We See You – Avatar captures global mood

When a motion picture story makes $1.12 billion in its world wide box office in the first week of release you have to believe there is something beyond technology at work, drawing people to see it.  And after two viewings of Avatar, flatscreen and 3-D, I’m impressed with the storyline for these reasons: 1. Its main protagonist, a relatively powerless ex marine with a spinal injury, discovers how to live fearlessly for the sake of a greater good than his nationalism.  2. Avatar offers a better future to our real world that’s changing fast through the dynamic of  globalisation (the new imperialism)  and its reactionary response, terrorism  - from Avatar we learn to see people who are utterly different to us as deserving of our respect, our attention, and our friendship.  In the movie this happens both ways.

My friend Bruce Herman, an artist, put it this way: “It’s so timely. By the numbers turning out to see it, ordinary people around the world are agreeing that they’re sick and tired of imperialism that breeds terrorism. It’s such a tired cycle.”  I’ve found myself in agreement, the story of Avatar has this amazing appeal.

And yet, it’s not a well told story.  It’s clumsy, it lacks subtlety and I regard it as a story in reaction to the Bush administration.  Too many lines are direct slaps at private armies like Blackwater, and a policy of pre-emptive war.  And it paints a picture of glorious indigenous life that has never been true in the history of this planet.  It’s fiction yes, but it needs to be credible. Since it’s metaphorical message is so unsubtle, it can’t get away with caricaturing “civilization” while at the same time romanticizing native life.  Ultimately, it is the technology used to tell the story that lifts it to the heights of enjoyment.

It’s a beautiful world that James Cameron has created, and the 3-D experience is not to be missed because we are seeing the future of cinema.  The power of it is proven to me.  Forty eight hours after seeing the 3-D version I am still revisiting Pandora in my imagination as if to see the friends made and their landscape explored in that three hour excursion.  I re-enter scenes like I would return to any place I’ve actually visited before.  Because, in 3-D the sense of being in the film as the invisible observer is extraordinary.  This was not my experience after seeing it first on a flat screen.

The limits of the technology also appear.  Particularly in the scenes of the marines meeting in the briefing room, or in other confined spaces, the images of the people rather than seeming 3-D appear two dimensional, like card board cut-outs placed in a three dimensional space.  So there are frontiers for this technology yet to conquer.

I have one more reservation, the same as expressed by Ross Douthat in the New York Times – there is no resolution for the world in returning to the pagan animism, from which our ancestors were converted over the past three thousand years. Yet this film suggests that hope might be found in such a proven dead-end.  In this sense I think the Avatar storyline is too much Hollywood, and culturally regressive.  My next post will outline a story that is not reactionary to contemporary US politics, a documentary that is in pre-production – that happens to touch the same issue of breaking the cycle of violence by seeing the other.  The protagonist in this real story is still being celebrated by a nation foreign to him three hundred years after his arrival on its shores.

The Seeds of Online Hate Speech

During the final weeks of the 2008 presidential election, I received email from friends wanting me to vote for their candidate.  As a new voter, I treasured my independent status. I’d just listen and make up my own mind.  So, I grinned and tolerated their pitches for the most part, until I got one that claimed to be a speech given by “Barack Hussein Obama.”  It was so outrageous it screamed for fact checking.  Two minutes on Google and into three different urban legend websites, and lo, there it was on each site, a speech concocted by a mid western radio talk show host to caricature Obama.

But my friend was passing on the chain email, as a real speech given by the presidential candidate.  Ugly.  He really wanted this to be true.  And he didn’t care that it was a lie. He still doesn’t see the harm of it, as he maintains his anti-Obama rage like a martyr.  I rebuked him, in a “reply all” for promoting a lie.  It’s a journalism thing with me.

