jgthink.com

#somecomms Conference, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester - 3rd March 2011

2011-03-22T13:17:00.004Z

Notes

Rob Brown / @robbrown
• Ideas are borrowed and shared
• The social media revolution is as significant as the arrival of the printing press
• Social media in the UK is now mainstream: as of yesterday more than half the UK population is on Facebook
• Average Twitter user is 39 years old / Average Facebook user is 38
• If something is interesting it *will* be on Twitter
• The vital ingredients for a great social media campaign: strong news appeal, sharability, tapping into current national mood, speed of response, challenging convention

Mark Jennings / Fresh Networks / @markofrespect
• Location-based: Checking into a store/football stadium/whatever says something about you• Checking in around London, get people to chase the Choos• Social media campaign picked up by traditional media – important that this happens because it gets the attention of the people who you didn’t reach with your social media campaign• Good for brand-awareness – engage people in something fun• Audience – For people who don’t know much about location-based, Facebook Places will be the first place they’ll try it and when that happens it will be huge

Steve Waddington / Speed / @wadds• Blogging – high praise for Wordpress• Blogs give a website more dynamism, energy, keeps it fresh, sharable content and makes it better for SEO• 40+ employees at Speed have blogging written into their job spec. As a result of this, blogging is second nature to Speed staff• Critical thing about blogging – be authentic• Don’t blog if: there are legal issues around being too transparent, e.g., pharmaceuticals companies, or if you haven’t got your tone of voice right

Patrick Altoft / Dir. of Search at Branded 3 / @patrickaltoft / @Branded3• SEO• #Twittition is MASSIVE – in the UK evening (when more people are active in US) someone signs a #Twittition every second• Lots of automation – auto-tweeting, auto-following (2 Twitter accounts)• competwition.com

Paul Fabretti / Origin Creative /• Future of Social Media• Take mobile seriously – interact with website• Social search – Bing already integrates Facebook likes• Buying in a social way is huge – Facebook buying is huge – Facebook allows us to be more social than any other social media platform• Badgeville – rewards you with credit points which equate to currency (Next Web article)• Social TV – whole nations of people are talking to each other via Twitter while watching the same TV show #scd , etc. Programmes are starting to incorporate social elements• As for organisations using social media, remember, it’s not about shiniest new tool, more about understanding behaviours of audiences• Multiskilled staff are now required

Gez Daring / @gezd / KMP Digitata / Manchester Airport Campaign / @manairport• Who does social media sit with at Manchester Airport? Press office? Marketing? Answer is all of them• Organisations need a strategy in place to enable more staff to use social media• Use Twitter for: marketing; PR (breaking news to the Press before a press release is prepared, time-critical events like the Snow and the Ash Cloud); customer service; making friends• Having a presence in social media isn’t enough anymore – give people a reason to follow you, e.g. ‘RT this and you’ll go into a draw to win...’ What does your audience want? • DM ‘FLIGHT + [flight number]’ to @manairport and you’ll have realtime updates about your flight DM’d to you• Twitter – tone has to be friendly, conversational and informative• Support partner organisations – RTing other orgs increases trust in you because you’re not solely pushing your own stuff (self-absorbed)• Responding to negative feedback.. Immediately: ‘sorry you’re not happy, what can we do?’ then do it (online action > offline action). If you deal with the issue well, it’ll turn negative feedback into good PR because your response is seen publicly, RT’d, etc. Remember – people will expect you to respond via the same tool they used. Say on Twitter when you’ll be tweeting, e.g. 8am-6pm, and then bid everyone goodnight for the evening at the end of each day.• Tweets and RTs are faster than news so during snow and ash cloud @manairport became a real news source – to the point where TV news were displaying their Twitter feed live on TV• Twitter – don’t be corporate – talk about things other than your own stuff• Competitions – first to tweet correct answer or 5th person to DM correct answer (obviously auto-follow back has to be in place for that one to work)• What’s the point? Increase trust and awareness of your brand – say something interesting and it will get RT’d.• @manairport is successful because: they break news; they respond; they add value for customers; they have fun while they’re doing all this

Steve Downes / @stevejuice / Juice• B2B, social media is very effective• Quality, not quantity• An organisation’s digital profile is not just its website, or even just its website, its Facebook page and its Twitter account but everywhere that it is mentioned online(Wikipedia)• LinkedIn is the most important platform/tool for B2B organisations• RT influential bloggers – don’t just tweet your own blogs, etc.• Monitoring and measurement needs to start before a social media campaign is launched – set targets for each platform so you have something to aim at and something to measure success against

Simon Butt / University of Nottingham• Low budgets – politics in 60 seconds (YouTube) – challenge• Poverty in 60 seconds?

Panel session – Evaluation and ROI• Think first: what’s the ‘R’ and what’s the ‘I’?• Decide what you want to achieve/measure and use appropriate tools for each specific job• @robbrown: Use Tweetdeck to measure and Meltwater Buzz (paid-for)• @gezd: Google is starting to archive tweets so they’ll show up in searches• Twitter counter – measuring historical followers• Understand each tool’s built-in measurement tools (Facebook Insights, Twitter, etc.)• @wadds: Counting RTs is ok but it’s just a proxy for the outcome and you have to be able to measure the outcome• AVE has been discredited• None of the tools are perfect yet but you tend to get what you pay for• You *have* to have people to apply human intelligence to get useful insights• @stevejuice: in stats, we take it for given that a representative sample if accurate enough to give us a useful picture but for some reason with social media, we’re obsessed with measuring every single bit of data. Plans to get people whose jobs it is to do this with samples.• Define your outcomes for the outset and measure using the most appropriate tool• Is everything conversation now or is everything media now?• Charity – Forever Manchester: build a following/community with people who will become the next generation of stakeholders/givers/customers – this is long-term investment (this is difficult to explain to Trustees!)• For charities, value of social media is direct contact with givers/volunteers/MPs/opinion-formers

British Library / Crowd-sourcing Soundmaps / @britishlibrary @UK_Soundmap• You need to be where the people are: Twitter, Facebook, blog and integrate Web 2.0 into website• By opening up with social media, we’re able to exploit more valuable, professional knowledge than we would ever be able to employ• Crowd-sourcing transcriptions, geolocation data, OCR corrections• Audioboo: YouTube of the spoken word• Archiving sounds by crowd-sourcing

Alison Hook / Coventry City Council / http://Facebook.com/coventrycc• Facebook page - 4th Jan 2010: 527 fans > snow > 18th January 2010 – 11,000 fans (now 17,000 fans)• Used 3 people to run it – one to listen to the radio (news source), one to do Facebook and Twitter (and someone else)• On busiest day, over 200 comments on Facebook in 30 minutes• Radio began to use the Fb page as the source of news• coventry.gov.uk/socialmedia• Flickr – Holds stock photos and images, photos tagged with location• YouTube – Favourite other videos people have made (so you don’t have to produce your own!)• Chief Exec tweets and blogs• Plan for negative feedback? Let it happen and deal with it properly afterwards – the benefits of opening up to positive/negative feedback far outweigh the problems caused by it

Jordan Stone / @jordanstone / We Are Social• Case study – Marmite XO• For a successful campaign, participation needs to be a badger of honour• Tapped into the Britishness of Marmite with an event, asked people to submit evidence (photos/videos) of their love of Marmite to win 200 jars of prototype new flavour. They also had to get their friends to vote for their submission

Chris Reed / @chris_reed / Seventy Seven Social• Case study Nintendo• In digital, brands now have to compete with porn and kittens – not just other brands (@JamieC)• If I tell my friends about you on Facebook, it’s because I love my friends, not because I love your brand• Find your audience’s passion-points

Panel session – Future of social media• Social media will become *media* - the term social media will go away• Who owns social media? No-one and everyone – in last 6 months we’ve finally started to get away from the ‘I must control this’ mindset – not just PR team but PR, HR, even the bloody cleaners.• Freely available wifi / Internet connection needs to improve a great deal and it will• Semantic web• Don’t let our obsession with measurement hold us back when it comes to innovation and creativity• To achieve the necessary buy-in within an organisation, for social media to work in a meaningful way, it can’t sit only with one team, it has to be extended to all staff• Facebook will be whatever you want it to be – an online community that suits you on an individual basis, whether that is work, friends, family, work, shopping, whatever• Facebook’s always been good at keeping the really nasty stuff about the Internet out

Facebook vs. Twitter: a breakdown of 2010 social demographics

2010-12-22T12:41:00.000Z

Click for full-size image

Not For Profit Summit '10: Technology For Good

2010-11-19T11:19:00.003Z

On Monday I was lucky enough to be at an extraordinarily good conference on social media for social good. Here are my notes from the conference. They are rough but I thought they might be useful. I'll add some of the relevant links as soon as I have time.

Please be aware that these are my notes and my interpretations - not quotes.

How Not for Profits can capitalise in the recommendation economy

James Poulter @jamespoulter Digital Consultant and Social Comms Trainer

We now have a new kind of consumerism. We are renting large parts of our lives, e.g., LoveFilm, Street Car and Spotify. The problem with this is that traditionally we ‘are what we own’ and we don’t consume to ‘own’ as much anymore. Companies and organistions are working this out. We’re not defined by what we own anymore but by what we recommend publicly, e.g. on Facebook. Our Amazon Wish Lists are on Facebook. The new currency is recommendation.

