Our Man Inside

We may never know the Impact social media had in shaping our new rather bewildering government.

Maybe it reached a lethargic non-voting population and changed their minds. Perhaps it taught the party campaigners to engage with more mobile tools in order to rally their troops. Maybe all it did was introduce other channels of communication to the mix.
All I know is it certainly played a part.

@CraigElder sources David Cameron questions on Twitter to answer at The Open University

Perhaps now with new Natural Language Processing tools for measuring our online sentiment we will finally get an idea of how much of an impact these new media tools are having in the mindset of the general voting public. This is both amazing and scary to me. We seem so desperate to know yet many of us are just having fun. Playing with tech as tools.

It was @Ilicco and Reuters that though it was OK to let the geeks loose with tech in close proximity to the leaders of our parties. And as the security perimeters thinned with each encounter, Brown to Cameron to Clegg.. we would try out more tools and techniques experimenting ways to bring the outside conversations in and to share the conversations we had with everyone. There were times when Ilicco wondered how much trouble we may or may not get into. That said.. I don’t think he ever stopped having fun.

Some of these groundbreaking platforms championed by @Sleepydog lived only during this extreme period of change. His coders would use zero’s and one’s like lego. All the bits are now back in the box. Till next playtime.

We were not too hung up on the quality of anything, be it the video stream or the questions I would slip into whatever conversations we were having. I do remember feeling excited and sharing way too much coffee with friends who’d been given the opportunity to collaborate on projects that excited and inspired.

It was a social media playground like no other. Mobile phones verses the HD stream. Political pundits verses the twitter stream with in many ways the geeks given free rein.

I’m not sure if we will ever again see such a massive change in communication in such a short space of time. Not to the extent that Reuters championed. It was the beach on which the waves of old and new media crashed ..and we all got wet.

Now everyone and their dog is a ‘Social Media Expert’ the air is muggy with hot air and opinion claiming the right and wrong way to engage using real-time web tools.

In the words of Yoda, “Do or do not… There is no try.”

Participation is the key and feeling free enough to play allows you to subconsciously learn from your mistakes.

The people who were both in the rooms and working remotely in these projects are too many to mention. Perhaps they would like to link in or comment their experiences below.

Some names of note were: @Ilicco, @Sizemore, @Sleepydog, @Loudmouthman, @Kate_Day, @SolobassSteve, @benjaminellis, @MarkJones, @CliveFlint, @Sophiebr

The unquantifiable nature of all this will be just a memory next time round. The tools are coming and although I feel we are a long time away from totally understanding the impact from this kind of exchange, we are getting closer all the time.

If I’m honest it’s the metrics that excite me the least.  Let the practitioners experiment, explore, dance around new ways. For every ten people willing to show the way, there will be ten thousand wanting to sell you the map.

“When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.” ~ Alan Watts

I am @Documentally on Twitter and mostly blog on http://Documental.ly

P.S Lets remind these guys what they promised the people..

PPS, In this last coffee soaked audioboo I meant to say megabits not megabytes..

My friend Phil wrote to me from Kirkuk, he’s researching this story on the Arab-Kurd situation. It’s slow going, but he summarises it all with one sentence. No one wants to compromise, there’s a low level war already underway and things could get more dangerous in a year or two. All sort of grim.

For months now he has wanted to get a photo agency together. It’s a collaborative effort between himself, his brother Chris Sands and Emma LeBlanc.

They wanted to start a small independent photo agency (called Makoto) specialising in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria – the places they live and work.

The idea grew out of a certain frustration over the photography of which we see more and more, particularly on the internet – Images divorced from context, divorced from the world and, in fact, divorced from any real meaning they might otherwise have had.

Too often photos are not even captioned, and those that are don’t always seem to offer enough explanation. They reduce everything to the 125th-of-a-second that the photo was taken in, without offering any of the before or any of the after.

Without this, the images become very disposable. With the glut of photos out there, it just becomes a morass. Click, click, click your way thoughtlessly through to the next link, the next meaningless photo. Everyone seems preoccupied with the image that punctuates the ‘breaking news’ too concerned to be first to really care about the story.

It’s the opposite of what journalism, or photo journalism, or documentary photography – whatever you want to call it – ought to be.

Phil talked to me of how the conception of ‘Makoto‘ gleaned inspiration from the book ‘Vietnam Inc‘ by the late Philip Jones Griffiths. A man I was fortunate enough to meet at The Frontline Club a few years ago. He says.. “What makes it so important is that his photos were accompanied by these incredible, searing, passionate, insightful explanations. He gave the context. That’s one of the reason it was all so powerful.  In that book Philip Jones Griffiths sets out the marker that we should all aspire to, the standard to aim at.”

I have to agree. The internet should not become a medium for shoving out more photos, at a faster rate, skimming ever more over the surface. It should be a way of accessibly going into more detail, of accessibly providing deeper insight. Micro/rapid blogging still has a place to disseminate but micro blogging should not mean micro context.

Makoto is also something of a reaction against parachute journalism, which has been really rammed home with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A decent number of photographers who were in Iraq for the war (the war that hasn’t actually finished) have now packed up and gone to Afghanistan, as if somehow one war is interchangeable with the next, as if the Afghans are the same as the Iraqis.

There’s surprisingly little commitment to sticking with a story. It’s as if everyone has Attention Deficit Disorder. Either that or photographers are generally on a mission to collect as many visa stamps as possible in their passports.