A few weeks ago, a friend sent an email quoting Prime Minister Rudd of Australia telling Muslims to get their act together or go home.  But I discovered in just a minute that this speech can be tracked to a Florida air force veteran who wrote these words to his local newspaper following the terrorism of September 11, 2001. I’d seen a similar email four years ago putting the same words in, then Prime Minister, John Howard’s mouth.  It was a lament that US leadership couldn’t be so direct.  I hit “reply all” here too and shot the thing down.

This week, via Facebook, another friend encouraged me to take seriously a video clip of a documentary trailer, that “exposes” the Obama administration’s subversive preparation of the US to accept a one world government and currency.  It’s such an obvious conspiracy theory, except for those who want to believe it.  And, some of my friends really want to believe this stuff.  (Makes me wonder what weirdness I might want to believe)  Should we be surprised to learn that a Republican talk show host, with a record of failed conspiracy theories, directed it?  It was a slick video.

Now, while the Bush administration suffered heavy criticism – no emails, or videos landed in my computer that attributed to G.W. Bush words he didn’t say, plans he didn’t have. Still, he was lampooned unmercifully.  So, a bit peeved at the intensity of Obama bashing, I chastised this particular friend for promoting hateful discussion, by “commenting on his status” (Facebook speak), and to my chagrin, he responded there with some humble pie.

So I called him.

Speaking about President Obama, my friend said, “You know Chris, I think the reason I do this is I feel so powerless. He and his henchmen make decisions that affect my life, even here in Australia, and I can’t do anything about it.  I just don’t trust the guy.  Any suggestions?”

I was flummoxed. I wanted to say it’s not even documentary – it’s propaganda.  But that wasn’t his concern.  He was overwhelmed by a sense of the power of the Obama machine, and the sense of his own lack of representation.  I wonder why he gives the man so much power.

Yet, I can relate to the feeling.  The question is what do you do when you feel like that?  I guess, owning it is a good start.  And there are civil ways to discuss politics and express disagreement, where truth matters more than winning power, friendship matters more than party machine, kindness and fairness come into play. But they’re discreet attitudes, since good manners happen in the quiet corners.  Rancor likes center stage.

Adolf Hitler - in the days when he was just one in the crowd

A worst case scenario: we could all become little Hitlers.  It’s easier than we might first imagine. Let’s start with resentment of someone we think is stealing our future, and blog about him or her.  Hitler did the equivalent in his own time.  His resentments crystallized and became a book that blamed a conspiracy of Jews for Germany’s demise, and, oh dear, a critical mass of people wanted to believe it.  They got behind him and propelled him to leadership, which he secured with the most extraordinary propaganda films.  Too far fetched?  Us?   Little Hitlers?   Nah?   Not seriously?

Poor victim, Adolf, got the perfect storm of circumstances to fulfill his Aryan utopia.  The whole world got war, European Jews a holocaust.  It was unimaginable suffering and loss of life remembered mostly by people born in the 1930’s or earlier.

In the US, people have assassinated presidents and other leaders whom, they believed, had eclipsed their Utopian dreams. They’ve shot up their schools, they’ve  bombed federal buildings.

Other disaffected groups with the same sense of deficit, have flown planes into buildings, and now they deploy suicide bombers, and roadside bombs.

Nahaah!  My chain email propaganda, and bitter blogging can’t be likened to this!  Oh, really?  Perhaps, not yet.

So what’s an alternative to fixing blame for our unease upon leadership, political parties, ethnic groups, or conspiracies of the elite?  I like Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s advice on this, in the semi auto-biographical book of his life by Clayborne Carson.  King says if you want to influence decisions you must be prepared to do the humbling work of persuasion.

I recall from my University days, Australian Historian, Charles Manning Hope Clark, liked to say, “If you have something to say have the humility to get up and say it.”  But he presumed it would be with some sense of dignity and respect for others.

Since we are all gifted so differently we need to be realistic about how we might be persuasive, and how much influence we can expect to have.  I’ve been amazed here in Massachusetts how readily my federal congressman and senator have, through their staff, listened to me and responded over and above my expectations to particular concerns I’ve raised.  I suspect, when we are such mobile people, it’s too easy to forget to begin in our own neighborhoods.

