An online notebook
Sadly the UK Youth Engagement Barcamp, planned for the 17th May, has been postponed, due to a lack of venue. This is a shame as I was really looking forward to what was bound to be a cracking event, but with a bit more time to plan and figure things out, it should be even better.
The other upshot of this is that with the 17th now free, I could make MediaCamp Bucks, being held at New University Buckinghamshire, which looks pretty exciting. Thanks to Paul Henderson for pointing it out.
John Naughton links to an event taking place in Cambridge on 19th May:
Nick Davies, a well-known and award-winning investigative journalist, has recently published Flat Earth News, a controversial and highly-critical analysis of the British news media in which he argues that the business of truth has been “slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance”. The book examines national news stories which, Davies argues, “turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda.” With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a detailed analysis of the contents and sources for our daily news, Davies found that “most reporters most of the time are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts”, leading him to describe UK journalism as “a profession corrupted at the core”. In the book, he also presents a new model for understanding news.
I’ll be there – anyone else?
Having an iPhone has really liberated me in term of the way that I use Flickr. This would be true of any phone with decent internet connectivity, and indeed there are plenty of handsets out there with better camera functionality than the iPhone. But the ability to easily take a picture and upload it to Flickr via email in a matter of seconds is fantastic – like this, which I took in Chipping Norton yesterday:
This has led me to have a bit of a wonder about Flickr and where the value of it lies. One thing Flickr does brilliantly is to create a community of photographers, from amateurs through to seasoned professionals, who discuss one another’s photos and chat about lenses, resolutions and whatnot.
But Flickr has another community too – people out on the streets with cameraphones, who don’t really care about the angles of the shots they are taking, wh just want to capture the moment and share it online. Such users can easily find themselves at the forefront of important events, thrust into the role of citizen journalist.
These two communities exist side-by-side rather well, despite the fact that they are using the same service for quite different purposes. Which is more important to Flickr, I wonder – and which to society?
As part of our work social reporting the Digital Inclusion conference last week, David and I agreed to write some posts building on what we had done on DC10plus’ own blog, which is hosted at WordPress.com .
The first of my posts has now gone up – do subscribe to the blog for some interesting reflections on technology and local government service delivery.