Makoto wants to make a point of not being like that; Chris Sands has lived in Afghanistan for coming up on five years. Back in 2005 it wasn’t remotely trendy but he was there, doggedly chipping away at his work. Learning about the people and the place. It’s now grabbing all the headlines but presumably it won’t be in a year/two/three/four from now. But he plans to stick with it. Similarly Phil Sands his brother arrived in Iraq in 2003. He has stuck with it since.

I feel that by concentrating on a place, by trying to specialise, it’ll pay dividends in the breadth and depth of their work, in the details. In a simple way that might show through in a photo essay that has images in it spanning two or three years, not one week or one month.

There’s also a matter of respect. If you are reporting on a place properly, you come to care about the issues, about the people. It’s hard to walk away from that and, if you’re doing your job properly, perhaps you can’t or shouldn’t walk away. That’s also an old fashioned journalistic axiom that is being abandoned – live on your patch. Try to live as close to the story as you can. How many times are Syria stories reported from Lebanon? One British newspaper used to report Afghanistan from Pakistan, for God’s sake, even though the British Army was (and is) at war there. Why not just report everything from London and have done with it?

So, context and commitment. These are their goals. Time will tell if they succeed in coming anywhere near hitting them.

I remember getting Phil an old Nikon 301 and giving him a five minute lesson on ISO’s before he flew to Iraq for the first time. He has worked wonders with that camera and every camera he has had since.. A wordsmith using pictures the right way.

But that’s the other thing about their photo agency. The key idea is that the narrative behind the photos is as important as the photos themselves. In journalism, what’s the point in a technically perfect photo if it’s just hanging in isolation; at that point it’s just an art object.

We need to know the back story. The subtext. We need the ‘why’ answered. The nasty, irritating, all-important why; that thing that no one much bothers themselves with these days because it just to much like hard work to understand. Again, if the photographer doesn’t understand that, how can the photographs hope to portray it?

This is the reason each photo essay on the site is an essay. They start with a written explanation that anyone looking at the stuff should read. The words say the things the photos cannot. And each photo is captioned. Not in some narrow sense of saying what the picture shows, but by putting it into a context – putting it into a place within the wider narrative whole.

The site is at www.makotophotographic.com Please spread the word.

If we are to protect ‘quality’ journalism when we need it most, we need more sites like this.

When I told people I was to be sat on a panel with Paul Carr from the Guardian a couple responded.. “Paul Carr? He’s a bit of a dick.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“It says so on his twitter profile.”

Fair enough I thought, but when I met him he was just frank and very funny.

The video of the panel we did at the #140conf is floating around somewhere in the ether. I may even drop it in a blog soon.

What I have here in the mean time is a brief conversation with Paul at the end of the day. We were on the way out the door and both of us had cold beer on our minds. That’s probably why this is not so much an interview as a chat in a corridor over a conference when what we really wanted (and had later) was a chat over a beer.. well away from the conference.

There is more about Paul Carr on his Wikipedia page..

Linked Here is the article he wrote for the Guardian while at the 140conf

This video was filmed with the assistance of Matt (@barnstormed) and is also on the Open University You Tube channel so go view it there and show some love..

During the 140 characters conference in New York I got to connect with some really fascinating people.

Moeed Ahmed is the Supervisor of Internet Media, New Media section with Aljazeera in Doha, Qatar. With the help of Matt (@Barnstormed), I managed to grab a few words with him at my hotel.

This interview and others will also appear on the Open University website ‘Platform‘.

More information on Aljazeera can be found at http://www.aljazeera.net

Follow me on twitter at Twitter.com/Documentally

Here is a phone call between the Independent Newspaper and myself as I try to resolve the issue of my photo being published without my permission in this story.

I must add that this is not the first time it has happened. I had to make similar calls regarding photography taken in Iraq. Once a photo has been kept on file (with or without permission) it is impossible to know if it is being used unless you buy every newspaper every day. It is especially difficult, as in this instance, when a picture has not been captioned at all.

This is lazy journalism, but above all, disrespectful to those supplying you with the content to fill your pages.

I am writing an invoice to them now and will keep you posted..

Today whilst passing through London and before descending into the tube, I just happened to pop outside Euston train station and spotted Tony Benn sat on a bench lighting his pipe.

I was on the way down to Southampton to pick up a car and although I have no idea what made me pop outside the station after getting off the train, I am glad i did.

I was not going pass up the opportunity to chat with a lifelong hero of mine so I wondered over and introduced myself.

We had a brief discussion about the National Union of Journalists before I suddenly remembered I had in my bag a pro stills camera, a web enabled mobile phone and a mini video camera.

Although Tony Benn only had about five minutes to catch his train to Preston he was kind enough to humour me as I conducted a short interview on video.. I then took a few stills and showed him how easy it was using Qik to stream from a mobile phone.

Tony is no stranger to being interviewed or filmed as he spends much of his life on the lecture circuit in the public eye. It was the quick demo of the technology around live streaming from a mobile device straight to the web that seemed to interest him the most.

In about three minutes we were done and a slightly amazed Tony Benn took my card and invited me to get in touch so I could introduce him to more of this technology.

It was a really great start to the day for me. Totally unexpected and I was glad I had my ‘geek’ bag at the ready.

I have been a fan of Tony Benn and his work for a while now and am so glad to have finally met him. Not only that, but as a great bonus I now have his home number and hope to do a more in depth interview in the future.

Here is the same video on YouTube

..and my thoughts on Qik straight afterwards.