Still Manufacturing Limited Consent

Once again, I guide a college journalism class through the 1992 documentary “Manufacturing Consent” by Canadians, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, which unpacks Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model of how the media functions.  It’s remarkably contemporary, and while it deals with how the US democracy functions – the principles can be applied in any culture/nation-state:  to what extent are we bound to a world view that exonerates us from committing atrocities, while blaming others for genocides?  For those interested in the flourishing of truth, justice, genuine liberty for citizens, and peace between peoples – this film is rich.  (“Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury (1951) is a useful book to read before the film).

Six Behaviours of Mainstream Media

Chomsky’s ideas are often lampooned by his detractors as simplistic, or too far outside of accepted US thought to be taken seriously – a thoughtful look at this film upends that notion.  I often tell my students that coming from Australia it is clear to me after 12 years, that US politics is played in only one half of the field – the right.  What it calls liberal/left is in fact the center line in most other western cultures.  And sadly, US mainstream media is so configured that it can’t help but propagate this cultural blindspot.  Chomsky suggests an even more sinister notion – that the system itself, a power unto itself and beyond the control of individuals, has an inherent bias, so that “liberal” which equates with “extreme left” and is a pejorative to half of the US population, is cleverly situated there at the 50 yard line.  This constrains the way the population responds to all issues affecting the fortunes of the ruling corporations and government elite.  Only a minority of people are willing to be tagged as “liberal” and its extreme advocates become poster children for what “liberal” means in the US.  Ted Kennedy, the “Lion of the Senate” and champion of the working poor, was among those dart board cultural villains.

The idea that “the system” perpetuates itself with evil consequence, is remarkably attuned to Christian thought.  Jesus applied his strongest denunciations to the ruling elite of his day, and when bound and made a media spectacle in his “capture,” he refused even to speak to the puppet King, Herod.  His apostle, Paul, described the “system” and “social institutions” as “principalities and powers”.  He admitted they have a life of their own, governed by invisible spiritual forces, propagating culture and values that suit the status quo, shaping the thinking of populations to serve those at the top of the heap.  In this they prove to be anti-christian, and must be opposed in a peculiar way: by living honestly and well, and caring for those in our circles who suffer unjustly because of “the system.”  Indeed, he had to cope with multiple imprisonments, beatings, and ultimately beheading, for pointing people to Christ and this Christian analysis of the day to day world.

Will globalization alter this blinkered, half-playing-field, media environment?  Maybe it will change the balance of media ownership and economic power.  But it won’t change much until corporations arising from other cultures and world views rival US based media ownership.  Or the BBC, which is a peculiar British animal, but of a similarly biased stripe.  And then, if these powers are ever challenged – the question arises – will the emerging view of the world be toward more freedom for global citizens to live and prosper in peace, or less?  History suggests its likely to be the same or worse, unless a critical mass of citizens arise, wise enough to shake up institutional power structures, and from within them, restore the values that provide just and free societies.  That’s always the honorable response, and begins in our local neighborhoods.  But as Chomsky knew in deciding to oppose the powers, it’s always a costly struggle.

Fifteen Years after “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”

In 1994, Historian Mark Noll published a book that was a cry from the gut. A scholar, and an evangelical, he was despairing at the contemporary intellectual vacuum that had overtaken his treasured Christian tradition. At Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts on Friday October 2, a number of visiting scholars and local students, many of them evangelicals, met with professor Noll, to consider what might have changed in fifteen years.

Noll’s book dared to name an Emperor with no clothes, a form of Christianity claimed by as many as 200 million Americans, that had become anti-intellectual, populist, ideological, politically polarizing, and socially sectarian, contributing almost nothing to US culture in the 20th century.  His criticism resonated with Christian intellectuals, both in the US and around the world.  Yesterday, Noll, to his chagrin explained that such a large response was evidence that his despair then, like the prophet Elijah’s, was overstated.  But the problem itself wasn’t, and isn’t exaggerated.

