Director’s Blog

By Chrysostomos Agapitos (Polis Summer School student, 2010)

Some years ago, I came up with this naïve idea for a short story. The plot revolved around a group of people being locked up in a room whose walls consist of millions of distorting lenses. I never actually wrote that story down. But, thinking it over through the years, I kept asking the same question over and over again: Could our world be similar to this?

Over the years the globe has become smaller, forcing people like Marshal McLuhan admit that we are all living in a “global village”[1]. The new techniques that have emerged to serve the needs of market economy have affected our perception of two significant dimensions: Time and space compression, is, according to David Harvey, one of the major traits of this era[2].

Telecommunications and media played a major part in this outcome. In their attempt to facilitate capitalistic endeavors, it was media technologies that promoted the transition towards the overcoming of spatial barriers in the first place[3]. As history has shown, changes in technology might result in outcomes  no one could ever have predicted beforehand. (more…)

15th Century Geek

I work in a modern tower block office in an alley where an Internet was invented in the 15th century.

Let me explain.

After about 1422 Henry V started writing his letters in English instead of Latin. These were the documents that allowed him to exercise power. They were the business email of the time. Their purpose was to make and carry out the laws of the land. But they were often also made public as a way of letting everyone know what was going on. They told the English people about everything from battles to taxes. So they  were also the journalism of the age. (more…)

One of the functions of international reporting is supposed to be that journalists can warn the world of impending disasters. The idea is that intrepid hacks can spot looming conflicts or humanitarian catastrophes and help persuade governments or other agencies to intervene. In practice, this ain’t necessarily so. By it’s nature, news journalism tends to focus on what has happened, not what is coming up. And there is no doubt that pressures on resources make it harder for mainstream media to find time for that kind of analytical, predictive journalism.

So do we need a new special media body to do this? (more…)

Messing With Media

Whose election is this? That was the question I am left with at the end of a fascinating week where I have heard directly from a top Labour campaign strategist, Welsh voters, and LSE political pundits. If you believe the mainstream media it is in the hands of the spin doctors and journalists. The pollsters and professors say it’s ‘motorway man’ in the marginals. I am not so sure

  (more…)

For a global elite who care about the big international issues such as climate change, economic regulation or conflict and security, modern media is a wondrous but worrying thing. Thanks to great multi-national brands like the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera or the New York Times we have fantastic trans-national news resources. While the Guardian only has 300,000 sales in the UK, it has 30 million readers online across the world. And yet at the same time the level of foreign correspondents, international coverage and the commitment to understanding global stories is declining in the hard-pressed mainstream media.

This was the problem that Columbia President Lee Bollinger sought to solve in a Polis lecture that used his new book about media freedom of expression as a springboard to discuss the kind of journalism we need for a globalised world. [The podcast will be up soon, as will a full report on the actual lecture] ‘Your news is our news now’ he said. And the implication is that therefore we also share a need to find a solution to what threatens it.  His answer was surprising and in a Chatham House Rules dinner afterwards was challenged by a former Fleet Street editor, a senior Conservative MP, and assorted UK academics, lawyers and an economist. (more…)

A view of the world

Travelling around New York City at the weekend with my two teenage boys was a reminder of just how globalised our culture has become with shops, music and even art looking distinctly familiar to my young Londoners.

An all-day seminar today on world media seemed to suggest that global journalism has some trans-national trends, too. But as ever, look closer and the cracks appear. (more…)

We have all got to stop believing in the Monkey Myth of the Internet and Democracy, according to Evgeny Morozov, speaking at  Polis. By this he means that the current wishful thinking is that the Internet works like the monkey and the typewriter. Leave it alone to bash away and probability theory says that eventually it will write out the complete works of Shakespeare.

Evgeny was talking primarily about how digital optimists think that somehow, naturally, inevitably, the Internet will bring democracy to authoritarian regimes like China, Iran and Russia. But his argument can also apply to hopes for E-Democracy in liberal states, too. (more…)

Ten years I saw the millennium out at midnight on top of Parliament Hill in north London, looking forward to a new job at Channel 4 News and enjoying the return to my home city London after eight years in Oxford. I would never have guessed how my life and my industry would have changed since then.

I lived and worked through the upheavals of 1989 which I still think are of greater historical weight than 9/11 and the War on Terror. But there is no doubting that the economic and climatic shocks of this past decade have been seismic. And this has all co-incided with the biggest set of changes in the way that humans communicate since the invention of mass printing. (more…)

A debate at Demos on whether the Internet is changing politics answered “Yes, but”. With four very different speakers you got four different views.

Tom Watson MP was effusive and positive about the Internet as usual but what I like is that he recognises that any results will depend on political will, not technological facility.

John Lloyd was rather more sceptical – he calls himself a ‘techno hater’. But in fact his evidence seemed to offer as much ground for optimism. Even in Russia, apparently, an intelligent independent blogosphere is starting to emerge.

We will hear more from the excellent Evgeny Morozov at Polis on January 12th – but suffice to say that he points out how those in power are at least as good at using the Net for negative ends, as dissidents are at using it for democratic purposes.

But most lucid on this night was the Conservatives Head of New Media [rather old fashioned title Rishi?] Rishi Saha. (more…)