Pretty much sums up what the Nuclear Pearls section of this website is all about:
My deepest fantasy is that, in my meanderings on this site, we will produce a piece of language that is useful to you. Not a slogan; not a quip or a retort, though if we do happen to provide those I’m happy to be of service. What I actually want to do is to create a useful linguistic tool that will improve your life, or has a life of its own, used over and over until the original source has been completely filed away.
That represents real success, as I define it: ubiquity and anonymity, in equal measure.
Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the 21st Century, which happens to be the one you’re living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.
I told my dad about this paragraph. “I heard something about cloning but nothing about teleporting. But I went fishing.”
Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? . . . really I think they’re talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion.
My dad thinks newspapers will never die out because they’ll cater for the ‘old fellows, like me.’ He’s not that old, to be honest. But he’s right about newspapers not dying out – for totally the wrong reasons. Take a look at the Newspaper Club’s playful agitpropapowerpoint to see why:
There are magnificent bits of infrastructure just lying around
Here’s the Ignite talk the two bits of sloganeering come from. (PS As it’s Russell Davies at an Ignite event, he’s unlikely to be using PowerPoint. Agitpropakeynote sounds even worse than agitpropapowerpoint, though):
People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.
The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
With the brutal vernacular materials we had before, the Capital-F Future was pretty much all we could build. What else could you possibly build from Fordlandia and a gnawing phobia of nuclear holocaust?
Now we have playful, cheap and cheerful/nasty vernacular materials; we can build all the futures we want, probably.
Oddly, this version of England in the 1970s works just as well, if not slightly better, in Spanish. Foreign voiceovers still have a knack for benign pomposity that our absurd news services have killed:
This is a zoom lens. It was invented by Thomas Rudolphus Dalmeyer in 1891 . It’s common tech now, but it was a big deal in the early days of film.
The idea behind the zoom lens was that, as a director, you could save money during a shoot by changing the zoom on a lens, instead of taking one lens off and putting another one on. That takes time, and it’s cumbersome and expensive to have to carry around a lot of lenses. With the zoom lens, it’s simpler. You film your wide shot, cut, zoom in, reframe, roll, and shoot the close-up.
It was a while before the first actual zoom shot was ever filmed. (That is, actually rolling and exposing frames, while zooming the lens.) But when it did, someone realized you could use this. A shot zooming in conveyed emphasis, surprise, intensity visually. It was a new storytelling element made possible by a new bit of tech.
Zoom Lens is a great metaphor for the latent potency available in all of our tools. I suppose you could say it’s kind of an opposite of the skeuomorph and path dependence:
Skeuomorph or skeuomorphism is a term used in the history of architecture, design, and archaeology. It refers to a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to structure that was necessary in the original . . . Skeuomorphs are differentiated from path dependent technologies such as the QWERTY keyboard which first appeared on the typewriter in 1873. The layout was designed so that frequently used pairs of letters were separated in an attempt to stop the typebars from intertwining and becoming stuck, thus forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars. Though no longer required since electrical switches beneath the keys replaced mechanical typebars, the QWERTY layout is still used for English language computer keyboards because of the existing investment in QWERTY typing education. Scholars therefore differentiate left-over technologies like the QWERTY keyboard, with its economic justification, from the pure design touches of the skeuomorph.
“What is it that I like so much about the house you’re building for me, Howard?”
“A house can have integrity, just as a person,” said Roark, “and just as seldom.”
“In what way?”
“Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it – and for no other reason. You see it here from the inside. The rooms in which you live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis on the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you’ve seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, mouldings, false arches, false windows. You’ve seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find six stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with the facade cut up into floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.”
We needed columns to support the wooden structures in ancient Greece. We don’t need them now; skeuomorphs denote slavery to nostalgia.
We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
I saw this come up in RSS feeds and Twitter timelines to an extent that either means (a) it resonates with all the people I follow on the webs or (b) it resonates with me and I was primed to spot the refs. I suspect it was a bit of both. It’s by Jonah Lehrer and it’s appeared on Wired and on his own blog.
Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.
It’s interesting that the piece was on Wired for a month before anybody I know picked it up. (My network are far quicker at processing my RSS feeds than I am.)
Jonah’s conclusions about how to deal with a universe of clocks and clouds is also worth discussion:
So how do we see the clouds? I think the answer returns us to the vintage approach of the Victorians. Right now, the life sciences follow a very deductive model, in which researchers begin with a testable hypothesis, and then find precisely the right set of tools to test their conjecture. Needless to say, this has been a fantastically successful approach. But I wonder if our most difficult questions will require a more inductive method, in which we first observe and stare and ponder, and only then theorize.
Shamelessly putting words into Jonah’s mouth, this means the return of Neo-Victorian dilettantism. Which can only be a good thing.
[I've name phrases like 'The Master Narrative' as nuclear pearls because they accrete around an irritation and contain a massive amount of power/information. Jay Rosen reminds me (D'oh!) that there already is a name for these things ie 'term of art'. Ho hum. Anyway, they're interesting and that's why I've started a collection here - it's all part of my 'Is there a Moore's Law for human speech?' thing, which I haven't posted yet.]
Press think has terms of art, and one of them is “master narrative,” borrowed from literary critics. I use it to describe a part of the press that too easily eludes attention: the big story, sometimes the back story, often a fragment of a narrative, that generates all the other stories, which are smaller pieces.