Mark Noll Ph.D. - Francis McAnaney Professor of History, Notre Dame University, IN

Evidence presented at the conference suggests that there is in fact a thriving Christian intelligensia throughout the US, and many of these, as professors, speak of great support from secular sympathizers within the halls of mainstream academia.  I’ve noted before that even avowedly liberal media like the New York Times especially through its columnists, David Brooks, Jewish, and Nicolas Kristof, a declared liberal, and the reporting of Michael Luo, show that intelligent Christian evangelical leadership makes a difference, notably in crisis places, New Orleans, Darfur, and many African and Asian nations beyond the efforts of governments, and other aid agencies.

My wife and I have for many years observed what we call the sleeping giant of Christian higher education where scholars have quietly devoted themselves to equip their own minds and prepare students in real world studies of the sciences and humanities, classical and modern because their evangelical churches gave them nothing else to do.  It has occurred under the radar of both the wider culture and the subculture of evangelicalism. An extraordinary number of these scholars have gained doctorates at the most rigorous Universities in the world and as Noll noted yesterday, have become serious contributors to global scholarship in their specialized worlds.

The issue for us, and it rose at yesterday’s conference, is how to communicate a flourishing knowledge that proceeds from a truly thoughtful biblical understanding of the world, to the broad and amorphous evangelical community of the US.  It’s a community that Pew research demonstrates has 100 million people who believe the world is less than 10,000 years old.  But Christian artists are taking it further – as writers, journalists, documentary film makers, painters, we consider how this knowledge might be shared with the community as a whole, a community we discover to be, ironically, even more receptive than the evangelical subculture, to thoughtful Christian understandings.

Link to excerpt of video interview of Dr Noll

Broadcast News: The Sorcerer’s Unwitting Apprentices

Edward R. Murrow - Had first hand experience of the destructive power of propaganda in Hitler's Germany

Mark Bowden’s cut to the chase story in this week’s the Atlantic exposes the rotten core of the 24 hour television network news cycle.  To those of us who’ve sniffed the rot for the past decade it’s astonishing that in the bear pit of broadcast news, network executives find unity in discarding the truth.  Yet, truth is at the heart of democracy-building.

That  CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, and ABC  direct the flow of public sentiment like wizards with wands is demonstrated by the billions of dollars they earn in advertising.  Corporations selling products and services pay huge sums to the broadcasters just to have some of that power work for them, a minute at a time.  Their media castles are almost impregnable, way beyond the control of Congress, because broadcasters determine how much air time a politician gets in the bid for re-election.

Something that tempered that power in other news media has gone missing since the rise of TV.  Once upon a time, we knew that democracy depended not on wealth, and power, but on a free flow of truthful information to everyone.  Journalists who were exposed to the sorcery of Hitler’s propaganda films during Word War 2, like Edward R. Murrow, came back to the US as inspired champions of truth and transparency in reporting to the public, for the greater good of the democracy.  They’d experienced the nightmare that engulfs a nation who’s only information is an orchestrated ideology.  It was a nightmare that almost engulfed the world.

Murrow’s victory in exposing the ideological paranoia of McCarthyism in 1954 was short lived when CBS relegated his program from prime time to Sundays when profit was threatened.  Profits we hear are threatened again.  But it’s not so.  CBS for example has regained the ground it lost late in 2008.  NBC’s 15% profit in this year of downturn is described by one finance reporter as “miserable”.  15%!  Most of us would like to be so profitable with our invested savings this year.