The DNA of recommendation:

Direction – Facebook newsfeed, Twitter timeline, etc.

Narration – The story of the recommend: what’s the appeal ?

Association – We give [to and connect with] charities because we want to be associated with them – it says something about us as individuals

It’s all about identity. How do we add identity to what we do?

How to make the most of little or budget with social media
Gemma Went @GemmaWent Founder and Director, Red Cube Marketing feat. Stuart Witts, Marie Curie

Social media enables us to build awareness, relationships, community and philanthropy. This is how to go about incorporating social media into your organisation:

• Show what SM can achieve with relevant case studies, how you’ll do it, how long it’ll take. Show investment vs expected return

• www.delicious.com/gemmawent/casestudies

• Talk in their language

• Social media strategies on her blog: http://redcubemarketing-blog.com/2010/01/16/top-30-social-media-marketing-pr-blogs/
• Use the staff member who are already familiar with social media (Facebook, blogs, etc.) and make the most of them

• If you’re worried about mixed messages coming out from within the organisation, start with Who the organisation is – what are the core message? More often than not, organisations do not keep their staff up-to-date on this

• Use your email database – share apps within the body of an email, ‘Join us on Twitter/Facebook’ link at the end of every email

• ‘Mail Chimp’ (social media monitoring tool)

• It’s about quality over quantity – focus on the platforms you use well, don’t try to sign up to everything

• Where are your advocates? Social Mention, Addictomatic, SM2, search.twitter

Stuart Witts demonstrated a Marie Curie online/virtual Twitter event called the ‘Twea party’:

• 1 hour long virtual tea party where people tweeted using a #hashtag and posted photos of themselves drinking tea using twitpic

• Spotify playlist so everyone could listen to the same music at the same time
• Other organisations picked up on it and suggested linking virtual events
• Used Tweet Reach to monitor the effectiveness of the event: 520 tweets, 127 guests, reached over 53,000 unique users
• Effect: decreased fear of Twitter among staff

How organisations can punch above their weight
Jon Waddingham @jon_bedford Product Manager, Digital Strategist and Charity Blogger at JustGiving

How do you reach peple?
• Focus on telling your story – it’s about what you do (core messages)
• Involve supporters where you can because they will recommend you
• Focus on where your supporters are (Twitter, Facebook... etc.)
• Be bold – try new things – work out where the blacks, white and shades of grey are
• STAT: Half of 18-24 year olds give on JustGiving because they heard about the campaign on Facebook
• STAT: Remember average age on social media is 37 years old
• Tell your supporters what they have achieved by supporting
• The ‘Our Mission’ tab on your website is far more important than ‘About Us’
• www.slideshare.net/jwaddingham
• Make the process for your supporters as frictionless as possible, e.g., JustGiving has an iPhone app that allows people to give money easily and quickly even while they’re stood at a bus stop

Word of mouth for good: harnessing the power of peer-to-peer conversation for charities, causes and campaigns
Molly Flatt @mollyflatt Word of Mouth Evangelist, 1000Heads and President of WOM UK

Social media is exciting because there’s a utopian, democratic aura to it so it feels good. In reality the technology isn’t good. People aren’t even good. Actions are good. In Clay Shirky’s book Cognitive Surplus he says behaviour is motivation filtered through opportunity.

Social media hasn’t changed the motivation, it has changed the opportunities. People’s motivations are still the same – they want to increase their attractiveness. Social media offers unprecedented opportunity to be seen being good. This is a real motivation to actually do something good.

We need to feed the motivations – inspire people to act. Look out for @tomsshoes – great use of social media.

It’s amazing how many charities and social enterprises have a social media presence but don’t use it to tell people what they do. Put links on everything – website, emails, etc.

Problem now is we have too many opportunities – it’s about disrupting people’s opportunities, arresting their attention – on and offline. Mobile does this really well. Charities need to feed our motivations as individuals.

WOM (word of mouth) is only worth the behaviour it drives.

How a big corporation’s staff can make a difference
Becky Hewlett from BT on Volunteering Scheme

Companies can enable their staff to do voluntary work by introducing them to a voluntary scheme and giving them 3 paid work-days off a year.

Unlock individuals’ talent focusing on skills-based volunteering.

Which audience? Matching digital media strategies with non-profit audiences
Joanne Jacobs @joannejacobs Social Media Expert Consultant, Adjunct Associate Professor Creative Industries

Donor and volunteers want to be publicly recognised for their efforts / support / contribution. This is the same for corporate partners / supporters / sponsors. Talk about your corporate partners on social media platforms – it is noticed and appreciated and it strengthens your relationships.

Beneficiaries want to be empowered; they want a platform to voice/broadcast the issues that are personal to them. And they want network interaction.

Humanising your campaign, turning supporters into advocates
Scott Gould @scottgould Founder of Likeminds, Blogger and Church pastor

What social media means is a shift from Me to We.

Me is old media – it is broadcast, it is a one-way flow of information;
We is social – it is plural, a multi-way flow of information.

The most important part of any campaign is 'social proof'.

Robert Cialdino talks of the principle of social proof as a facilitator of influence: We determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct. This applies especially to the way we decide what constitutes correct behaviour. We view a behaviour as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see other people behaving like that.

It doesn’t matter that the family all brushing their teeth together are animated – we still buy Aquafresh toothpaste because we’ve seen social proof that it’s correct behaviour.

Oxfam campaigns are very good at raising awareness. An Oxfam campaign that shows a child starving in Africa raises our awareness of conditions some people live with – but it does not show social proof. It’s emotive but we assume that everybody who has seen that campaign was moved to act so we don’t have to. We don’t want to raise awareness, we want to raise action. If it showed people acting on it, that would be social proof and would encourage us to do the same.

Place people and their faces – from your target demographic – in your campaign. Facebook plug-ins humanise the page and info on it because it shows a Facebook ‘Like’ button with faces of people who have ‘liked’ it.

Return on involvement: how NFPs even have an edge
Lee Smallwood @leesmallwood Digital Marketing Director and Blogger

Every charity and organisation is terrified of social media because their terrified of letting their people (staff) speak. After all, they may all go in different directions. But using social media is just part of speaking and you can’t stop people speaking so you have to deal with it.

Guidelines are necessary.

When you’re an organisation and you have to respond to an uncomfortable post online, respond with authenticity, honesty and integrity – this is how you want to be (accurately) perceived.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure and when it comes to social media there are lots of measurement tools available – some you have to pay for but they’re valuable.

Free ones include: crazyegg.com enquisite.com woopra.com

Social Media, a cultural shift ‘inside’ your organisation
Steve Bridger @stevebridger Builder of Bridges, Redesigning Charity for the Digital Age

Steve helps charities trust more of their own people to use social media and move from being an organisation that uses social media to a social organisatio. Social media is about long-term engagement; you won’t win by dipping in and out.

Cory Doctorow (The Guardian) said The real value of Twitter is to keep the invisible lines of connection alive.

Katia Anderson said The message is not about the charity; it’s about why the messenger cares.

Charities and organisations should encourage their staff to speak confidently in public about their work. The challenge is to empower staff without generating chaos – guidelines are necessary. But these guidelines should be about encouraging, enabling and releasing untapped potential, not about policing.

Isaac Newton said We build too many walls and not enough bridges.

Panel discussion and audience Q&A

• Stop trying to stick to criteria for success – learn some criteria for failure. Don’t be afraid of it - failure is a great learning tool!

• Social media is not about additional staff/work, it’s about incorporation.

Notes:

Other good round-ups for this conference:

http://charlotteclark.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/how-the-lessons-learnt-by-charitable-organisations-will-help-a-profitable-business/ by @CharlotteClark

The ongoing conversation can be followed #techforgood

The higher education system is midleading

2010-08-24T15:50:00.000+01:00

After I graduated last year I found it extremely difficult to find a job and subsequently struggled for the rest of the year. I was taking painting and decorating jobs (which I liked) while working part-time as a waiter (which I hated). I felt very bitter about the amount of debt I was not being given the opportunity to repay and this was exacerbated by the feeling that I was letting down various family members that helped me through university. The problem is when you graduate, you expect to be able to get a better job than you could have done before and this is not necessarily the case.

As an article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian today points out:

A couple of years ago, two economists at the University of Kent crunched through data from 1992 up to 2006 on how graduates fared in the jobs market. It was a big exercise, going through thousands of career paths, and it was carefully done. Francis Green and Yu Zhu took into account that it can take a while for graduates to find the right job (or, as their parents might more precisely refer to it, to switch off E4). Yet they still found a third of graduates were "overqualified" for their jobs. Many were "formally overqualified", in positions that wouldn't usually require a university degree; but one in 10 were what Green and Zhu called "really overqualified" – their jobs barely utilised their expensively acquired skills.

I don’t regret going to university for a moment. In terms of the personal development it enabled, I don’t think I would recognise my undergraduate self. I would recommend it to everyone based on this alone.

