UPDATE: the video referenced is sadly no longer online.
The story goes like this: my twelve year-old son Oliver builds a spectacular tower in Minecraft (Olly is a Minecraft ninja and runs his own server). Then, an anti-social twerp demolishes the whole thing. This kind of large-scale vandalism is called ‘griefing’ in Minecraft and is frowned upon (terrific explanation on the Minecraft wiki).
Unfortunately for said twerp, though, the rozzers are on hand: a Minecraft admin is online and sees the whole thing. Dishing out the kind of blocky summary justice that’s only possible in a kind of blocky virtual world, the admin incarcerates our twerp in a special Minecraft jail built for the purpose (for how long I’m not sure).
Here’s the best bit. Oliver visits our twerp in his very public nick (there’s some blocky banter), captures a video of his visit, adds informative captions and a soundtrack (Jailhouse Rock, what else?) and publishes it on YouTube. I’m so proud (I’ll have a word about his spelling of of ‘griefer’, though).
Of course, I find myself wondering if I should encourage this kind of naming and shaming but, since this is essentially an extension of Minecraft’s in-game sanction and since it doesn’t seem to be possible to reconstruct the twerp’s real identity from the video (and since he is a troll), I’m OK with it. Gamer justice: tough but fair.
Extraordinary movement in the phone hacking case today – and presumably only the beginning of a torrent of admissions and concessions. This is good. But there’s something about the indignation of the celebs (and near-celebs and non-celebs) caught up in the phone hacking mess – those whose names appeared on those long lists of ‘targets’ and whose personal information showed up in tawdry news stories – that limits sympathy. Politician blustering, starlet whining etc. I can’t quite throw my circle of empathy around this group of moaners. I want to say: “change your bloody PIN and move on, you crowd of money-grubbing dimwits.”
But hold on, cease your righteous typing in the comment box. I know that would be wrong. I know this is serious, but the offense here is not one of kind – it’s not the essentially adolescent crime of trying a few obvious PINs on a minor royal’s voicemail – but of recklessness, of hugely overdoing it. Had the editors and reporters felt able to confine their ‘hacking’ (it barely merits the label) to genuine miscreants – cocaine lords, oligarchs, privy councillors – this practice would and probably should have carried on essentially unnoticed into the future. In fact, used with discretion and in the public interest – like ‘camera bags‘ and dressing up as a sheik – it would have formed a useful part of the investigative package.
It was the simple greed and desperation for stories (and the whole culture of ‘going out and getting’ and ‘proactively producing’ stories) that blew this up and gave it the potential to undermine journalism as a profession and as a vital public service. Let’s be clear, the ultimate villains in all this will be the editors who permitted, if not actually sponsored, this conduct. And it’s obvious that this is much larger than a single newspaper and a single editor (or even a single proprietor).
A whole generation of Fleet St editors (with a handful of exceptions, I’m sure) will leave their posts having radically diminished their profession and their business – those who put up with or directed this miserable dilution of the values of investigative journalism. And the big question is whether this and other increasingly desperate competitive measures marks the beginning of some kind of final decline for the prints.
There’s a kind of morbid postscript to the whole thing, of course, for we humble readers and voters. It’s the bit where we suspect that legislators were compromised and embarrassed by what they suspected the tabloids had on them and consequently sat on their hands during crucial debates on regulation and ownership. That bit makes my blood boil. The idea that editors may have literally (and I’m using the word ‘literally’ literally here) blackmailed MPs not to back legislation they didn’t like is heartstopping. A giant affront to democracy (it was when Tom Watson alerted us to this nastiness that I really switched on to this scandal).
My dad was book mad. He owned a couple of thousand books, mostly non-fiction. He was an old-school, working class, self-taught polymath, a bus conductor-know-all (I’ve written about his dictionaries before). And he had this habit. He would snip cuttings from newspapers and magazines. Almost daily he’d snip a story of some import and file it away inside one of his many books.
And there was method in this compulsive snipping and filing. The cutting always went inside a book of some relevance to the story – cuttings about Kennedy and Nixon inside an American history, cuttings about captured Nazis inside a book about the war. An Alan Coren column in a Thurber collection. Some books were bulging – mum and I used to laugh as we pulled a book down from a shelf and a confetti of cuttings fell out.