And so news – a critical public service – the least profitable to those whose only bottom line is cash – gets downgraded, journalists laid off willy nilly.  What’s with the greed in this brave new world, as we seek Eldorado Wall Street gains of 30% and ever upward annually?  In every sorcerer  story I’ve read, the delusion of grandeur, of establishment entitlement,  the mindless infliction of collateral damage on the common wealth, breeds a backlash that destroys the wizard, his followers, and then also, numberless innocents.  Think, Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Cambodia, Rwanda, Uganda and the Congo, before thinking Lord of the Rings.  It’s always a bloody and titanic struggle for freedom to be self governing when sorcerers have spread their enchantment.

Oh, and guess what?  To fight back to usurious profit margins – besides the flood of press releases from partisan think tanks, there’s this whole new flood of budding reporters on the Internet.  ” Maybe,” think the TV execs,  ”We can trim back our staff and get news from all of them, for FREE.”  They’re wrong, clueless, but the “remote” is in their hands.

Bowden’s case study is fascinating in this light.  The young idealogues with no sense of history find and offer their Google scourings to the partisans and lo – the appearance of news. But it’s just that – a mirage.  Citizens need to get active here and turn these stations off the air.  My wife and I disconnected our TV cable twelve months ago, and no withdrawal symptoms at all.  News from multiple online former print sources is more substantial, memorable, and reliable.  Movies, and favorite TV series – for us its Monk, and The Closer, and NCIS,  are uninterrupted played on DVD, even streamed to computer in HD.   And for educating ourselves even as seekers of the news, there’s no better book to inform us of what journalism must become as the necessary fourth estate of freedom – The Elements of Journalism by Kovach and Rosenstiel

An observation of Hyperlocal Websites

In the chaos of newspaper melt downs because of free Internet news, I’ve begun to wonder whether hyperlocal websites that are begun to give a voice to anyone and everyone are an experiment on the brink of failure.  Failure, that is, if what you go there for is news you can rely on.

For some months I have contributed video news reporting to Groundreport.com and more tentatively began the experiment with the newer start up called Allvoices.com about six weeks ago.

The aims of each site are similar, and motivated according to their “about us” pages by the desire to give people who would otherwise never have a voice, a forum, people in villages in South Asia, Africa, and other nations barely acknowledged in the west. On its face, this is laudable.

Yet, on Allvoices, the nature of most of the home page stories is simply opinion – and US political and polarized opinion at that, with its hate language and demonizing of others.  Like the comments pages on old news online sites, it’s providing a disturbing expose of the mean spirit animating so much public discourse, not exactly new in the US, because it has been there since Washington became president.  But this meanness of spirit, that has always lurked, now has a megaphone, or is it a cacaphone? in new media.

Groundreport.com has attracted more professional journalists, especially from South Asia although opinionated American scribes bloviate there too.

But here’s my confession as a contributor – I rarely go there to read what other people write.  I go there to post stories and see how many hits they’ve been receiving.  It’s not my source of news – I still read the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, all online when I want news, daily. And with this blogsite of my own, Facebook, and these hyperlocal outlets, I tend to be writing stories and editing video stories more and reading the stories of other people less.  I follow a rare few people on Twitter who I’ve found link me to substantial stories on the direction of new media, and none of these links take me to a hyperlocal news site.

So I sometimes wonder if new media will turn us all into opinionated chatter boxes, rather than good listeners/readers for truth.

At recent conferences I’ve attended that have addressed the issues of Web 2.0 it has become axiomatic that a journalism start-up now needs high level computer scientists and business managers at the core of the team, since with hyperlocals, there is no editing of the content, just aggregation of it in a semi ordered way so that it attracts high volumes of users, which generates a great advertising cash flow. Allvoices claim they have more than two million stories online at any given moment.  And, all this is managed automatically by computer programming. No editing. There’s just a mass of uncensored conversation from which we can pick and choose, ordered by computer into a few broad categories.  In the case of Allvoices, I find no journalists among the start up team, just computer techies or business mavens.  And in the case of Groundreport, a young journalist from New York City with a heart for the displaced and dispossessed in the world, and her family backing and somewhere back of that is an IT team with the smarts to design the aggregating website.  Despite a valiant recent attempt to check the stories for veracity before posting – the global volume of them prohibits it – and so comments columns become repositories for spam, and often in Arabic!