But it costs an enormous amount of money. Joe Baden, Head of Open Book at Goldsmiths University of London works to enable everyone to reach their academic potential, regardless of their background. In a Guardian podcast recorded at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas in 2009, Baden champions education for education’s sake - rather than a means to enable social mobility. He doesn’t see anything wrong with people with Ph.D’s having to take cleaning jobs because those low-paid, low-status jobs are currently undertaken by people without the means to do anything else. I wholeheartedly agree with this. I think we need to change attitudes surrounding higher education. Everyone has a right to the same opportunities and higher education is invaluable for personal as well as professional development.

If this had been made clear to me before I applied it would have effected what I chose to study and what I expected to get out of it.

Social media as a campaign tool: 'Online protest: power to the people?' at the Frontline Club

2010-08-11T19:21:00.008+01:00

Last night I ventured for the first time to the Frontline Club in Paddington for what turned out to be a very good talk. Online protest: power to the people? It was concerned with how social media is used for political purposes, its advantages over traditional media and its limitations. Of the many issues raised and points made I'd like to list a few here that are particularly interesting to me.

Social media lends itself well to short-term campaigns. You can rally a lot of people around a particular campaign because it is relatively easy to establish connections with people and those people can also direct others to it. This stimulates debate about the campaign. When a social media campaign becomes popular it is often picked up by the mainstream media and this raises its profile and gives it more credit.

The kind of short-term campaigns we are talking about are 'quick win' campaigns. Many important campaign-worthy issues necessarily require more commitment to the cause than just joining a Facebook group or signing a petition. Quick win campaigns should be part of a broader long-term objective. Social media is a tool and cannot replace well-established means of campaigning.

Social media can be a watchdog for mainstream media. A lot of people have a lot to say about various aspects of the media and can now easily connect to make their voice heard. It also makes gagging orders harder to enforce. Individuals can be held accountable and prosecuted for what they say but if everyone is talking about it, it is more difficult to hold individuals to account. This is a double-edged sword for me because sometimes accountability should be attributed.

One of the most interesting issues raised relates to how effective social media is for connecting us with like-minded people. Because of this though, it generally only links us with people who share our opinions. We don't often link to sites that we don't like. The problem with that is people on opposing sides of an argument need to listen to and communicate with one another. Social media can help that happen, it enables conversation but it's important that people with opposing views are allowed and enabled to communicate with each other.

Another problem with social media, particularly as a campaign tool is that not everyone uses it. Discourse about social media tends necessarily to focus on the developed world and primarily on those within that who use social media. It was suggested that a single mother living in poverty probably doesn't have time to represent herself through social media. And of course there are millions of people in the world who don't have access to the Internet.

Online protest: power to the people? was chaired by Deborah Bonello, video journalist and founder of mexicoreporter.com. The panel included Benjemin Chesterton, radio documentary and photofilm producer, co-founder of production company duckrabbit and the website A Developing Story, Mike Harris, public affairs manager of Index on Censorship and manager of Libel Reform Campaign, Sina Motalebi, head of output at BBC Persian TV and author of one of Iran's first blogs Roozengar who was detained for 23 days in solitary confinement as a result of his work, and Sunn Hundal editor of the left-wing blog Liberal Conspiracy.

The Frontline Club broadcast their debates live on their website and also make them available as a free podcast.

The role social media plays in the decline in empathy

2010-08-03T10:32:00.000+01:00

Read an interesting article by Peggy Orenstein in New York Times Magazine. She describes a wonderful moment with her daughter in which she felt all the joys of being a mother and which was interrupted by urge to tweet about it.

She wonders to what extent she shapes her Twitter persona to what extent it shapes her.

Back in the 1950s, the sociologist Erving Goffman famously argued that all of life is performance: we act out a role in every interaction, adapting it based on the nature of the relationship or context at hand. Twitter has extended that metaphor to include aspects of our experience that used to be considered off-set: eating pizza in bed, reading a book in the tub, thinking a thought anywhere, flossing. Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it.

Among young people especially [Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T.] found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance… ”

The fun of Twitter… is its infinite potential for connection, as well as its opportunity for self-expression... But when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy? The risk of the performance culture, of the packaged self, is that it erodes the very relationships it purports to create, and alienates us from our own humanity. Consider the fate of empathy: in an analysis of 72 studies performed on nearly 14,000 college students between 1979 and 2009, researchers at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan found a drop in that trait, with the sharpest decline occurring since 2000. Social media may not have instigated that trend, but by encouraging self-promotion over self-awareness, they may well be accelerating it.

On The Guardian’s technology blog Jemima Kliss reacts to the article:

I know exactly what she means. Then again, that impulse to break away and record the moment also happens with using my camera and with drawing, so it's not new and not exclusive to technology.

I think what is new about this is that not everybody draws or uses a camera. (Something like) everybody uses social media and I think this article seems to suggest a contributing factor in the overall decline in empathy in society today.

David Cameron on Raul Moat

2010-07-15T15:47:00.004+01:00

I was watching the news last night reporting on the various reactions to Raul Moat's death. Suddenly David Cameron pops up condemning the public show of sympathy for him - flowers outside his house, etc. He says Moat was a murderer and a monster (or words to that effect), that sympathy should be with his victims and that he [Cameron] cannot understand any sympathy for Moat.

This pissed me off for a number of reasons. How dare Cameron condemn the public for showing sympathy when someone (anyone) has died! Moat did terrible things and sympathy should be with the victims as well but he wasn't Osama bin Laden (or George W. Bush) he was a disturbed man who told the authorities HIMSELF that he needed help, long before he lost it. When Moat killed people, he became a murderer, a criminal. This suddenly legitimises a whole wave of condemnation and he becomes something less than human, a symbol. If he had gone to an authority - one that listened - before his killing spree and told them that he wants to kill people and that he's worried he might actually do it, he would have been considered mentally unstable and in need of help. Which he obviously was. But he wouldn't have been considered a criminal for it. In an unstable mind I would suggest that there is a fine line between wanting to kill people and going ahead with it. If authorities have ignored a man who thinks himself unwell and tells them so, then they have let down the people they are there to help.

What's more, every night on the news for a week we were all in Northumberland with the police, following their search for Raul Moat. It was a drama, a serial, a story and the fact that it was real made it more compelling. When we're watching any serial TV program, one develops the illusion of a relationship with the characters. We've been given reality TV to do exactly that with. So of course people are going to sympathise with Moat - they've devoted a week of their lives to following his. Like Big Brother. Forget The Running Man, forget The Contenders Series 7, we've got the 6 o'clock news.

Condemn hero-worship of people like Raul Moat but not sympathy. Especially since we're only reacting to the media in the ways we've been taught to.

Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks

2010-07-15T12:05:00.006+01:00

Nicholas Christakis explores how the large-scale, face-to-face social networks in which we are embedded affect our lives, and what we can do to take advantage of this fact.

We're all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don't even know.

Gated communities are a social ill

2010-07-13T14:50:00.000+01:00

Paranoia is the reason we gate our streets and homes yet the more we cut ourselves off from one another the more it spreads.

Article by Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian

Free v Paid online content

2010-07-13T13:12:00.003+01:00

What is lacking from the debate about free versus paid-for content is the important point that you can't share paid-for content.

One of the sectors hit hardest by the Digital Revolution is publishing - particularly newspapers. The Guardian online offers their content for free along with the opportunity to share articles, blogs, etc. using Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, et al. Visit The Times website and you are treated to a moment of free content and then prompted to sign in / register to pay. The Times and other online paid-for newspapers are not realising the full extent of the shift between paper and digital press. One of the great advantages of digital content is that it can be easily shared among an infinite number of people which surely increases readership. In denying readers this option, online paid-for press ignores the most fundamental aspect of the Digital Revolution: democracy.

The defining feature of Digital is that it is accessible to everyone, sharable and infinitely replicable. Paid-for content is not conducive with the most basic digital ideals.

Ken Robinson on education

2010-07-09T16:37:00.002+01:00

TED Talks Sir Ken Robinson makes an funny and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. 20 minute talk. Click here for direct link.

If you liked that one...

JRF interview with creator of Channel 4 Documentary 'Rich Kid Poor Kid'

2010-07-08T18:22:00.000+01:00

Found an interesting interview with the creator of Channel 4's 'Rich Kid Poor Kid', a documentary which examined the attitudes of two young girls living in neighbouring areas but who were worlds apart in terms of economic circumstances.

Reporting poverty - Rich Kid Poor Kid, perspective of the producer from Joseph Rowntree Foundation on Vimeo.

Clear ideas about tablet publishing

2010-05-24T11:44:00.007+01:00

At last, someone who sounds like they might know what they're talking about is discussing tablets and offering up a few clear ideas about the future of publishing...

During the opening speech of the Oxford Tablet Summit Juan Senor and Juan Antonio Giner from Innovation Media Group explained the necessity for newsmedia companies of taking tablets into consideration in their expansion strategies. Read about the future of newspapers and the newspapers of the future in the following post.

Many people think tablets are a savior to the newspapers. But publishers should think about the reality. And they are facing few options nowadays:

exit the marketbe sold or taken over
cut cut cut until the cow bleeds to death
re-invent the business focusing on ‘profit audiences’

The only chance to survive? It is the last option of the above.