But this carefully-assembled distributed scrapbook was pointless – an essentially write-only collection that was destined never to to be seen (the fact that the whole lot was destroyed in a flood at Christmas is just a melancholy full stop to the story). No one was ever going to read or reflect on these cuttings. And there’s an exact parallel with my dad’s manic clipping and saving in the universal curatorial reflex of the social networks. The three-stage process: see something interesting, read it and then – click – it’s shared. It’s a kind of twitch, already so natural that we’ve forgotten how we got started and when.
Sharing is now so part of the process that it influences the kind of content we absorb. I’d love the paywalls to work but I suspect they’ll fail because they short-circuit this curatorial reflex. I cancelled my Times subscription when I realised that being unable to share the marvellous stuff in there – Aaronovitch, Moran, Finkelstein – made it less valuable. I enjoyed it less because I couldn’t share it with my friends. The big publishers can’t ignore the curatorial habit – they’ll have to adjust their offerings to accommodate the twitch.
I clip and save obsessively too (is it a heritable trait?). Since we closed Speechification.com I’ve been posting things at Audiolibre.net and at /Reading. Audiolibre’s a bit like Speechification but I’m sticking to sound recordings that are free to republish. Public domain, creative commons, out-of-copyright stuff that’s explicitly shared by its owners (like the RTE programme that’s at the top now). And there’s plenty of this stuff out there too but it’s a bit of an adventure and I’m looking for new sources (send me your favourites).
And /Reading is a straight copy of James Bridle’s Mattins. He’s been reading bits of books he loves into his phone for a while now (although he’s evidently on a break right now). This is a twist on the trusted guide thing. I trust James to switch me onto writing I wouldn’t have met otherwise and the excerpt he reads makes the whole thing more vivid – and I can listen on the way to work. He’s been reading mainly fiction and poetry but I’m focused (like my old man) on non-fiction – and I’m trying to dig up stuff you won’t find on the non-fiction table at Waterstones. Like this out-of-print anthology of writing about the industrial revolution collected by Mass Observation founder Humphrey Jennings.
/Reading is more of an experiment – should I publish my reading with no commentary or should I add a short review or some context? Will people find my selections useful or are they just bleeding chunks too short to inform a decision? Is this legitimate recommendation or self-indulgence? Will publishers be OK with these short readings? /Reading uses Audioboo because it’s just so accessible (and because it’s easy to lift and embed the audio). For Audiolibre I’ve used an HTML 5 player which means it’ll work on an iPhone or an iPad. Both are available as podcasts and that seems like the right way to package this stuff.
I’ll keep collecting and sharing (because I can’t help it) and I’ll see what happens – tell me what you think and suggest new audio sources and books too.
The Tweetdeck crew, led by doughty leader Iain Dodsworth, came to BBC Audio & Music yesterday to grill us about our use of the app and to fill us in on their plans. Fascinating as you’d expect.
One interesting observation: Tweetdeck’s not for beginners, not for light or ‘ordinary’ users. It’s for ‘power users’ so that’s why it’s not very friendly. There’s a proper learning curve and the experience can be a bit forbidding if you’re new to it. Iain has the luxury of allowing Twitter to worry about the n00bs while he gets on with building a pro dashboard.
We had a cup of tea afterwards and I told Iain about the impact on me of Twitter when I came across it four years ago. I told him I was part of the generation that encountered ‘cyberspace’ in William Gibson’s Neuromancer in the mid-eighties and that I’d spent the next twenty-odd years waiting for something as impossibly vivid to come along. Each time a new bit of net tech arrived, I’d find myself hoping that it’d be cyberspace, that it would finally have arrived. And of course it didn’t.
Usenet: that wasn’t cyberspace. FTP? No. Gopher? No. The web? No. Along the way there were false dawns (do you remember GopherVR? Thought not): VRML was meant to be it (but it wasn’t). So were various alternate realities and MUDs and MMOGs and MOOs: I remember the rush I got from logging into Habitat (that’s way back) and then Second Life (much later). And then the disappointment: still not cyberspace. Not glowing and evanescent – too physical by far.
Virtual worlds had none of the vertigo-inducing collapsing of space and time I was expecting and none of that sense that you jack in and you’re present to millions. And they’re present to you. And I think that last thing was what I was really waiting for – the anticipated sense (odd image alert) of pressing your head through a stretchy membrane and arriving THERE, right in it and present to all the others who’ve just done the same thing – blinking and staring.