But here’s the rub.  Who has the time or interest to search in acres of mud in the hope of finding a gem?  The beauty of old news is that someone takes the time to order it, write it well, and place it intelligently for me to find and attend.  Being at the heart of that kind of process is not always about greed, information control, or elitism, but more often I’ve found journalism motivated as a service to the reader.  Perhaps the real culprit in the current chaos is a capitalism for which nothing has been too sacred to exploit for maximized profits, well above 20% annually.  And in the US, newspapers as the fourth estate have suffered from this dreadfully in the past 30 years.  But vengefully swinging the pendulum with new technology is not likely to result in a lasting revolution.  Failure of the experiment, I begin to imagine, is just around the corner.  The biggest prize will go to those who bring order out of the chaos, and serve their readers with a meal cooked to a recipe, not just open a shute for raw grain to flow down.

But ultimately it’s because they are reactionary, I think the hyperlocal sites will prove to be Emperors with no clothes.  In the end, unless there is artful choice by journalists (not wannabes) serving people (not computers) then, as with Youtube, the meaningless and mindless will make the system too boring to navigate.

New Media and Boston’s Old Journalism Trail

Last week, with 12 journalism students in tow, I had the fun of discovering 34 sites in Boston where newspapers were pioneered, beginning with the first newspaper in the US and five of the first seven US publications.

The Journalism Trail is now well mapped as a project of Emerson College’s Professor, Manny Paraschos.

It’s about a two hour adventure, rediscovering historic Boston, and useful for reflection as we deal with the extraordinary challenges of new technology affecting the collating and delivery of the news all over again.

The first was published ever so briefly in 1690 known as Publick Occurrences, both Forreign & Domestick and its site is beside the Old State House on Washington Street, (then Cornhill Street) at the head of what later became known as newspaper row.  According to the Emerson College website it was closed by the government four days after commencing.

We found the sites quite clustered, especially around the Court House and the Old State House and they included original places of the Boston Globe, and the Boston Herald.  I was fascinated to find The Jewish Advocate as the only newspaper house still producing its publication where it began in 1902.

Perhaps my favorite discovery is the site of the Boston Post, dating before 1890, once the highest circulation newspaper in the US, at more than 600,000 subscribers, also on Newspaper Row.  It built its circulation using strategies like those of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.  That included in the early 20^th Century sending a naked and unarmed man to the Maine woods for 60 days and reporting on how well he survived the trial.

One of the first impressions of a tour into this journalism history, is that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to getting people’s attention, but more surprising are those long lasting publications that had some real sense of the public interest.  And nothing in news reporting seems to be permanent.

If “mass circulation” and “ratings”, are now translated into “unique hits” – will this guide business managers of news reporting start ups, into old puffery in the new media?  The challenge in the new environment is how to serve the public interest and become a lasting institution without the gravitational pull into selling the news online with the age-old baits of easy money, sex or association with power.  As the Globe teeters, and people in Boston dread that the one remaining daily paper might end up being the Herald, it’s pioneering time all over again for those who would report public occurrences both foreign and domestic.

The Bitterbynde Trilogy – a return to British roots

One of the great finds for me through the northern summer, was the best selling fantasy fiction series, The Bitterbynde Trilogy, by Cecilia Dart-Thornton.

Over the past thirty years, I have devoured George MacDonald’s fantasies, C.S. Lewis fantasies, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy plus The Hobbit, numbers of times, always uplifted by the adventures of remarkable characters in their mind-created realms.  I have had a less uplifting experience with Steven R. Donaldson’s writing, always promising something transcending the grinding wheel of human history, but in the end delivering ambiguity, derivative endings (Thomas Covenant series) or petty gender triumphs (Mordant’s Need).