Is technology good for us? (and why it probably doesn't matter)

2010-05-19T21:36:00.005+01:00

I was reading an article today (actually a book review) that discussed the effect that digital technology was having on kids in particular with regards to language. It includes a number of arguments that suggest SMS and IM messaging encourages young people to write in a conversational style, that new technology is learning them bad English lol.

With every new technology that lands itself in society there is always a dust cloud of debate about whether it is bad for us. Mobile phones were going to give us all head cancer. MP3s were going to be the death of music. Arguments against it generally quieten down as the new technology takes root and everyone begins to wonder, 'how did we ever manage before?'

Those opposed to a new technology are always bombarded with examples of technological advances that we now find hard to imagine life without. I'm sure there is, as usual some truth to each side of the story but I wonder, given how quickly and graciously technology is naturalized, whether we would even realize if a technology really did have a negative effect? We still don't know whether mobile phones give you head cancer but they are so ingrained within the fabric of our lives that no-one dares ask again.

The lament of old people that life was better way back when is a tiresome dirge but it transcends generations. Apparently everyone who reaches a certain age begins to believe that the world has gone to pot. But what if one of the generations was right? Would we know? We can't possibly understand 'how life was' before the inception of a technology that we depend upon on a daily basis. Once something has been invented it can't then be un-invented.. Sorry, we were wrong - it is bad for you after all. Can we have it back please? It doesn't happen.

My grandfather is in his 80s and he is pretty well up to date with digital technology. I speak to him on Skype, he is on Facebook, he uses BBC iPlayer and sends me text messages but he complains that life is not what it was in the days before these things. What bugs him most is the lost sense of community in the village where he has lived all his life. No-one says good morning when he is out to pick up a newspaper and he doesn't know anyone anymore. Obviously the reasons for this are numerous; it's not wholly due to technological development but it is due to progress and that is the drive behind and the argument for new technology.

Progress is sort of a password. If something is pursued in the name of progress then it is legitimate. We are naturally wary of something that is new or different but curiosity overrides this. We didn't need to invent space flight but we did because we could and it was exciting. It's an achievement, isn't it? And because we can do that, we now have mobile phones and GPS and various other forms of satellite communication.

But are we better off? In some ways, yes but in another way we've always lost something. More often than not, new technology promises us an easier way of doing something. It can't explain or explore all the possible ripple effects it could have on us so we take the easier option in good faith. In the name of progress.

We are programmed to pursue progress in every way and rather blindly because we are curious and ambitious. I think the question of whether any given technology is 'good' or 'bad' for us is hypothetical because it's always going to happen anyway. It is our version of evolution. All we can do is commentate.

Photographs are the new GPS.... but more accurate

2010-05-02T12:32:00.004+01:00

GPS isn't accurate enough anymore according to Michael Leibhold of Institute for the Future. In a 5 minute video interview for GigaOM he explains that photographs could be the new media through which we will be globally positioned (tagged?) accurate to the millimetre. This technology will be combined with augmented reality making the world, as Leibhold explains, 'self-explanatory'.

I can appreciate the exciting prospects that augmented reality offers but if we are going about our day with our phones giving us information about every detail of our surroundings it is going to drastically alter our perception of the world and how we experience it. I'm not sure I want to be given so much information - surely the whole point of doing anything is to learn about it first hand, and in turn learn about yourself? Where's the risk if you're briefed about everything in advance? A self-explanatory world... Where is the fun in that?

Erasing David

2010-04-30T17:24:00.004+01:00

David Bond is 38 and lives with his wife and children in London. In 2007 he was among thousands of UK residents who received a letter from the government apologising for the loss of two discs containing their personal information including bank details. In his new documentary Erasing David the film-maker attempts to 'disappear' for a month while private investigators track him down using basic surveillance and information that is readily available or given. David's aim is to reveal just how much of our personal information is stored by the government and private companies and urges us to consider the implications.

Unsurprisingly, we discover that the amount of information stored about each of us is vast. From the moment we are born details of our lives are written down and stored in government databases (medical records, school records, bank details, tax records, job history, criminal records... ) and increasingly, private companies are gathering, storing and selling as much information about us as possible in order to market goods and services more effectively. Erasing David reveals how readily available our personal information is for anyone who is determined to collect it. David interviews individuals who have had their personal information misused by fraudsters and through government mistakes and these people have found that once something is recorded it tends to plague them forever after even though it is unfounded. Unfortunate though they are, these are very isolated cases and do little to discredit the information-obsessed culture that David is attacking.

The real revelation of the film is somewhat unwitting and pertains to a lax general attitude toward disclosure of personal information. The private investigators easily find out where David lives, where he was born, went to school and information about his family. They do not use CCTV or any of the research or tracking methods that would be available to government agents. On the whole, their methods are simple and would be effective for anyone who is willing to steal bags of household waste and who has access to the Internet and a phone. They discover information about David's whereabouts from blogs and details about his family that he himself has disclosed on Facebook. They find out hospital appointment times and locations by ringing receptionists under the pretext that David has forgotten his appointment details, which are then willingly given.

The premier of the film last night was followed by a debate about civil liberties and surveillance. It was mediated by the director David Bond and the panel members were former MP David Davis (who resigned over extended detention laws for terror suspects), director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti, Phil Booth of NO2ID, and author and journalist Will Self. The former three panellists avidly discussed infringement on our privacy by government and private companies and congratulated David Bond on raising awareness with his film. Will Self suggested that it is ridiculous for 'an affluent white middle-class man' to claim that his civil liberties are being violated when 'black boys in Brixton' are being continually stopped, searched and arrested by police and having their personal information and DNA stored regardless of whether or not they are charged.

The film is interesting and thought-provoking but falls short of addressing the real issue which is why we are all so willingly open with our personal details. Neither does it discuss the issue of ID cards for the UK or why large-scale DNA databases won't work. Nevertheless Erasing David is worth watching and will be shown on More 4 at 10pm on Tuesday 4th May.

Trailer

Erasing David trailer from Green Lions on Vimeo.

Links 27/04/10

2010-04-27T09:56:00.003+01:00

The disappointment of things
Buying objects is disappointing

There's value in obscurity
Some of the best ideas in history were forged by weirdos and outcasts

Want to know a secret?
Of course you do

Links 24/03/2010

2010-03-24T21:05:00.001Z

What you loved doing when you were nine or ten years old is what you should be doing now...

Read on..

Charlie Brooker on mephedrone

2010-03-22T15:20:00.005Z

Just read Charlie Brooker's latest blog post on the media panic surrounding methedrone. As per usual, he is spot on in his analysis of the situation, explaining what is wrong with the media coverage far more eloquently and articulately than I can. So here's the link.

Links 16/03/10

2010-03-16T15:06:00.002Z

swissmiss - if home appliances were inhabited

How genetically flawed am I?

2010-03-12T18:47:00.000Z

Ever seen the film Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997)?

It’s set in ‘the not too distant future’ and explores a society where your DNA testing is quick and easy and social status is dictated genetically. Prospective parents have a child designed for them by a doctor who eliminates susceptibility to diseases and undesirable predispositions such as alcoholism and violence. He also engineers the sex and physical characteristics (eye and hair colour, skin tone, etc.). People conceived in what we would call the natural way are now at a disadvantage. They are known as ‘invalids’ and regarded as a liability for schools, employers, insurance companies and so on. The invalids are society’s lowest of the low, unable to get decent employment or make a meaningful mark on society.

‘Of course it’s illegal to discriminate but nobody takes the law seriously’ ~ Jerome Morrow, Gattaca

DNA testing is becoming cheaper and easier all the time. You can now send off a DNA sample and have it analysed. You are then sent your results which detail your chances of developing Alzheimer’s, prostate cancer and a whole list of other illnesses. As this technology becomes more widely available and accepted I wonder how prophetic Gattaca might turn out to be?

There is an interesting video about this from the Australian TV show Hungry Beast (ABC):

Google.. in two minutes and forty-six seconds

2010-03-12T11:09:00.001Z

The future of digital technology.. from a gamer's point of view

2010-02-23T19:42:00.000Z

At the Dice 2010 conference last week in Las Vegas, Jesse Schell, founder of Schell Games and former creative director at the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, gave a talk not so much about the future of gaming but about the future of digital technology and the psychological uses of gaming in everyday life.

He starts off talking about Facebook and how huge that is and how unbelievably popular Facebook games have become. He explains some of the psychological tricks they use to get us hooked on them. He talks about how the most popular games (in various formats) last year were games that are routed in or linked to reality. This is big because games have traditionally been about fantasy and about escaping reality. He examines some of the most popular games which require an actual physical thing to interact with them, for example, Guitar Hero for the Wii (requires you buy an additional thing shaped like a guitar to play it). He talks about the proliferation of disposable technology and sensors. From here, he paints a picture of a typical day in the future taking into account the way digital technology is starting to use games to encourage certain behaviour, which is really quite amazing.

What is amazing is first, what he is suggesting; and second, how plausible it is. A video of the talk is available on YouTube in 3 parts. Each part is less than 10 minutes long and the last one is where it really gets going. So go watch it. But watch the first two parts first! Obviously.

