discussion

This survey is for bloggers, journalists, expats, analysts, and netizens (That’s about everyone, right?). Please take it. I’m begging you.

Take the survey!

Here are some additional questions for people in Iran:

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Breaking news? Or simply broken?

I’m a radio addict. Well maybe not addict. I don’t have the discipline for a true addiction. The reason I bring this up, is that I am currently working on a project for a multi-media news organization. To prepare myself, I am reading up on trends in content delivery and journalism. I am also doing a lot of listening. In addition to talking to people about their news gathering habits, I am listening to the radio.

I am going to post some of the findings I find interesting here. Kevin Cowan who works on future platforms for the BBC World Service discussed what they found when they looked at mobile content usage in Russia, the UAe, South Africa and Argentina.

Essentially people use their mobiles for breaking news and sports. Here are some key excerpts:

Lots of competition on the mobile platform (“BBC is a small player…”)

First stop is Google, then maybe on to other sources, BBC, CNN.

“The good thing with Google is that they are an aggregator so they take content from us. People are still getting news from us.”

The BBC has to fight to get heard. (Wow. I thought I had to fight.)

“In the old days it did just used to be BBC and Voice of America and Deutsche Welle… there are numerous ways that people can obtain information.” (He’s talking about the World Service)

The BBC is moving from being a broadcaster to being a content provider. (Hmm… that’s an interesting distinction. I had already conflated the two.)

Mobile phones have a lot of impact since more people have access to mobiles than to the internet. You can dial a number to listen to BBC and get fm quality sound. (That is really great when you’re talking about regions that routinely block outside sources of information.)

Thanks to Richard Sambrook who helped me track down the program online after I heard it while washing dishes.

From Ghana: a coffin shaped like a Nokia Phone

A friend has told me that only old people (like me) still use email. Twitter and texting are the current ways of keeping in touch. There’s a good program from the BBC on the effects of mobile technology on daily life.

I’ve transcribed a few quotes (didn’t get all the names… listen to the whole program here on BBC World Service):

Sunita Singh:
“People sleep with their mobile phones switched on.” She later discusses a scandal in India that occurred when a 17 year-old boy, angry that his girlfriend had broken up with him, distributed video he took when they were having sex. (I know that this has also been a problem in Iran where young men secretly film young women having sex with them and then distribute it. Kamangir writes about this in Persian.)

Narrator:
“The MTV generation that’s wedded to the mobile phone also wants instant gratification …They zap boredom or loneliness wherever they may be.”

Sadie Plant:
“The mobile phone is the first technology that you need to sort of do some kind of public performance with.” (pdf link here)

Genevieve Bell talks about the way that the mobile phone is used as “a kind of social prompt” in S. Korea. People assign rings according to social status thus ensuring that they answer appropriately and preventing social missteps.

Nina Weerakkody talks about the fear that mobiles will allow “upper class women to have affairs with lower class men.”

We also here about mobiles in some parts of the Islamic world that, among other features, bring you the entire Koran in English and Arabic and a live call to prayer from Mecca.

The pope sends out daily sms messages! He got 3 million subscribers in just two months. “A photo of the pope inside the phone may be a holy religious icon.”

At funerals in Ghana, people send streaming video/sound to family that cannot make it in to the country. They also have coffins shaped like mobiles.

(not the latest news, I know. For that go here)

Bruce Conner, RIP

Jesse Walker | July 10, 2008, 8:30am
The great beatnik filmmaker Bruce Conner has died at age 74. No director has surpassed Conner’s ability to assemble preexisting found footage into something entirely new; in experimental movies rangling from his Zapruder-meets-Owsley short Television Assassination to his Devo video Mongoloid to his haunting dream-film Valse Triste, he laid the groundwork for the current explosion of remixes and mash-ups.

Read the rest at Reason

This should not stop you from taking the 5:10 to Dreamland…

Since the first time I saw a Bruce Conner film, I have been haunted by the images he produced. I am sure that I am not the only one. In fact, I am almost sure that the Science fiction writer William Gibson was haunted by Bruce Conner’s films when he wrote the book Pattern Recognition. If he wasn’t, I was.