But from book one through book three of The Bitterbynde Trilogy I found myself enthralled in a unique tale, intricately woven, and populated by an extraordinary number of supernatural creatures drawn from British and Celtic folklore.  That’s different from Tolkien in that he used Celtic and Norse mythology to populate his universe.

It is also a world of the southern hemisphere, with Australian plant and animal life, intermingled with European mythical beings, while the weather and geography is southern as well.

The genius of the story is with the introduction of the main protagonist – voiceless, a face so dissolved by a poisonous plant as to resemble a gargoyle, and without a memory, or even a sense of its gender.  How could this young person possibly rise to something?  That’s the hook, and it carried me all the way to book three, as the person traverses three identities, and three extraordinary odysseys to an ending, which needs some comment.

The author believed she needed to elaborate on the ending in later paperback editions of The Battle of Evernight with an after word that removes the mystery she originally intended.  But, there is wonder in the ending, and a certainty about it that arises upon reflection.  It doesn’t require much awareness of history and human behavior to grasp the meaning of her conclusion. And for me it was immensely satisfying, without her author’s note.

There is a further dimension to my interest in Dart-Thornton’s work.  Tolkien, MacDonald and Lewis admitted a fascination with mythic tales because the yearnings of the human heart appearing in these stories are universal, across all generations and all cultures, something, which also fascinates Dart-Thornton.  But the three men crafted into their tales, outcomes and endings implicit with their belief in the epic-mythic-true story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. From this visitation of the ultimate man, now immortal King in a realm imminent, yet beyond this life, they interpret all stories and their own stories reflect his story.  Celtic monks also presupposed the truth of this.

The world of the Bitterbynde trilogy reminds me of the animistic world that the Celtic monks knew and transformed from the time of Patrick to the end of the dark age that enveloped Britain and Europe until after the Norman conquests. They were powerful in converting the tribes of Britain and Northern Europe because they apprehended how the story of Jesus consummated the human longings, for justice, glory, immortality, and peace in their Irish mythology. The western world has mostly lost touch both with this animism from which the disparate tribes emerged as Christendom, and with its transformed tradition of Christian belief.

Dart-Thornton’s fantastic world provides a way of return to the roots of Britain’s civilization, and its forgotten beliefs, so for history buffs it’s true in this case – fantasy can be so enlightening!  In her world, the immortal Faeran people are like the gods of the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, who find mortal life both amusing and yet demeaning, and who work out their own destinies not counting bloody collateral damage to the world of humans.

Yet, the Faeran High King in Dart-Thornton’s world has uniquely Christ-like qualities in that he has some compassion for humans, and pretends to be a mortal king, successfully, for a period.  And yet, unlike the Christ of the ancient scriptures, is a victim of wild fate himself, not a total master of his Faeran destiny.

The main character is a young soul with whom we might all identify, but one that refuses to give up on knowing and being responsible for its destiny, its highest calling through extraordinary but utterly credible sufferings, and human mistakes. (The impersonal pronoun is to allow the first-time reader the surprise of discovering the gender riddle resolved midway through the first book)

So it’s not so surprising given Dart-Thornton’s faithful mastery of the diffuse and scattered literary and historical sources for British folk lore, but without the Christian assumptions of Tolkien et al, that we have in her stories an admixture of the pagan and the Christian cosmos and motifs, and therefore a more mysterious ending than the other writers produce.

The Bitterbynde Trilogy is so layered with plot and character, so richly woven that it stretches and enlarges the imagination, and the reader’s vocabulary with some of the most beautiful words that nevermore make it into print.  I had to tell you about it. I regard it is a must-read for all lovers of fantasy fiction. And did I mention the writer is an Aussie?