Russell Davies has posted an article on his excellent blog about a trendy device that you wear round your wrist and which measures how active you are on a daily basis. If you've been sufficiently active, it displays a code for you. You can use this code on a website to download various rewards for your activity. For anyone who doubts what Jesse Schell suggests in the third part of the Dice talk, check this out - it's already happening!

As anonymous video wins respected journalism award, the digital beast slowly becomes more autonomous

2010-02-17T18:00:00.000Z

The Guardian published an article yesterday on the anonymous video of Neda Aghan-Soltan's death that won one of the most important annual journalism prizes, the George Polk Award.

This is an amateur video taken on a mobile phone of a woman dying during the 2009 Iranian election protests. It was posted on Facebook and YouTube and within hours was broadcast on CNN news. This is the first time the award has been given to something produced anonymously. It has also prompted the introduction of a new videography category for the award.

In The New York Times, John Darnton, curator of the Polk Awards said 'This video footage was seen by millions and became an iconic image of the Iranian resistance. We don't know who took it or who uploaded it but we do know it have news value. This is this award celebrates the fact that, in today's world, a brave bystander with a cellphone camera can use video-sharing and social networking sites to deliver news.'

I thought this was interesting because it is an example of how the idea of the 'original' and 'authorship' is being challenged in the Digital Age. When everyone is a contributor no-one is the author. Stuff appears on the Net and is used in other media in any number of ways. Since it is a digital video each copy is exactly the same, with no loss of quality and so there is no 'original'. It belongs to everyone.

I do wonder though as more and more media is made by multiple contributors, who then is responsible? Who is accountable? The answer is either no-one or more likely everyone.

What's the point of a blog?

2010-02-16T19:39:00.000Z

On Forever Becoming, Leigh Pearson has offered a wonderful explanation of why we blog and what purpose it serves:

'It seems that everyone has a platform these days: a website, a blog, a twitter.

On the surface, much blogging may appear to be a pointless endeavour: if the information is already out there then why reiterate or regurgitate it? Do we really need someone else to tell us the same thing again?' Read on...

Augmented reality is on its way

2010-02-11T16:01:00.000Z

(From The Guardian's Digital Content Blog)

'Augmented reality is a lively creative mess. Now that smartphones have relieved us from unstylish fantasies of goggles, the technology is finally getting real. In 2010, the world is becoming subtitled and your future will be augmented.

Augmented reality applications enable users to see additional layers of data when they view normal objects through smartphones or webcams. In fact, in the near future you will find more and more barcodes around, and parts of your visual world will be readable for machines and not anymore for humans.

Since programming an augmented reality application is easier than ever, even a computer student can develop augmented software for a smartphone. Very many of them are. These days, applications mushroom everywhere a bit of augmentable content is to be found.'

Read on...

Related links:
Do you care about privacy?
Mobile augmented reality set for boom time

Link to article 'Should automobile software be open-sourced?' and addition to post on Google Wave

2010-02-09T15:04:00.000Z

Read an interesting article on Clive Thompson's excellent blog about whether automobile software should be open-sourced to reduce bugs in the system that cause car crashes. He says something interesting about open-sourced software that's relevant to my post about Google Wave:

"Once software grows really huge, its creators are often unable to vouchsafe that it’s bug-free — that it’ll work as intended in all situations... it’s practically a law of nature that when code gets huge, bugs multiply; the software becomes such a sprawling ecosystem that no single person can ever visualize how it works and what might go wrong. Worse, it’s even harder to guarantee a system’s behavior when it’s in the hands of millions of users, all behaving in idiosyncratic ways. They are the infinite monkeys bashing at the keyboard..."

How humans and machines work together

2010-02-05T11:49:00.000Z

I thought this was interesting. It's an article by Clive Thompson who writes for the New York Times Magazine on how humans and machines work together, taken from collisiondetention.net.

Back in 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov played against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, and lost. At the time it was widely regarded as a huge victory for artificial intelligence. But as Kasparov points out — in a fantastic new essay about computer chess in the New York Review of Books — experts had long predicted that a computer would eventually beat a human at chess.

That’s because chess software doesn’t need to analyze the game the way a human does. It just needs to do a “brute force” attack: It calculates all the possible games several moves out, finds the one that’s most advantageous to itself, and makes that play. Human grandmasters don’t work that way. They do not necessarily “see” the game several moves out. Indeed, they can’t — as Kasparov points out, chess is so complex that “a player looking eight moves ahead [faces] as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy.”

Instead, people who are truly great at chess use the peculiarly human qualities of understanding, insight and intuition: They study oodles of games, encode that knowledge deeply in their brains, and practice incessantly. “As for how many moves ahead a grandmaster sees,” as Kasparov concludes, the real answer is: “Just one, the best one.” We like to think that artificial intelligence is replicating human smarts, but in reality it does something quite different. One doesn’t learn much about human intelligence by examining the way computers play chess, just as one doesn’t learn much about computer intelligence by examining the way humans play chess. They are fundamentally dissimilar processes.

But this gave Kasparov a fascinating idea. What if, instead of playing against one another, a computer and a human played together — as part of a team? If humans and computers think in very different ways, perhaps they’d be complementary. So in 1998 Kasparov put together an event called “Advanced Chess”, where humans played against one another, but each was allowed to also use a PC with the best available chess software. The chess players would enter positions into the machine, see what the computer thought was a good move, and use this to inform their own human analysis of the board. Cyborg chess!

The results? As Kasparov writes:

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

This stuff really fascinates me, because so much of our everyday lives now transpire in precisely this fashion: We work as cyborgs, using machine intelligence to augment our human smarts. Google amplifies our ability to find information, or even to remember it (I often use it to resolve “tip of the tongue” moments — i.e. to locate the name of a person or concept I know but can’t quite put my finger on). Social-networking software gives us an ESP-level awareness of what’s going on in the lives of people we care about. Tools like Mint help us spot invisible patterns in how we’re spending, or blowing, our hard-earned cash. None of these tools replace human intelligence, or even work the way that human intelligence works. Indeed, they’re often cognitively quite alien processes — which is precisely why they can be so unsettling to some people, and why we’re still sort of figuring out how, and when, to use them. The arguments that currently rage about the social impact of Facebook and Google are, in a sense, arguments about what sort of cyborgs we want — or don’t want — to be.

What I love about Kasparov’s algorithm — “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and … superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process” — is that it suggests serious rewards accrue to those who figure out the best way to use thought-enhancing software. (Or rather, those who figure out a way that’s best for them; people always use tools in slightly different, idiosyncratic ways.) The process matters as much as the software itself. How often do you check it? When do you trust the help it’s offering, and when do you ignore it?

(That photo above is by Elke Wetzig, and released for use under the GNU Free Documentation License!)

Google Wave, or How Google is going to change the world

2010-02-04T14:50:00.000Z

I don’t know much about computer software from a technical point of view but this blew me away.

At the Google I/O conference in May 2009, Google announced the development of a new browser-based software, a personal communication and collaboration tool known as Google Wave. It is designed to merge email, instant messaging (IM), wikis and social networking and presented as a replacement for these. It’s characterised by its focus on collaboration in real-time.

The advantage of Google Wave over email / IM is instead of sending a message and its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user’s inbox for context, a wave contains a complete thread of multimedia messages and is located on a central server. Waves are shared and collaborators can be added or removed at any point during a wave’s existence.

Google describes the waves as 'equal parts conversation and document' that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications by any participant anywhere in the wave. All content of a wave is subject to edit at any time by any number of participants, anywhere in the world simultaneously, as well as by anyone else that is invited to collaborate (by an existing participant). This means that users can create collaborative documents, regardless of time or location, as well as invite others to contribute. The history of each wave is stored within it and collaborators can use a ‘playback' feature to observe the order in which a wave was edited and who is responsible for what.

Google plans to release most of the source code as open source, inviting the public to develop its features through extensions. In the demo at the I/O conference, the creators demonstrated a couple of the supporting extensions they had built, which included sophisticated spelling/grammar checks and automated translation between languages. (These are simplistic examples of how the extensions feature can work.)

I think Google Wave will be a huge leap forward in digital technology. Such is our need to combine existing technologies into one, it incorporates email, IM and social networking and since it's browser-based, will be available remotely via mobile phone and other portable devices. This immediately simplifies and links the main tools we use to communicate virtually. It removes the need to use email ever again and also replaces global phenomena like Facebook and Twitter. Since it operates in real time, it means we will be better connected than ever before.

As well as replacing existing technologies for social interaction it also introduces a whole new way of working. The collaborative nature of Google Wave, the immediacy of communication and the combination of these features simultaneously within a single ‘object’ means that people will be able to work more effectively on the same document or project simultaneously and remotely. Everyone can see what everyone else is doing (in real time) and make suggestions and amendments when they feel like it. When we consider how an office works, with people in the same space working on different parts of the same project, it becomes apparent that Google Wave means that physical workspace is now unnecessary. More people can operate as a collaborative unit remotely than can possibly fit into a single office or building. The implication here is with collaborators working remotely less physical space is required as a base and so the cost of running a business goes down. As populations of cities grow too, it seems reasonable to assume that remote collaboration will become more and more necessary. There is already evidence that suggests this is a rapidly growing interest for companies in the US.