And do you remember that fantastically potent image of Gibson’s? The floating cities of light that illuminated his cyberspace – Chiba City and The Sprawl and the data havens, waking up and coming to life and humming with the presence of the millions jacked in? That, for me, is Twitter. That’s what I encountered at the beginning of 2007 when I logged into Twitter. The sense that Twitter made me present to others – and made them present to me. And the sense that all those other Twitter users were present to me but not in an intrusive way. Not here with me but just doing their thing over there on the virtual horizon, just waiting for me to pay attention and make a contribution, but not demanding it, not requiring it.
And about ten days ago, when Cairo lit up on the social nets, that image came back to me and then, a few days later, when it went dark, more so. Twitter – which, after all, is composed entirely of thought – is the closest we’ve yet got to Gibson’s fabulous cyberspace.
And – circling back to Tweetdeck and Iain’s proud admission that his app isn’t for the masses but for the social media ninjas and that its rather forbidding, out-of-black, nuclear-submarine-control-room look is like that on purpose – I realise that Tweetdeck, with its whizzing columns and blinking alerts – is probably the dashboard cyberspace needed.
[You might want to know: when I wrote this I worked at BBC Radio (and still do!) but these are the opinions of a civilian radio nut and not those of the BBC. Also, Amazing still exists but the ‘unsigned music only’ policy described here does not]
I’ve developed a bit of a radio crush on a new station called Amazing Radio. Amazing‘s a national digital station mounting a head-on challenge to the music radio status quo. Unless you’re a radiohead like me you’ve probably never heard of it, though. And it’s worth a listen because it’s very different. For a start, there are no stars, no record labels and no ads. The station plays only music by unsigned artists, uploaded by those artists to the amazingtunes web site where it’s sold for 79p per track. The station even carries an ‘ethical’ label, presumably because artists keep 70% of online sales.
Listening is a fascinating, slightly disorienting experience. What you hear sounds like a conventional music station – music grouped into recognisable genres and linked in the usual, slick way by DJs (apart from the off-peak hours when the robots are in charge). The music goes out in familiar slots – there’s a breakfast show, a rock show and a chart show… But listen for twenty minutes and it’ll dawn on you that there’s something odd here: you haven’t heard any of this stuff before. It’s all new.
And listening to a radio station without the elemental familiarity of even the most ‘challenging’ conventional stations is a bracing experience. Tracks flow by without the contextual cues you’re used to: no history, no celebrity, no personal memories. And none of the credibility that comes with a play from a name DJ. Amazing DJs sometimes help by defining a track in terms of an established artist: “here’s a Crystal Castles-style track from…” or “if you like Florence…”
I’m a convert. I like the DJs and I enjoy the unanchored listening experience. There’s something compulsive about this stream of new stuff and you get a sense of the ocean of talent that’s out there waiting to be discovered – but I can’t listen for too long. It turns out that providing your own context is quite hard work.
And the experience highlights just how dependent we are on DJs and stations for their judgements and their stories and their categories. In fact, listening to Amazing helps to explain the function of mainstream radio’s unfashionable props – the cosy playlists and charts and the guiding hand of the DJ.
Amazing must be doing something right. The station has just tempted Trevor Dann, grizzled radio veteran and outgoing Director of The Radio Academy, to join as Director of Programmes (he’s been presenting a show for a while now). So I asked Trevor if he’d answer a few questions about Amazing:
Does Amazing represent an alternative to the mainstream, label-based music biz? A kind of parallel music economy?
Yes. We think of it as a music-based social network which takes the power out of the hands of the playlist committee and the A&R men and gives it back to the artists and their fans. In the digital world we need tastemakers and trusted guides but we don’t need gatekeepers.
Do you aim to break artists?
Yes.
If an Amazing artist crosses over and becomes a big star will you participate in their ongoing income – will you become a kind of label?
In tune with our ethical stance, we don’t seek to control or exploit anyone but we are here to help artists on their musical journey. First, they upload their material to amazingtunes.com. Then, if it’s popular on the website, it’ll be featured on Amazing Radio. If they get in the Amazing Chart and there’s a real buzz about them, Amazing Music may offer to help with everything from management and gig promotion to publishing and even record manufacture and distribution. But none of these services are compulsory.
If Amazing’s a hit, do you expect record labels to join in and upload tracks to amazingtunes? the way they came to trust iTunes and later Spotify? Will you encourage them to do so? Will you support a more conventional royalty scheme, for instance?
We don’t have any plans to broadcast music by artists signed major record labels. That model is in decline. Ours is the future.
It’s fascinating to hear a playlist assembled entirely from unplayed music with not a label in sight. How does the process differ from playlisting at a conventional station?