Individual reports we can summarize, index, and criticize, especially today with the explosion of citizen critics on the Web. But there is no reliable index to replicating patterns in news coverage. Your local newscaster may tell you, “here’s a list of stories we’re working on for NewsFour at 11:00,” but there is nowhere listed the story forms from which this repetitive content flows. A given work of journalism will have an author’s byline, but in some measure the author is always “journalism” itself and its peculiar habits of mind. You can’t interview that guy.
In standard coverage of political campaigns, where one goal is always to appear nonpartisan and above the fray, the master narrative has for a long time been winning— who’s going to win, who seems to be winning, what the candidates are doing to win, how much money it takes to win, how the primary in South Carolina is critical to winning and so on. Reporters call this the horse race, one of the rare occasions on which they have aptly named their own master narrative and recognized it as a story machine— almost an appliance for cooking news….
Most people who pay attention to politics know that candidates who cannot win are safely ignored by the press until they threaten to affect the outcome. Then they become part of the story because they fit its terms. Winning, then, is the story that produces all (or almost all) the other stories; and when you figure in it you are likely to become news. This is a relatively non-partisan, apparently neutral, sometimes technical and of course reusable device, easily operated, and it maintains an agreed-upon narrative, which then maintains the press tribe as one tribe. In this way, master narratives resembles myths as anthropologists understand them.
Were “winning” to somehow get removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend.
I suppose it would be easy to see the Master Narrative as evidence of patriarchal/colonial/hegemonic/whatever structures attempting to coerce blah blah blah. But it’s as easy to see the Master Narrative as archetypal/oceanic/mythical too. I suspect it’s a combination of these, and other, elements.
As I said above, it’d be easy to see the ‘master narrative’ as being about blah blah. Here’s a commenter on Jay Rosen’s piece:
I believe the word “Master” in “Master Narrative” is quite telling. It evokes images of colonialism and slavery. Whether one formulates a master narrative, critiques one or denies its existence; whether one applauds the virtues of existing in the postmodern condition, rails against it, or denounces it as a hoax seems to me irrelevant. So long as those in the educated middle class focus their lens on debate rather than direct action, or rather stop at the door of debate and refuse to pass through the unchartered passageway of political and social engagement, they are benefactors of this narrative, i.e., they are masters owing to the fact that they have chosen to spend their time deliberating such abstractions and not entering the trenches. Or as Woody Allen put it, “Those porno movies are really digusting, and they are so poorly lit.”
But, as Jay Rosen points out, there are good reasons for choosing/using a master narrative. On why ‘winning’ is the master narrative for stories about elections:
Yet I repeat: to choose winning as master narrative is a defensible move, non sinister. Its logic has over time settled, the way sediments settle and become earth. Journalists walk that earth. But they are not the only ones— candidates, contributors, consultants, pollsters join them. That’s significant since these people tend to be regular sources for journalists— and one way you negotiate with sources is by agreeing on a common narrative, (W for Winning) the way musicians might settle on the key of F.
The master narrative as boundary object makes non-sinister sense.
Here’s an interesting take on the idea of the Master Narrative from wikileaks:
Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled “NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative”, details the “story” NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.
Post-script:
What is ‘news’?
All of these definitions come from the first page of returns on a Google search (November 18, 2009) for the question, “What is news?”
Some definitions:
“Current or recent events broadcasted over a distribution medium or word of mouth. “ Wiki-answers
“News is stuff someone doesn’t want you to write. The rest is advertising”
What is “news” and what is “unethical”? Ted Neward’s blog
News informs, editorials seek to convince. News value is calculated by weighing news determinants and they are timeliness (“news is perishable”), prominence (“important people are more newsworthy than others”), proximity, consequence (“that which directly affects the reader has more news value”), Human Interest ie oddity, conflict, emotion “Notice! Exaggerating or distorting information based upon these factors is sensationalism”
The Gully What is news?
“When people think of news, they usually think of the stories and photographs which will appear on today’s newspaper front-pages – a significant occurrence which is ongoing or recent. News is often new to people… This crash on the highway to Abu Dhabi probably won’t be of much interest to a visitor or newspaper editor in Vienna. But to an Emirati, perhaps one of the thousands who regularly uses this road, this would be interesting news… This photograph of a blind woman in Uganda was uploaded as part of a story about life with sight-problems in the country. It prompts viewers to consider an aspect of African life that they may have not previously considered… Another example, this time from Milan, is photography from a tattoo convention. They are striking images, and provide a fascinated insight into an industry few people have contact with.”
What is news? Demotix
“Stories that are not time-sensitive but that focus on significant issues are often called “news features.” A story about one community’s struggle to deal with AIDS, for example, is a news feature. A story about a new treatment option for AIDS patients would be hard news.”
What is news? America.gov
“News has two priorities: it must be current, and it must mean something to people. A story about the environment and a story about the Oscars can both be newsworthy, for different reasons. On the surface at least, the objective of news is to inform the audience. It’s the job of all the news media to tell people what’s going on in their community – locally, nationally or globally. In this sense, the news media provide a valuable public service.”
What is News? Media Awareness Network
“News is something people WANT to know (interest) or NEED to know (public service).”
Lesson 1: Finding News BBC News educational website
“How do journalists decide what is news and what is not? How do they distinguish between a big news story and a small one? The answer is that they do it in exactly the same way as everybody else. Everybody makes those same judgments whenever they decide to talk about one event rather than another”
What is news? The News Manual
(Some more quotes on the question of ‘What is news?’ from The News Manual.)
It’s interesting to apply a master-narrative lens to these quotes. Like I say, it’s a useful Boundary Object.