It strikes me that this is the closest thing yet to digital fulfilling its promise to replace physical space with virtual.

It could potentially change our concept of time as well. Since it enables users to make alterations anywhere in a wave at any time, the fact that one thing was created before another has no meaning anymore. Either ‘thing’ can be easily changed at any point. The history of these changes can also be searched by a user to view only specific kinds of activity or the activity of a particular user. This activity can then be altered seamlessly. This is a somewhat eery thought. If a thing can be so easily altered, or even disappear leaving no trace of itself behind, it might as well never have existed!

What fascinates me about Google Wave is its potential to very rapidly evolve. Google plans to release most of the source code as open source, inviting the public to develop its features through ‘extensions’. Essentially then, what this software is ultimately capable of is controlled by the public. The Apple iPhone has a similar feature, allowing users to download applications that enhance the capabilities of the device. The applications can be made by companies or individuals. Thousands of 'apps' are currently available to download, performing a mind-boggling array of functions, making this the most interesting feature of the iPhone. The big difference with Google Wave is that it is free and accessible software (rather than expensive and exclusive hardware) and therefore potentially capable of far more and with more universal effects. Giving anyone and everyone free reign to make such powerful and intuitive software do whatever they want it to then is both tremendously exciting and absolutely terrifying.

Post Script.

An article in a newspaper recently warned of a 'scam app' for the iPhone which allows users to take out unregulated loans with enormous interest rates. As far as I am aware, this is the first time serious abuse of the iPhone applications facility has been made public. It should be noted that the iPhone technology is still in its relative infancy and has already demonstrated the imagination and determination of criminals to make use of new technologies. Like the applications feature of the iPhone, the extensions feature of Google Wave opens the door for people to use it in ways the designers will never have imagined. This begs the question, what kind of criminal activity will be made possible by the infinite new possibilities generated by Google Wave?

Corpses

2010-01-07T09:37:00.000Z

Corpses are still people.

Today and Tomorrow

2009-06-10T17:01:00.000+01:00

This city is a drug, mapped out in my veins
My friends and my foes are one and the same
They all know me now, my familiar name
What we do every day to take it away
My pain is their gain and they know it.

To glance in a mirror, perchance a surprise
These days more and more I don't recognize
The hollow face looking out through dark inset eyes
Bound by untimely rings circling thousands of lies
I can no longer hide 'cos I've blown it.

I wander the streets, wonder how to get home
Stumble over my feet, fumbling for my phone
An old lady I meet crosses over the road
The anxiety has taken hold
It tasted so sweet that young day on my own
But I'm cheated bitter, I've out-grown it.

I remember my bedroom when I was a kid
And the smell of the clothes hanging up where I hid
To surprise my young sister as so often I did
But memories of joy, of that little boy are
Worlds away now from life as I've known it.

This life is really no life at all
Always walking a knife-edge, a double-edged sword
Any day now a trip could turn to a fall
Just a little help, say, to get me through today and
Tomorrow I'll think about atonement.

Norbury, JG, 'Today and Tomorrow' (2009)

Photography in The Digital Age (Extract from essay 'What Is Real?', 2009)

2009-06-04T15:16:00.000+01:00

Digital and Analog Photography

Before we explore what is implied in the term The Digital Age, let us begin by discussing the differences between digital imaging and analog photography. A photograph functions as a distinctive means of representation based on its indexical relation with ‘the real world’, that which it signifies. Someone may not look the way they appear in a photograph but we generally take it for granted that it is proof that they were in fact, at that moment, there in front of the lens. Photography relies on this relation, a referent in the real world. This is not always the case with digital photography because so much of the final image is determined after the shutter has been released. In addition to the choices made by photographers at the printing stage with analog photography which determine colour-cast, contrast, tone and so on, choices can now be made to place the subject afore an entirely different background, people’s physical appearances can change, other people might turn up in the final image or people may disappear entirely from the scene. It is possible for digital images to have no referent in the real world and therefore, they have no such indexical relation with the world they signify. Fred Ritchin even suggests that digital photographers have been consigned to nothing more than paid researchers since the images they produce serve a purpose comparable with that of a ‘preliminary script,’[Ref.01] a draft that can and will be reshuffled, easily modified before it is published. From this point of view, digital imaging does not necessitate a photographer, or even a camera. Authorship, once automatically assigned to the photographer, is now indefinable.

The world signified with digital photography is often not even the ‘real world’. This is exemplified by most advertisements, where the image signifies a possible world (a hyperreal promised alternative) you could have if you purchase their product. Here, though, we must note that analog photography fulfilled this role just as well before digital took over. Photography was a major contributor to the image-obsessed visual culture that we now belong to. We know that the prescribed indexical quality of photography has been misused almost from the outset - that it has been manipulated in a variety of ways in order to affect popular opinion and yet photography is still highly effective, widely employed and enjoyed. It seems however, that all the ways in which we consume photographs have been based on nothing more concrete than faith. We have faith that photography is ‘the pencil of nature’ because when Talbot told us this in 1839 we had no reason to disbelieve it. In fact, photography relies less on our belief in its indexical relation with the world, but more on our willing suspension of disbelief that the images are not actual reality.

Digital Imaging and Hyperreality

Digital photography – or digital imaging, as we must begin to think of it – is problematic only because of its association with traditional photography. The creative freedom that digital imaging affords is in fact more in line with that of painting, which photography was said to have displaced. Perhaps ‘digital painting’ would be a more accurate term for the process we currently know as digital photography. Ritchin claims that it has been ‘configured as a seamless, more efficient repetition of the past. Its name is intended to express massive change while paradoxically siting a medium that dates from the mechanical age.’ [Ref.02] The language of digital, which assumes the language of analog, minimizes the profound departure from its predecessors. Whereas traditional photography requires the presence of a seer and a seen, as Ritchin has it, focus not only of the lens but of one’s intuitive mind, [Ref.03] digital photography is an overtly fictional process which abandons even the rhetoric of truth owed so much by photography’s cultural success. It is ‘one more quick and omnipresent communication strategy [and,] added to the plethora of text messages and emails, it contributes mightily to a condition that former Microsoft executive Linda Stone called “continuous partial attention.”’ [Ref.04] ‘Continuous partial attention’ is a condition of the Digital Age in which we interact with the world in various different ‘hyperreal’ ways simultaneously. While walking down a high street one could be partially taking in the surrounding advertisements, partially interacting with others in the street, partially communicating with a completely absent friend via mobile phone, partially listening to music and so on, simultaneously. Umberto Eco suggests a reason for the shift into hyperreality. Capitalism generates a general demand for more, a demand that, incidentally, can never be fulfilled. In order to cater for such demand, replicas and replacements are created and offered in place of the original, offered as ‘the real thing’. According to Eco, to attain ‘the real thing’, we must fabricate the absolute fake [Ref.05]. Digital imaging is an apt illustration of hyperreality because it is based on infinitely repeatable abstracted data, where the reproduction is indistinguishable from the original. This means that ‘original’, as a concept, is no longer valid.

Fred Ritchin describes a strange tourist attraction known as ‘the most photographed barn in America’[Ref.06]. People follow numerous road signs to arrive at the barn and then photograph it again for themselves. Photographs of it are also sold there as postcards. He does not point out whether it is famous for any reason besides its claim to ‘most photographed barn in America’. He considers: what did the barn look like before it was photographed? and, once the world has been photographed, can it be seen in any way other than as photographed? People go to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa in order to create that image that makes them appear as though they are trying to push it upright. The only reason for doing this is because this is how they have already seen the Tower represented in photographs and so it feels like the appropriate thing to do. You cannot escape the ‘aura’ that is created around a thing once that thing has been photographed. Once it has been represented, it is never the same again. There is no ‘punctum’ in a photograph of someone propping up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. This has been removed by enormous repetition, by re-production, by re-presentation. When everything has been photographed, re-photographed and re-produced, we can no longer see the world as differentiated from its image. When the world and its image are inseparable and interchangeable, how then do we approach a question like, ‘what is real?’ When considering a notion like ‘authenticity’ in a photograph, it is now insufficient to ask whether the photograph accurately represents the subject. Instead, we must consider whether the subject even exists outside of the photograph. Ritchen suggests that, ‘Once the images begin to replace the world, photography loses much of its reason for being.’ [Ref.07]

Photography and Hyperreality in The Digital Age

It is not unnatural for people to be seduced by replication. Like most animals, we are comforted by what is familiar. We find it reassuring. Eco suggests that, ‘the pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit.’ [Ref.08] This was the seduction of photography in the first instance. We take pleasure in imitating the world because in doing so, we feel more powerful. But the imitation seeks to replace the original, and eventually becomes accepted as such.

Geoffrey Batchen writes that,

Digital images may be indices of sorts but their referents are now differential circuits and abstracted data banks of information (information that includes the look of a photograph), in other words, digital images are not signs of reality but signs of signs – representations of what is already perceived as a series of representations. [Ref.09]

Where photography removed us once from reality (or, the reality of the ‘real world’), and placed us in simulation, so digital imaging doubly removes us and entrenches us even deeper in hyperreality.