The playlist is chosen by the consumers of amazingtunes.com. There is some human intervention to prevent too much of one genre dominating the sound of the station and to take account of the time of day. But broadly speaking the playlist is ‘crowd-sourced’.
Will you build domain expertise? Hire DJs who have deep regional or genre knowledge? Will you give them freeplays? Will they become curators?
The ‘specialist’ presenters – Jim Gellatly (winner of the Radio Academy John Peel Award in 2008), Mark Ryan etc. pick their own music from the wealth of material on amazingtunes. I wouldn’t want to put words in his mouth but I think Jim in particular would be happy with the word ‘curator’. Part of his mission (and everyone’s at Amazing) is to encourage more bands to upload music so they can get airtime.
What does your research tell you about listeners? Who are they?
We are not part of RAJAR and we don’t publish any audience data.
What’s the natural audience for unsigned artists? Do you think that younger listeners are more open to unfamiliar sounds?
Feedback shows that our audience is very varied. It’s certainly not exclusively young or old, male or female. Rather like 6Music I think we have a very varied audience which encompasses old fogeys like me (and dare I say you Steve!), teenagers with an appetite for emerging music and everyone in between. I think the traditional radio obsession with demographics is rendered obsolete by a service like ours.
How about live shows? Will you add a few hours of live output so that DJs can interact with listeners?
We launch our first live daily show in January. Details shortly.
Is there enough good stuff out there to fill a radio station? Are you surfacing artists overlooked by the labels? Is an Amazing artist different from one with a record deal?
I’m constantly amazed by the quality of music uploaded. The radio station could fill its playlist many times over with really brilliant stuff from all over the world. The weekly review show I present has music from 7 different countries this week.
What do the labels and the collection societies think about the Amazing model?
We don’t know about the majors and don’t really care. We are licenced by PRS who have been very encouraging of our effort to give exposure to more talent.
Thank you Trevor!
Listen to Amazing on DAB (“just to the left of the BBC”, as they say on the station) and online.
6 Music ran a lovely series of programmes about this year’s Mercury nominees. They did a simple thing and recorded the artists introducing the tracks, describing the inspiration and the creative process for each song. It’s like watching a movie with the director’s commentary switched on. Superb night-time radio (and unimpeachable public service output – could a commercial network play out a whole album in this way?).
If you can lay your hands on a copy (it’s gone from the 6 Music site) listen to the episode featuring the XX. And not just because you’ll hear the quiet and entirely unjaded voices of THE FUTURE but also because you’ll learn something about the creative process that you’d have missed if you’d listened to the unglossed album a dozen times.
Many completely disarming glimpses of the teenage creative process – a keyboard bought for £3 on eBay, at least one song composed when Romy and Oliver were sixteen, the kind of completely obsessive attention to detail that must have had their parents typing ‘OCD’ into Google. And something about the epic luck of finding someone you can work with when young, and just clicking. They’re a quietly inspiring pair: I hear the kind of generosity and trust that makes a collaboration bulletproof.
And there’s also something here about A&R and a supportive, courageous creative context. I don’t know much about Young Turk/XL but to have given these rather unprepossessing kids the keys to the studio while barely out of school was a fantastically smart and open-minded thing to do. There’s the value of the whole, creaking, benighted music business in a nutshell, if you ask me.
Now watch them split up just after I click ‘publish.’
How do you monitor broadcast output on FM, LW (MW in some areas), two DAB frequencies, LW and FM channels for digital TV on Virgin cable, Sky satellite, Freeview and the online versions of the LW and FM streams in Flash and Windows Media? I’m not a radio engineer so jump in and correct me here if I’ve got this wrong but checking playout for silence is easy enough (and explains why you don’t hear 4’33” on the radio very often) but checking that a particular stream is carrying the right audio is an entirely different challenge. Putting a system into the broadcast chain that could automatically check that all those streams (the list at the top is just for Radio 4) were carrying the right audio at the right time and then take action if it finds an error sounds like the definition of a tall order.
And the answer, of course, is obvious. You ask the listeners. In fact, you don’t even have to ask them. As part of my impossibly glamorous day job, I look after Twitter and Facebook accounts for Radio 4 and at about 0645 yesterday morning, while eating my cornflakes, I noticed a lot of tweets mentioning Radio 4 and complaining that there was something wrong with the network’s FM stream on Internet radios and mobiles. These listeners were hearing classical music when they were expecting Today. Apart from the obvious annoyance, some were evidently freaked out by the presence of sombre music (Brahms was mentioned) on the BBC’s primary news outlet – they feared a national tragedy! I responded to some of these tweets, getting a bit more information from affected listeners, then emailed various people I knew to have responsibility for output at BBC radio.
