I’m not sure if any of those bloggers who have been writing about the Adelaide Festival of Ideas have actually been asked to speak. If not, then that’s a pity. Adelaide might be different, but my own experience of the Brisbane Festival of Ideas has been that it follows a very similar dynamic to a Writers Festival, a conference session or a university seminar. Those who are privileged to be out the front of the theatre, or behind a table in a tent, are there because they’ve been anointed by someone or other as experts on something or other, and the interplay between them is usually calibrated to be *much more important* than that with the (relatively) passive audience, whose role is not to debate the “ideas” articulated, but to ask questions and wait for answers. Despite the fact that lots of folks go along to these events (which is good), and lots of folks who speak have interesting stuff to say (which is also good), it’s not really a very democratic format. I was thinking about all that in the context of Pavlov’s Cat’s stimulating reflections on the experience of blogging the Festival, and more particularly because of her great post on the session about media futures:
The attitudes expressed by these three people had reminded me anew of something I’ve fully realised only since I took up blogging: most people seem either unwilling or unable to go beyond the paradigm of the [journo/blogger] dichotomy. Maybe it’s a hangover from being picked for competing teams in primary school. Whatever it is, I’m thinking of having the words ‘It’s not a matter of either/or’ tattooed on my forehead.
I think she’s spot on about how lazy interpreting new media in terms of “can bloggers be/replace journalists?” and “will print disappear?”, and that hardy perennial “but isn’t most of that intertubes stuff about people’s cats?” are as questions – questions incidentally almost completely imported from a quite different American context where both cultures of debate and media cultures are quite different to ours here. But the mere fact that, as Pavlov’s Cat says, most of the speakers at the session, and a lot of the audience, couldn’t see the issues in any other frame than blogging as some sort of threat, either to be dismissed as trivial, or demeaned as not meeting the aspirations others have in fact made up for it, is significant. What’s interesting to me is that I suspect that there’s more interest in the bloggers’ reactions, and then more of a possibility of a conversation about the issues raised, than would be stimulated by actually attending some of the sessions. That’s an idea to think about.
Elsewhere: My other pick of the Festival posts so far is Gary Sauer-Thompson’s Indigenous futures post. And Gary has more on the media/blogger dichotomy – with some very astute points made.
Update [by Mark] Jason Soon examines yet another dumbassed MSM v. Bloggers piece.
Here’s some Media/Blogger dichotomy for ya.
Some folks are a little more open minded. Although it is sport which may not matter as much to the media culture gatekeepers as it probably does in other areas of expertise.
Kim:
Welcome to Australia!!
That’s the way we do things here. That’s how we shelter our lazy, incompetent, horribly expensive, pompous, ignorant failed elite from the necessity to strive, to discuss [let alone debate!], to learn, to be open-minded, to be innovative. That’s one of the many reasons why Australia, which once had an incredible abundance of natural resources and talent and was once admired and respected, is now nothing but a quarry, a brothel, a dumping ground for shoddy goods and a rubber-stamp for a foreign ruler [until he is impeached, that is].
If these losers hinder awkward questions and prevent vigorous debate. Gee, they can can feel really smug and clever ….. while the rest of the world, unimpressed by their little games, runs right over the top of them.
Pavlov’s Cat:
If only that would work
Graham, you seem to be hinting that Australia has somehow fallen short. What you are not taking into account is that a lot of people from a lot of countries have fallen short. Very.
Cheer up, old son. You can’t change the world! Laugh at it like me.
Kim, thanks for the link — I spent so much time writing that post that I’m glad a few more people will read it!
When I said that people were unable or unwilling to go beyond the paradigm of the dichotomy, I was actually extrapolating (or meant to be extrapolating) from ‘journo/blogger’ to ‘any dichotomy at all’ — that is, that people tend not to be able to get past the paradigm of the dichotomy as such, and that it gets imposed as a framework onto whatever the topic is. It would explain the power and persistence of what’s seen as the ‘left/right’ spectrum, and it would certainly explain the constant insistence from certain quarters that any feminist who doesn’t loudly denounce Islam and all its works must perforce be a hypocrite.
PYZO:
Ah yes. we’re way out in front in the race to go down the gurgler.
The situation is bad and worsening but it’s not hopeless. How do we take the agenda and the discussion away from the gatekeepers and yappers of the mainstream media, from the supposed exclusive experts of academia, from our noisy yet timid parliament? How do we stimulate an active involvement in important issues by the wider citizenry?
Agreed, Dr Cat, except that some dichotomies have their uses – as in the “left/right” one, because the forces and beliefs represented by the right side of the dichotomy are structurally much more powerful in this society, and therefore attempts to transcend or dissolve it usually end up collapsing quickly into a default conservative position. But one should always be critical of one’s preferred dichotomies!
I agree, Graham, there are a lot of false prophets. But I think you’ll have to wait until the people are downtrodden and angry. Then, as in France, they will finally listen, they will spring into action.
But don’t hold your breath!
The dichotomy versus spectrum thing is something that interests me very much. We all seem to know that any experience or set of ideas exist on a sliding scale ( or many sliding scales) and yet it always seems to come down to a dichotomy doesn’t it? My current (biologically determinist and quite crackpot) theory on why this might be is that the brain contains a lot of on/off cell arrays for processing information and the complexity of experience in for eg vision is coded by which sets are off and which sets are on at any given moment.