Hyperreality refers to far more than the function of images in society. Eco discusses artificial environments such as Disneyland, which functions by blending the reality of trade with the play of fiction. Disneyland has been discussed by many post-modernist philosophers (such as Jean Baudrillard) because it is a physical, architectural manifestation of hyperreality. The place itself is entirely fake but the money spent there is real. The merchandise sold is real but ‘what is falsified is our will to buy, which we take as real, and in this sense, Disneyland is really the quintessence of consumer ideology.’ [Ref.10] He describes the fake New Orleans at Disneyland, where you can take a boat trip down the fake Mississippi River and where, as it has been reported of the real Mississippi, you can see (real) alligators on the banks. Eco points outs that once you have experienced this, when you take the boat trip down the real Mississippi River and the tourist guide tells you it is sometimes possible to see alligators on the banks, you are disappointed if you do not see any. You feel ‘homesick for Disneyland’. Technology promises to deliver more reality than nature can. Hyperreality is preferable. We take pleasure in the perfect imitation because we enjoy the conviction that ‘imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it’ [Ref.11]. It is easier and more convenient to play a game of tennis on a Nintendo Wii [Ref.12] than to organise a game of tennis in reality. This may seem irrelevant to the discussion of photography in the Digital Age but it is helpful for our understanding of what is meant by The Digital Age, in which absolute unreality is offered as real presence, in which we prefer hyperreality to actual reality, and of which photography and digital imaging is a large part.

Geoffrey Batchen identifies two crises that face photography today: one technological (photography’s uneasy shift from analog to digital) and one epistemological (concerning great changes in wider society, our transition into the Digital Age). The technological crisis stems from the association of digital imaging with photography, and people who want to protect traditional photographic ideals from the threat that digital technology presents. What they are in fact trying to protect, is an already simulated reality, the nature of which has been more widely exposed since the proliferation of digital photography. They are trying to protect an ideal of photography which has been ingrained within our understanding of the medium, but which has proved itself as fallacy time and time again. As, Batchen states,

The production of every photograph involves practices of intervention and manipulation… what else is photography but the knowing manipulation of light levels, exposure times, chemical concentrations, tonal ranges and so on? …Artifice is an inescapable part of photographic life. [Ref.13]

To understand photography as a medium we cannot identify it with the technologies it employs (camera, film, etc.). Technology is only the embodiment of an idea. The camera is the embodiment of the idea of photography. And no medium is confined to one technology. Photography is the result of nearly 200 years of technological progression in the field of image-making, of cycles of innovation and obsolescence. We need to cease considering photography as a mode of image-making that is somehow more natural, automatic and objective than any other and we need to understand that ‘photographs are no more or less true to the appearance of things in the real world than digital images.’ [Ref.14]

Both Fred Ritchin and Geoffrey Batchen have noted relations between digitally modified phrenographs (images of the human body), genetics and cosmetic surgery. So acceptable is it now that a person’s image can and will change in photographs (celebrities in magazines are just the beginning), that it becomes more acceptable to modify, or enhance ones actual image surgically or genetically. We have recognised that analog rots and degrades over time and replaced it with digital, which is infinitely duplicable and we are now doing the same to human physicality. Ritchin claims that, ‘If images in the press show ‘flaws’ disappearing, that process of actually removing them appears less remote and even inevitable.’ [Ref.15] We are replacing ourselves with the image of ourselves. People are having ex-spouses ‘removed’ from photographs in albums. We are becoming image. Batchen predicts that, ‘Those who look for evidence of an extra-photographic real world will find in its place nothing but signs.’ [Ref.16] As French philosopher Jacques Derrida put it, ‘the thing itself is a sign… from the moment there is meaning, there are nothing but signs.’ [Ref.17]

The Future of Photography in the Digital Age

Photography is faced with more challenges today than ever before. As it enters into the Digital Age, people will demand more and more of the medium. As there appears to be little distinction generally between the new digital imaging technology that employs photographic techniques to generate a “draft image”, and traditional ideals of analog photography, their demands will be met by something altogether different from what they understand as ‘photography’.

Digital imaging is a complete break away from analog photography and the distinction between them must be made clear if we are to understand either. Digital technology, still in its infancy, already affords a creative expression that extends much further than any offered by photography. The threat it poses to photography is the threat of exposing the medium as a mistrusted and widely misunderstood mode of image-making. By offering itself as the logical progression of photography, digital imaging throws open the hood of photography and exposes its inner workings to a vast audience. Photography is finally been unmasked publically.

As digital technology progresses, will we still continue to place our trust in the images as we have always done, so innocently, so naïvely, with photography? Surely, if an image is offered to us as a photograph, we will read it as such, our interpretation invested with so many disproved ideals. Perhaps this is the reason why digital imaging needed photography to announce its own dramatic propagation, to temporarily disguise its fallacy in something familiar, whose own fallacy has always been shrouded in mystique. Once the fallacy of photography is exposed to the world, digital imaging has covered its tracks. Its overt manipulation of the image seems less ‘unnatural’, quite palatable even because claims cannot be made that it communicates more or less “truthfully” than photography.

For digital imaging to maximise its potential as a creative medium it will have to shed its ties with photography. The ideals of photography which have, thus far been exploited by digital imaging, securing it a foothold in contemporary visual culture, will eventually become restrictive. As digital technology progresses there will be no need for digital images to include the look of a photograph and it will break free of such constraints. Perhaps this will leave photography behind, viewed as an antiquated medium, or even mean the death of photography? Perhaps it could also be advantageous for photography if it restores a certain fascination with traditional photographic methods of image-making. A new language would be created with photography, taking into account new attitudes to images and combining surviving ideals of traditional photography, in much the same way that has meant painting has survived. Like painting though, this would confine photographic practise to the realms of the artistic since its indexical relation to the world would no longer be taken for granted.

For the time being, digital imaging is still widely associated with photography and we will soon have to make the distinction between the two so that general ignorance cannot be exploited. A wider acknowledgement is also needed of how photographs work, how they communicate with us, and why photography holds such an esteemed place in society. We need to understand how photography contributes to visual culture and how images function to generate hyperreality. It is important that we understand what is meant by hyperreality and how it affects us, so that, as we progress into the Digital Age, we are appropriately informed when we have to address important questions of identity and social ethics.

References

[Ref.01] Ritchin, Fred, After Photography, W.W. Norton and Company, 2009
[Ref.02] Ibid.
[Ref.03] Ibid.
[Ref.04] Ibid.
[Ref.05] Eco, Umberto, Travels In Hyper-Reality, Picador, 1986
[Ref.06] Ritchin, Fred, After Photography, W.W. Norton and Company, 2009
[Ref.07] Ibid.
[Ref.08] Eco, Umberto, Travels In Hyper-Reality, Picador, 1986
[Ref.09] Batchen, Geoffrey, Ectoplasm: Photography In The Digital Age (essay), Squiers, Carol (ed.), Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography, New Press, New York, 1999
[Ref.10] Eco, Umberto, Travels In Hyper-Reality, Picador, 1986
[Ref.11] Ibid.
[Ref.12] Home video game console with a wireless controller that detects movement in three dimensions, and which also allows the user to ply other others anywhere else in the world via the Internet
[Ref.13] Batchen, Geoffrey, Ectoplasm: Photography In The Digital Age (essay), Squiers, Carol (ed.), Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography, New Press, New York, 1999
[Ref.14] Ibid.
[Ref.15] Ritchin, Fred, After Photography, W.W. Norton and Company, 2009
[Ref.16] Batchen, Geoffrey, Ectoplasm: Photography In The Digital Age (essay), Squiers, Carol (ed.), Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography, New Press, New York, 1999
[Ref.17] Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976, quoted by Geoffrey Batchen (Squiersm Carol, (ed.), Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography, New Press, New York, 1999)

Norbury, JG, Photography in The Digital Age (Extract from What Is Real?, 2009)

In Defense of Imperfection

2009-06-02T10:39:00.000+01:00

The more I think about the notion of 'perfection', the more I think it must be a construct of man. Where in nature does perfection exist? Nature survives by generating a harmony among living beings but harmony is not synonymous with perfection. In daily parlance, we use the term extremely flippantly: he cooks a perfect steak, she's perfect for the job. The basis of this usage is in comparison. The steak is described as 'perfect' only because we have experienced eating other steaks. She is only 'perfect' for the job because we have met others who would not be at all suitable. Perfection refers to a state of completeness, or flawlessness and thus it cannot by definition, be comparable. Who can give a natural example of true perfection? (You will answer two plus two equals four: that is perfectly true, a perfect equation, but let us return to mathematics later.) Is man capable of perfection? Can a person be perfect or create something that is truly perfect? I should like to suggest that it is impossible because 'perfection' is a completely abstract and hypothetical idea, and to lay down an argument in addition to this as to why it is not even desirable.

It is common to hear the phrase 'to strive for perfection' but what does this mean if perfection is impossible? It is a given that it is not possible for a person to physically mould - that is, with his or her hands - a perfectly spherical shape from any kind of material. It could be pointed out here though that it is possible for a person to use technology to design and build a machine that is capable of doing this on his or her behalf and that this means it is possible for him or her to create something perfect. However, this argument does not refute the original statement because the person created only the machine and not the perfect sphere. The person is a step removed from the creation of the sphere. It is not within human beings to generate perfection. Therefore, when someone says of a book or of a piece of music that it is 'perfect', that is not at all what he or she means. It is not possible to write a perfect book or write a perfect piece of music because 'perfection' refers to something that is unattainable and impossible.