I also tweeted on the Radio 4 account, keeping followers up to date with my actions. There was a to-and-fro of tweets from listeners (using semi-private @replies and public @mentions as appropriate). Although there was no official line on the problem yet, between us we were able to figure out that the only streams affected were the Windows Media ones used by devices that don’t support Flash. So we got a sense of the size of the problem too (pretty small). And somewhere in the middle of all this, BBC staffer James Hart (@syzygy on Twitter) noticed all the fuss and picked up the phone to exactly the right engineer who proceeded to switch the streams back to their proper locations. By 0915 everything was back to normal.
So, to summarise, in this particular minor crisis, Twitter (and Facebook to an extent) did the following:
Alerted us us to the existence of a problem within minutes of it arising, outside working hours.
Provided some quite specific data on the scale of the problem, platforms affected etc.
Gave us a real-time, two-way connection to affected listeners.
Allowed us to update other listeners about the problem quickly.
What I love about Adam Savage is his laugh. On Mythbusters, which I watch a lot (I have children under 12), he’s the riotous, uninhibited, self-actualiser – and he laughs all the time. In this video he talks about his other passions. And it’s inspiring.
19 June 2017 UPDATE: I’ve just taken down the picture of my staff pass that sat at the top of this post – I’ve been advised that these days it’s thought to be uncool to share pictures of your pass online.
I’m quite new at the BBC so I’m still pretty wide-eyed about the whole experience. Actually being allowed into Broadcasting House and TV Centre still makes my heart race. I just wave my staff pass and I’m in. OMG.
People tell me I should take that staff pass off when I leave the building. I think that’s actually policy, in fact. Health and Safety, privacy and so on. But I don’t. I leave it hanging there and wander round like a big BBC dweeb. Partly because I’m proud of it (showing off a bit really) and partly because it gets me into the most interesting conversations.
And in the time I’ve been wearing the thing, of the literally dozens of encounters it’s triggered, only one has been even slightly negative: the old guy who leaned in close on the Central Line and said, quite loudly, “British Bullshit Corporation innit?” But even that one wasn’t really negative, since it developed into an excellent ten-minute chat about spin in politics.
And there’s more. Not only do people react in a positive and friendly way to my BBC pass, they go further and routinely provide evidence that they trust me more because of it. Evidently, working for the BBC puts me in that category of near-public servants, the AA men and commissionaires and bus inspectors and Salvation Army buglers who are routinely asked to help in public places. The other day, a woman practically jogged across Tavistock Square to ask me how to get to Euston Station: “I saw your badge, I knew you’d help.”
On the train to Birmingham I was asked to watch two small children while a bacon roll was fetched, an American asked me how to get a tour of Parliament, two women asked if it was OK to reverse on a one-way street. I’m the fifth emergency service – the one you ask to hold your brolly or steer your car while you push it (I’m not making this up). I was asked “Is this a good book?” in Foyles at St Pancras. There’s a kid on the till in a Central London supermarket who grills me about current affairs every time I go in.
And the message, of course, of all this happy, trusting behaviour (I can recommend it, it’s a proper cheer-up) is simple. Almost every day, my BBC staff pass provides me with evidence that the Corporation is not the Great Satan that some (even people who’ve got their own BBC passes) would want you to believe. And this, of course, encourages me hugely. The political classes and the haterz in the pop media may have scented the opportunity to topple the whole eighty year-old, self-contradicting edifice but the general public thinks it’s all right and would even trust it to help them top up their mobile (there’s another one).
Am I deluding myself? I don’t think so. I’m sure that some of the nice folk I meet harbour misgivings about executive pay or dumbing down or crowding out and it’s not inconceivable that some of my fellow commuters would like to work me over with a rubber hose or push me under a train because of where I work. It’s just that the data doesn’t support it. I’ve got data and you can’t argue with data.
Do people wearing the staff passes of British Gas or The Telegraph or Schweppes get this treatment? More to the point, do people stop Jeremy Hunt in the street and ask him where the oil goes in a Honda Civic?
in the mid-eighties and that I’d spent the next twenty-odd years waiting for something as impossibly vivid to come along. Each time a new bit of net tech arrived, I’d find myself hoping that it’d be cyberspace, that it would finally have arrived. And of course it didn’t.