On a less crackpot note I think the pendulum is swinging toward a more concerted attempt to recognize spectra rather than either/or categories. (Because I am seeing this dichotomy/spectrum debate in a few different fields at the moment.)
Su, I love it. On/off would certainly explain it. And in terms of processing the complexity of experience it would certainly explain why some people just cannot get their heads around any form of nuance.
And of course, as you imply, spectrum/dichotomy isn’t a dichotomy either — the spectrum still exists as a line between two points and the two points still usually represent the terms of a dichotomy. Which is one of the implications of Kim’s excellent point, which I hadn’t thought about before, about returning to the default position.
I like the way the Political Compass plots one’s politics on a graph using four terms instead of two — they’re still dichotomies, but at least there are two of them.
As Pavlov’s Cat suggests, a spectrum is also a dichotomy. In terms of politics, the left/right distinction is in some ways historically arbitrary, but conversely reflects the form of political competition. We’re much better off if it has a content, though, rather than two parties with very similar worldviews and social bases competing as teams of elites for our support.
On the other issues raised by the post, I’ve also found some sessions at Ideas Festivals frustrating for similar reasons – and the comparison to Writers’ Festivals is a very apt one.
Fantabulous festival blogging by Pavlov’s Cat and Gary though. (I haven’t seen any Ideas Festival blogging from Tim yet).
Ooh yes – I’ve played with the compass. One thing that worried me is that if two people hold similar opinions about something, but do so for very different reasons should they inhabit the same point on the compass? I was trying to imagine what it would be like to argue with someone with whom I disagreed without ever once suggesting that they were wrong. I think it would feel like arguing at cross purposes or one of those frustrating conversations which consists of a string of “Yes, but…” constructions. (Which happily reminds me of Black Books and “The expensiver the wine, the gooder it is.” “Yes, but the older the wine the gooder it is also”).
SU:
No worries, Just add another dimension or two to cover “reasons/motives” and take it from there. That way you can disagree with them as much as you like — short of resorting to violence, of course — without ever saying they are wrong.
If you have to represent the various dimensions on paper you can use tricks like differing colours, thicknesses of line, symbols, fonts, etc. — this is simply stacking-up spectra but the overall effect is to give you, if you are lucky, a touch of nuance.
And that is the interesting thing isn’t it- that we seem to need those simple spectra as the base units (hence my crackpot theory). I may be being ethnocentric though- I remember a lecturer at uni saying that linear logic is not universal. He gave examples from New Guinea tribal languages.
Update [by Mark] Jason Soon examines yet another dumbassed MSM v. Bloggers piece.
SU:
.
Did notice you called your own hypothesis “crackpot” but, as the old saying goes, “If it works, it’s good engineering — if it doesn’t work, it’s a load of rubbish no matter how good it looks” so it mightn’t be quite as crackpot as you think.
This reminds me of something I used to wish while I was writing my thesis back in the mists of time: that someone would invent a sentence structure whose visual equivalent was the disco mirror ball, so that instead of having to say things sequentially, you could have small units of meaning/grammar functioning as rotating, reflective facets.
Imagine my delight when they invented hypertext, though of course by then it was far too late to help me with my thesis. I have glimpses, just every now and then, of the possibility that the regular use of hypertext and whatever evolves from it could actually change the way our brains are wired to produce meaning. Change it away from the linear, I mean, to something more three-dimensional.
That is fascinating PC. I have just been reading an entry on Helen De Witt’s blog about how hypertext could transform the novel. It would particularly suit her style. I loved the way she drew on so many different disciplines in The Last Samurai and I was quite happy to skip over the Greek and Japanese text, and to accept that Fourier transformations were important to the plot without knowing what they were. I think other people may have found it disconcerting and publishers certainly seem reticent to publish her again.
I am still too attached to books as objects to feel really happy about e books however.
“that someone would invent a sentence structure whose visual equivalent was the disco mirror ball, so that instead of having to say things sequentially, you could have small units of meaning/grammar functioning as rotating, reflective facets.”
Somebody once tried something like this, and the result is called “Finnegans Wake.” Very pretty in parts, but more or less impossible to comprehend.
It’s interesting that our brains are able to ‘comprehend’ (i.e. process) visual or audio information quite easily in the way that you’re describing, but that our communicative skills can only do so much with so many units at a time. (It’s not our actual, multi-vectored thoughts that are the problem, it’s the communicating them.)
Interesting too, to think that hypertext, and multiple windows, may start to train younger folks’ brains to think along more multiplicitous lines; I think in a way it started with montage technique in cinema. 300 years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to comprehend things like jump cuts and reverse angles at such dizzying speed; it wouldn’t make sense to you. Every so often some clever painter would do one simple reverse angle, like Las Meninas, and be proclaimed a master of astounding conceptual pyrotechnics. I often wonder what the dreams of people 500 years ago must have been like; probably a lot slower and with fewer discrete subjects, I’d bet.
The bizarre capabilities of computers, say, another 50 years from now, might possibly create cognitive capabilities in our grandchildren that would be utterly beyond us. I bet they’ll think that “Childhood’s End” was rather quaint.
EARTHLING: What the heck are they doing now?
ALIEN OBSERVER: We don’t quite know; but we call this, “the Long Dance.”