There have been many different usages of the term 'perfect' and the notion of perfection can be traced back beyond Latin to Greek, in which it referred to something that was as good as it could be, or the best.

The earliest known definition is offered in Aristotle's Delta of the Metaphysics, in which he identifies three parts to the meaning of 'perfect':

1. that which is complete, which contains all the requisite parts;

2. that which is so good that nothing of the kind could be better;

3. that which has attained its purpose.

Let us examine the second. If someone created something that was so good that nothing of the kind could be better, what would he or she have achieved? Would it be possible to be satisfied in the knowledge that there is no longer any point to committing oneself to any task 'of the kind'? Would that be happiness? The next logical question is: what does that person do next? It is not possible because true perfection would definitively quantify value and to definitively quantify value would be to assign unnatural value.

I would like to explain what I mean by 'unnatural value'. I suggest here that two plus two equals four is not an instance of perfection because two plus two only equals four because of the accepted mathematical system we use to calculate a value of two and two. Four might be the mathematical value of the sum of two and two but it is not a natural value. Mathematics seeks to quantify everything, which is to assign unnatural value. Consider a scenario in which two people are hiding from a group of attackers. It might be easier for two people to hide themselves than four because four people are more conspicuous than two. Thus, adding two could mean the demise of all four (if you translate this into mathematical terms you have two plus two equals zero). It could then be argued that two, in this case, is a preferable or more valuable number than four. If four is not automatically the most valuable sum of two and two then the equation is mathematically correct, but cannot be perfect.

If a perfect book were suddenly published, it would automatically devalue every book published until now to the point of worthlessness. It would mean the end of literature. If a perfect artwork was exhibited, no other work of art would any longer be relevant and it would mean the end of art. A perfect piece of music would be the end of music. It is precisely because of imperfection that literature and art and music is ever relevant at all. 'Perfection' is not a notion that is conducive to the human condition. Imperfection gives meaning to creation. It is imperfection that makes a thing interesting to one person but not to another. It is imperfection that generates attraction between people (in his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood, Japanese author Haruki Murakami describes the act of sex as two people 'sharing their imperfections'). Imperfection makes steak worth cooking and life worth living!

So, what does it mean to 'strive for perfection'? Perfection would leave us nowhere else to go. Perfection means the end and thus perfection is death (perhaps death is the only instance of perfection in the human condition?) Striving for perfection is the inflation of a balloon and perfection is the precise moment when it pops. Perfection is self-destruction, total annihilation.

It should be noted that this is in no way advocating a nihilistic view of life. Everything one does should be done to the best of one's ability. What would otherwise be the point in doing anything at all? Neither is it a means to excuse complacency, which is a cancer. I merely wish to point out that it is precisely because no man or woman can create anything 'perfect' that we have great books, great music, great art, great architecture, great food, etc. The pleasure we take in something is possible only because of imperfection coupled with an idea of (an impossible) perfection. So go forth, I say! and create wonderful things - strive for perfection and be happy in the knowledge that you will never achieve your goal!

Norbury, JG, In Defence of Imperfection, 2009

Extract from: Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1864)

2009-05-20T12:28:00.000+01:00

... You see, gentlemen, reason is a good thing, that can't be disputed, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's intellectual faculties, while volition is a manifestation of the whole of life, I mean the whole of human life including both reason and speculation. And although in this manifestation life turns out to be rubbishy, all the same it is life and not merely the extraction of a square root. After all, I, for example, quite naturally want to live so as to fulfil my whole capacity for living, and not so as to satisfy simply and solely my intellectual capacity, which is only one-twentieth of my whole capacity for living. What does reason know? Reason knows only what it has succeeded in finding out (and perhaps there are some things it will never find out; there may be no consolation in this idea, but why not express it?), but man's nature acts as one whole, with everything that is in it, conscious or unconscious, and although it is nonsensical, yet it lives. ...

Extract from: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Notes From Underground, 1864 (Penguin, 2006 edition, translated by Jessie Coulson)

Guilty Party, by Peter Cook (1959)

2009-05-15T12:51:00.000+01:00

(A police Constable and a police Inspector are in a police station. There is a knock at the door.)

INSPECTOR: See who that is, will you Constable?
CONSTABLE: It's a Mr Prone, Inspector.
(Enter Mr Prone)
PRONE: Mr James Prone, Inspector, of Hawkchurch. I'm sorry to disturb you at this hour.
INSPECTOR: Not at all. Won't you come in? What can we do for you?
PRONE: I'd just like you to ask me a few questions.
INSPECTOR: Questions? What about? There's nothing wrong, is there?
PRONE: It's purely a matter of routine, Inspector. There's no need for you to feel alarmed, but you are in fact investigating a murder.
CONSTABLE: Murder? But this is horrible!
PRONE: Yes, Constable. Murder is an ugly thing. That is why I should be extremely grateful if you would help me bring the culprit to bear by asking me one or two simple questions.
INSPECTOR: But I don't understand, Mr Prone. What kind of questions?
PRONE: Like 'Did I know Mrs Tallow well?'
INSPECTOR: Only slightly. You used to play bridge together, but you don't mean to say...
CONSTABLE: Is she? he's not! She can't be! She isn't?
PRONE: I'm afraid so. She was found stabbed this morning at 11.31 between the third and fourth rib.
CONSTABLE: Poor Annie! Why did it have to be her> She never hurt a soul!
INSPECTOR: There, there Constable. You mustn't upset yourself. You must excuse my Constable, Mr Prone. You see, he was much closer to her than I was. But I still don't see what this horrible thing has got to do with you.
PRONE: Where was I this morning between eleven and twelve?
INSPECTOR: You were... you were... now look here Prone, you're not suggesting...
PRONE: I'm not suggesting anything Inspector. I only want you to get the facts. Now, where was I this morning?
INSPECTOR: I expect you were in the garden - gardening the beds.
PRONE: And did anybody see me gardening?
INSPECTOR: How the devil should I know? Now see here Prone, I don't like your tone.
PRONE: I'm only trying to do your job, Inspector. It isn't always a very pleasant one.
INSPECTOR: I'm sorry. I'm sorry about that. It's just that you got me on the raw. Of course we'll do all we can to help you.
PRONE: And now the Constable would like to ask me a few questions.
CONSTABLE: I... I... Oh dear, I don't know what to say.
INSPECTOR: Can't you see the Constable's overwrought? He's not himself.
PRONE: Let me see your shoe, Constable. Just as I thought. This speck of gravel is identical to the gravel in Mrs Tallow's drive. You were there this morning, weren't you? Come clean now, Constable.
CONSTABLE: Oh, what's the use? You're too clever for me.
INSPECTOR: Is this true, Constable? Why didn't you tell me?
CONSTABLE: I thought you'd be angry.
PRONE: And what were you doing there?
INSPECTOR: Look here, Mr Prone - you're not implying that the Constable is in some way implicated in this affair?
PRONE: I am implying that at 11.15 precisely, he looked in through the large bay window and saw the murder done - correct, Constable?
CONSTABLE: I'm sorry, Inspector. I couldn't help it.
PRONE: Yes, Constable. I'm afraid the game's up. You looked through that window and saw me stab Mrs Tallow.
CONSTABLE: Yes, yes. I confess.
PRONE: In that case I'm afraid you have no alternative but to arrest me for wilful murder, and of course to caution me.
INSPECTOR: But this is absurd, Mr Prone. We can't possibly arrest you on such tenuous evidence as that. There's no proof.
PRONE: The Constable saw me do it.
INSPECTOR: I don't see what that's got to do with it. He's not a reliable witness. He'd soon break down under skilful cross examination.
PRONE: My fingerprints are all over the murder weapon.
INSPECTOR: But this is all purely circumstantial evidence. Besides, we haven't found it.
PRONE: Look in my pocket.
INSPECTOR: I haven't a search warrant. No, no. I tell you, Mr Prone, we haven't got enough to go on. For instance, what motice did you have?
PRONE: Money. She left me all she had. It's no use, Inspector. You must arrest me.
INSPECTOR: Are you threatening me, Prone? I warn you, I have influential friends in the force.
PRONE: Constable, take me into custody.
INSPECTOR: You'll never get away with this.
PRONE: I'm coming quietly, Inspector. You always get your man in the end.
INSPECTOR: Alright, you devil Prone. You win. But let us have one last drink before you go. Won't you join us?
PRONE: Not while I'm on duty, thank you. Wait, what were those white crystals you put in those glasses? Give them to me!
INSPECTOR: Too late, Prone. We'll never live to run you in. You see, that was cyanide we drank.
(The Inspector dies)
CONSTABLE: Oh no, Mr Prone - you'll never hang.
(The Constable dies)
PRONE: Damn, damn, damn. I've slipped through their fingers again. I should never have allowed them that last drink. I thought it was the perfect crime, but like all murderers, I made on fatal mistake.

(First performed by Peter Cook, David Johnson and Ray Mitchell)
(Published in 'Tragically I Was An Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook' Edited by William Cook, 2003)