating him to be a man of the people. Fridge-magnet then created a Cameron anecdote generator which got passed around on twitter.

Seeing the threat now posed by Nick Clegg, many of the right-wing newspapers turned their focus on him. The most hysterical was a piece from the Daily Mail which claimed Clegg was some form of Nazi supporter. Within a couple of hours the hashtag #nickcleggsfault was trending on twitter as people punctured the pomposity of such articles by blaming any event, from IE6, to Justin Bieber.

So while this won't be the social media election in the way the Obama one was, because the parties themselves aren't using it as effectively, it will be an election in which social media begins to challenge the dominance of traditional media as the means through which we experience it.

Is public engagement an old media concept?

"In many ways the Roman Forum was a bit like a Lady Gaga concert..."

The OU hosted an event today, in collaboration with the BBC and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement called 'Engaging citizens: media, research and the public'. It was an interesting day with presentations from the excellent Mary Beard, the BBC's Martin Davidson and Tristram Hunt from Queen Mary's. All the speakers were engaging and talked about the relationship between academics and media and some of the tensions and benefits collaboration brought.

In the panel session the issue of public engagement and particularly reach came up, and how could we get to 'non-BBC' audiences. Mary Beard gave a good answer, saying that she is a Classicist, she usually speaks to a hundred or so people, if she can make a programme that reaches thousands, then that's a win, and she'd 'worry about their postcodes' later. Which is I think the right attitude, no matter what you do, not everyone is going to be interested in classical history. Tristram Hunt used a quote from Bush's presidential campaign, that of 'the soft bigotry of low expectations', in this context to suggest that we dumb down or transform content to meet a middle class perception of the needs of others, only succeeding in patronising them.

But what all of this set me thinking was that the whole concept of 'public engagement' seems very rooted in traditional media. It has as its assumption a control of what is 'put out there' and thus a need to ensure that it meets the needs of the public. Public engagement becomes an issue because of economics - it costs lots of money to make traditional broadcast and so you have to a) demonstrate value for money by engaging 'the public' and b) need to meet as many different audiences with the same piece of content as possible.

If we switch to a new media (I know,I know - when will it stop being new?), then these two restrictions disappear, or diminish anyway. This is particularly true if we adopt a 'low friction' model of production from academic activity - we make slidecasts of talks, video interviews, lectures, podcasts, blog posts and put papers up online. Any one piece of output is not likely to engage all of the public, but some will, and they will engage small, interested groups. 

This is classic Long Tail distribution - lots of content, each piece of which appeals to only a few individuals, but the cumulative effect is that of engagement. And academic work produces lots of content - it can almost be seen as a Long Tail content production system. This view may also remove some of the tensions in the academic - broadcast relationship: there is no requirement to appeal to a mass audience.

There will undoubtedly still be a place for academics who are good on TV and radio, but this provides an alternative view of public engagement. If we were to think of how you could get better public engagement around this type of content then the focus would shift - it might not be about content but about tools, or promotion, or community.  

Living in a twitter world

(The last in my trilogy of ALT-C related posts)

Two things brought home to me that we live in a twitter world (whether David Cameron or John Humphrys like it or not, and indeed, all the better that they don't).

The first was that I attended the ALT-C for the first time post the development of twitter. I have been to this conference (it's the UK's main ed tech conference) three times before. Usually my approach was to hang around on my own in a corner, maybe find a couple of OU people and stick with them, or stand on the edge of a group and hope someone notices me. But this time I went feeling that I knew nearly everyone there because we follow each other on twitter. Here is a list of people I know well on twitter who I actually got to say hello to face to face for the first time (and I've probably missed a load off, sorry):

Brian Kelly, Alan Cann, Josie Fraser, Graham Attwell, Steve Wheeler, James Clay, Stu Johnson, Sue Folley, Theo Kuechel, Haydn Blackley.

And then there were the people I have met only a few times but keep in contact with via twitter. I was practically high-fiving my way down corridors. Well, maybe not, but it was a distinctly different real-life social experience because of twitter (and blogs).

Given this it struck me that I need to work on some new social skills. What is the appropriate type of conversation when you are pre-introduced via social networks? I had a few good discussions, but often I would shake hands with someone and we'd both go 'good to finally meet you. Errrm...' So one upshot of living in a twitter world is that we need to tweak our social interactions to have a mode that is somewhere inbetween being introduced for the first time and being old friends.

The second twitter related moment was watching TV last night. I was watching something else when someone on my twitter stream said they were about to watch the Derren Brown 'event' on Channel 4. In this he 'predicted' the national lottery numbers live, see this clip:

I'm not particularly interested in how he did it (it's TV, he can make it look anyway he wants), but rather what it reveals about the changing nature of television. Last year I mentioned that for TV creating events that appealed to twitter users (or any network, obviously not limited to twitter)  and allowed them"to share the experience online may be the the thing that saves scheduling". This seems to me an example of a broadcaster attempting to do this. There are two key ingredients:

1) It is a live event so participation at the moment is crucial

2) It provokes discussion - the acid test is does it get to be a trending event in twitter? The answer for last night was yes:

 

I'm not arguing that it makes good television, merely indicating that this can be seen as an example of the impact of social networks on an existing broadcast behaviour.

Death of broadcast?

I am part of the Broadcast Strategy Review group at the OU at the moment. This is currently realised through our relationship with the BBC, with the general audience programmes and the excellent open2.net stuff. But in an e-learning, internet age the very definition of broadcast needs to be re-examined.  The OU needs to reexamine what it means from pedagogic value and return on investment perspectives. To put it crudely, is it better to have 10 high quality programmes or 10,000 lower quality podcasts/feeds. There are a number of issues here:

Quality - generally people are prepared lower quality on a lot of internet media, e.g. podcasts, video clips, etc because they are getting material closer to their needs. There is a trade off here between appropriateness and production quality.

Integration with courses - the traditional OU model was to make programmes for specific courses (you get minus ten points if you mention kipper ties here). The last agreement was focused around more general interest programmes, fulfilling an outreach function. An internet focused model has the potential to be course, or subject area specific.

New models of outreach - TV is the broadcast medium par excellence, and much has been made of the difficult to market things on the net. However, there are effective models, and also initiatives like the Open Content project have the possibility of fulfilling the outreach function.

Range of providers - put bluntly, if you want to make TV programmes then the BBC are your best bet of partner, and there is a pretty limited pool to choose from. If you want internet content (be it regular feeds, multimedia, podcasts, articles, etc) then the choice of providers is much broader (although BBC online is probably amongst the best here too).

This will be a consultative review, and I don't know what the conclusions will be, but it strikes me as one of those zeitgeist projects, so I'm quite excited about it.