the brain boxes at Google have unveiled their latest innovation this week. Ngram is a programme which allows you to type in any word in the dictionary and see how often it has appeared in print since the birth of mass publishing. The possibilities for history scholars is endless and cultural studies professors have already come up with a name for it, "culturonomics". But the aim is that an 8 year-old should also a be able to manage their way around the site.
Here's the link, try it for yourself: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
I put in a few and thought I'd show you the results for capitalism and communism. Interesting, very interesting (red is communism and blue is capitalism. obviously).
Opinion of the Week: Let Journalist be Journalist
Some journalist report the story, and some, a very few –whose
ideas are worthy enough, become the story. Christopher Hitchens is one of those
very few. His career has always been about railing against authority, be they
political or celestial and his long standing views are both very well developed
and a constant headline maker. The recent outpouring of support has brought him
a wave of public sympathy from both sides of the Atlantic, but it would be
remiss of me to say that it has also brought pleasure to some.
So why hasn’t he been a household name for years? Admittedly
he is a little too high brow for most households but there is also another
reason. He is part British, part American and so unlike his brother he doesn’t
have a newspaper column or regular guest spots on political TV programmes. In a
recent interview for Charlie Rose he explained why it was that he felt the need
to leave the UK for the USA. This was the reason he gave:
“If you show any promise as a writer in London, that fine,
but you keep feeling that you have to pass through a series of test and hoops;
‘he’s quite promising and so forth.’ You can die of that kind of encouragement.
Whereas in America if you are willing to take the chance and say ‘here I am,
try this’ you don’t feel that you are having to go through these stages of
evolution.”
Whilst I am a writer of sorts, I’m not the sort of writer
who is paid /commented on/cited/read, so I am nowhere near the standard that
Hitchens is or was when he crossed the Atlantic. That said, with the little
experience that I do have as a journalist I can see exactly where he is coming.
Writing and journalism, from where I stand, has become straightforward and formulaic.
If you’re a novelist, where your job is to distract people from hellish tube
journeys then the consequences aren’t that grave –though if you’ve looked in
the fiction section of Waterstone’s they are disheartening, if you’re a
journalist, where the craft of writing and the grit of endeavour fuse, then the
consequences are a little more severe.
The situation in the UK is very much that if you can only
report on salacious topics and you can only write about what you know; on the
face of it this might seem a perfectly logical standpoint (personally as a
journalist I can only write about what it is like to be young or black, or if
I’m lucky and the editor has some vision, young and black). But new ideas
become shut out as it just becomes a constant loop of the same old same old
commenting on and reporting on issues of the day, a fresh outsider perspective
can give some new insight and information, people want good reporting and to be
challenged in their ideas not just comforted in them. That for me is the job of
a journalist. It seems odd, to me at least, that when an industry is as on its
knees as journalism professes to be it should not allow for new ideas and new
ways of doing things and indeed new perspectives.
This is my own example of something that many people have
experienced. i.e. the marketisation of what they love and its subsequent
dumbing down – but for journalism this is a dangerous trend as they perform
such a vital duty. John Pilger’s recent documentary on the Iraq war, entitled
“The War You Don’t See” laid into the free press of the UK because of such
narrow mindedness. When reporting on the war, without exception, the major news
outlets chose to embed their forces with the military rather than report independently.
This meant that stories of soldiers committing atrocities and the true
devastation of shock and awe were never dealt with until afterwards; the
procession of tanks with journalist in toe moved on to the next story, or
indeed got stuck on the same story (the fall of Basra was reported as breaking
news story 17 times).
When comparing the
free press of the UK with that of Russia, Pilger has recounted this story to further hit the point home:
“During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists
toured the United States. On the final day of their
visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. 'I have to tell
you,' said their spokesman, 'that we were astonished to find after reading all
the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues
were by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison
people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret?
How do you do it?”
In
trying to report the story war correspondents became too close to those whose
actions they were there to report on, shattering any hope of objectivity.
For
(young) writers who have a different approach there a series of hoops,
essentially drills, designed to get you thinking a certain way and essentially
taking the new ideas and beating them out of you.
The
point Hitchens makes is that he simply wouldn’t have been allowed to get away
with some of the things that he has written if he stayed in Blighty; in the
land of opportunity and freedom perhaps it’s the case that controversial
opinions can flourish. Hitchens though is an exception, an exception that makes
me want to read everything ever written by De Tocqueville and dream of a journalist
utopia where ideas are ranked on purely on their strength and not on their “angle”,
but an exception nonetheless.
In the
main journalism is driven by what everything is driven by in the end – market forces.
But the importance of free thinking journalism is as important to a free
society as galleries or free school meals. Journalists perform a function and
are there to serve a purpose, reporting on a story for viewers means being
innately sceptical, not accepting the line from a politician or a soldier or
anyone in authority, constantly having an inquisitive nature and putting ideas
out there in all there unformed, unpopular glory. It’s surely in the job
description somewhere. Ummm... where did I leave that copy of “Democracy in America?”
Music of the Week: Post rock instrumental I
Along with fusion jazz and Scandinavian pop this is my favourite sub genre at the moment, so I've put together this collection of a couple of classics (Explosions and Mogwai) and something you may not have heard of. This is my first playlist on this genre, but it wont be the last.
track listing
Explosions in the Sky - Day 1
Mogwai - Tracy
Tallships - beanieanddodger
Explosions in the sky - Day1 by oomphstations
Tracy - Mogwai by Fernandon
Tall Ships - Beanieandodger by bsmrocks
Video of the Week: Physical Theatre
Summer 2010, and whilst at the Edinburgh Festival I saw 'Inside', an intense physical theatre piece which captured the imagination. Intense and abstract and more powerful than any dialogue, here is a snippet from their show. The second video takes abstract physical theatre to its limits and is entitled "Sideways Rain." Enjoy.
N.B. toby raves will be taking a break for a while to enjoy Xmas and so wont be back to mid January; their may be the odd video to pass the time but that will be it. So have a good Christmas and see you in January. Toby Bakare
Sideways Rain - (excerpt 1) from Alias/Guilherme Botelho on Vimeo.
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