Butts in the gutters of Newmarket

I work in Newmarket. I often walk up Alma St, alongside the Maori TV building. It really disgusts me how they come out the side entrance, smoke in this small street and then just throw their butts in the gutter. Even at my worst as a smoker I would try to find somewhere better. There are usually a huge number of butts on display. You'd think as a principle sponsor of Quit-line that they would at least supply their staff / performers / contractors with outside ash trays so they'd leave the surrounds looking better.

I often have lunch in memorial park.  Recently as I walked back to work I passed the front door to Maori TV. I noticed for the first time that they had a sign up but pointing inwards asking people to smoke in the park opposite and not outside their building.

I suppose we should be grateful that there isn't a kindergarden or primary school opposite for them to send their people to smoke in but for the first time since I gave up smoking I was regretting it as that sign so offended me that I would have loved to have had a smoke and stubbed it out on their precious front steps.

O tempora o mores; Oh Times, Oh Daily Mirror

Until a very few years ago the professional news media: owners, editors, and journalists had a huge power to limit the information that was available to the ordinary person. If any step in the chain didn't consider a piece of information was "fit to print" the ordinary person never got to hear about it. More subtly the professional news media had the ability to slant the news according to their prejudices (as we all do) but unlike today the other slant often didn't get a chance to get out.

In the 1940s and to an extent the 1950s Britain (in reality England) had the largest empire the world had ever seen and considered the world to be their oyster. The ordinary Briton was regaled by tales of the colonised people, admittedly not a very nice picture of them, but a picture none-the less.

We left Britain in 1959 when I was under 2. In the mid 1970s my father took me & my younger brother back to Britain to meet the relatives and see the home land. He was socked by how insular the British press and local TV news had become. In retrospect, the loss of empire and the adjustments to being a part of Europe had simply changed the views the news media chose to present. For the locals this had been a gradual change, for Dad Britain was frozen in his mind at 1959 and it was a sudden wrench to bring his world view forward 25 years in a couple of weeks.

New Zealand media have always been focused on the world. We know we're a small and relatively unimportant part of the world and so our press has always covered events in England, USA, Western Europe and Australia very well. In recent years it has expanded its coverage of Asia and Africa.

The United States is an interesting case. Despite being the strongest nation on Earth militarily and first or second economically, they have retained an incredibly insular media, and most people in the United States are woefully ignorant of the world outside their country; and what they do know is horrifically slanted by the views constantly trumpeted by their news media. Americans are no more stupid than any other nation, and if given better and more honest coverage of the world would be much better able to use their democracy to make far better choices. The keeping of them in ignorance by big media is almost a crime.

Also in today's world I can choose where I take my news from. 25 years ago I had a choice of 2 newspapers; today I can read the on-line version of any newspaper on earth. If I want an English daily I can read it, if I want a US paper I can read it, I can read the Chinese government news ... typically I don't but I have that freedom. I can choose the slant I want.

Things are changing though, and what is changing it is that big media is losing control. In 1975 it was incredibly expensive to have a voice. Today a home PC and Internet connection and anyone can. I'm currently "following" an obscure Icelandic politician on twitter and commenting on world events. Sure, there are a huge number of differences between me and a professional journalist, but I have the freedom to make my voice heard and an increasing number of independent voices are out there being read. So where is the journalist today? At least in theory I'm free to be as slanted as I like while journalists are supposed to give "unbiased reporting" ... the reality is both the journalist and myself can only report what our internal filters let us see ... I think I'm fairly open about my biases and I would like to see big media and professional journalists come out about their biases and prejudices, so when we read their words we have the ability to know where they are coming from.

I'm picking that the future of the professional journalist is going to be interesting. The independent commentators and amateur reporters in places like Wikinews are going to be increasingly pressuring them and they are going to adapt to survive. I can see a few futures that don't really work out. I'm sure that the professional journalist will survive, but I don't have a good handle on what that survival will mean ... it could be raw news feed with an ability to get to the right place at the right time ... it could be the ability to conduct interesting penetrating interviews with the key people ... it could be a slanted journalism that would make today's US media look unbiased ... it may well be something else.

Whatever professional journalists become, they won't have the ability to filter information in the way that their predecessors in the 1970s and earlier enjoyed. 

[The title of this blog entry is a quote from Michael Flanders, who in turn was quoting Cicero.]

The loss of history

Five thousand years ago the Sumerians started writing on clay tablets. Mostly it wasn't interesting stuff, commercial transactions, tax records, the occasional letter or decree. Today these give us an insight into their life that we would not have if we relied only on the official pronouncements and how they would want to be seen by posterity.

Not long after the Egyptians started recording their history, there's the official story in hieroglyphs and the real story in Hieratic script, including an incredibly advanced (for the time) medical text.

Fast forward 3000 years and we have Roman Britain, a time we until recently knew remarkably little about, to the Romans it was a fairly uninteresting provincial outpost and in any case the official histories of the time did not place the same value on objective truth as we do today. Then came the Vindolanda tablets, suddenly we had an insight into the day-to-day life of a Roman garrison in England.

Rome fell, and a lot of information was lost in the west, mostly by a quiet censorship. When books needed to be copied by hand, unpopular books (or unpopular ideas) simply weren't copied and after a few years vanished ... still examples did show up, just as the Vindolanda tablets did.

The twentieth century will probably turn out to be the best documented ever time for future archaeologists. In many countries there was near universal literacy, while from Djibouti to Papua New Guinea the educated elites had been joined by the educated middle classes and printing had become as cheap as it ever was. Electronic media developed during the century and at until the very end of the 20th most people got their news and information on paper.

Then electronic media took over. 24 hour news channels and Internet news took over. In the days of newspapers, yesterday's news wrapped today's fish and chips, but in the days of electronic news, yesterday's news is only a bunch of electrons or magnetic fields. Paper might be preserved, but electronic media only live as long as the publishers want to keep them. In the 1970s the BBC deleted thousands of television programs so they could recycle the magnetic tape they were stored on. They saw no purpose to keeping them. At the time very few people were concerned, television was ephemeral, home video didn't exist and if you missed a programme, you missed it. Today the BBC regrets this and is trying to replace those deleted episodes from third party libraries, old film copies an similar.

Blogger Martin Belam reports that the BBC website is deleting hundreds of sub-sites. To them these have passed their use-by date and are no longer needed. To the future this will probably be seen as cultural vandalism on a par with the deletion of series 1 and 2 of Dad's Army. The BBC deletion is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. Huge amounts of information exist only on impermanent digital forms, often technically protected using technologies that didn't exist 10 years ago and may not exist in 10 years time.

There is the Internet Archive, but it's coverage is erratic and in the long term its future is far from certain. It's a small start, let's hope it is enough to allow our great-great-great-grandchildren to understand us.