Book 1: The Ill Made Mute Book 2: The Lady of the Sorrows and Book 3: The Battle of Evernight remain in print through PanMacMillan in the UK and southern hemisphere.  Cecilia Dart-Thornton has also written a four book series, The Crowthistle Chronicles for an imprint of Warner Books in the US, TOR, and for PanMacMillan UK and Australia.  Her website .

Upside Down World of Digital Journalism

Almost 2,400 educators and practitioners of journalism and mass communication in the US came to Boston on August 5^th to a conference with uncharacteristic urgency.  According to some long time attenders, the 97 year old Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is about as unchanging as a denominational church convention, but this time many of the 365 presentations given over five days, were like in-service training for emergency personnel. Despite years of perceived resistance that has frustrated some attenders, the AEJMC acknowledged the prophets of past events: because, now it’s undeniable, the digital revolution has turned the media industry quite literally upside down, and inside out.  Many experts in the past media of journalism seem lost in the new landscape.  It’s not journalism that’s in flux, it’s the way the message gets carried and delivered.

Information that once had a price is now free. So how do those who bring us the news get to eat?

News agendas once set by elite editorial staff at major outlets are now subject to breaking news that can’t be controlled or owned, as it’s reported ad hoc by eyewitnesses at the scene. Then follows the commentary of hundreds of thousands of internet bloggers. Our choice of news channel is now mind-boggling.  But who can we trust to tell it truthfully?

Once major firms employed armies of investigative reporters, more and more now the reporters must be entrepreneurial experts, and form collaborative enterprises with small niche news services. So, in the wash-up, which of them can provide resource and staff to be watchdogs against corruption in our social institutions?  And these are just a few of the as yet unanswered questions raised by the new playing field for media.

It was a theme expressed by many of the newmedia experts: if you’re not confused by it then you’re not paying attention to it, and perhaps, in denial. But the encouraging subtext of the huge attendance and the various seminars confronting the issues of the information technologies is that many wise hearts and minds are now focused intensely on the issue.

In the midst of confusion, it was heartening to find people like Dan Gillmor and Tom Kennedy as people pleased with the apparent chaos in the field of journalism.  They see it as a great societal opportunity and point out the exponential increase of citizens participating in the process of news-gathering, and dissemination.  Citizens now more directly choose the topics for media discussion.

Kennedy also spoke of the equal opportunity environment for visual communicators who have long been marginalized and under resourced by the bosses of print centric media.

And it’s affecting Universities and Colleges.  This morning, over breakfast, I spoke with the dean, of a college of communication, at a large mid western University and was surprised to find that over the past two years his institution’s robust response to the upside down world its students must face, has been to scrap the old curriculum and create a wholly new multidisciplinary approach to journalism, and communication that includes the departments teaching marketing and computer science.  This will be press released in the fall, so ’til then the school remains anonymous.

The dean anticipated the counsel of Gillmor and Kennedy to the forum of educators. Journalism and Communication schools must lead industry.  They must not look to be led by an industry that has proven too slow in its response to Web 2.0.  Feisty editors, as oracles of all things newsworthy, are past tense, dying off and disappearing. Controlled information flow is extinct. Editors must now be collaborators and facilitators of news flow.

As Gillmor said at a Tuesday night plenary Q & A session – where else can the kind of experimentation that is needed now take place with such a pool of talent other than in our colleges and universities. And there, it needs to be a multidisciplinary approach.  Kennedy called such an approach an ecosystem that includes entrepreneurial business management.  Gillmor agreed and suggested training computer programmers as journalists so journalists might have intelligible conversations and partner with them as necessary to a team that is inventing and creating digital communication language.

Gillmor has established the  Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.  Kennedy’s stellar career with National Geographic, the Philadelphia Enquirer and the Washington Post make him a genuine statesmen for the development of visual language in the digital world.  Everything seems counterintuitive now.

Harold S. Lewis, the Business Development Officer for the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University who leads a double life as a professor at the same institution, had strong words for the non-profit sector that he saw giving away their extraordinary investigative work to the so called legacy media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times.  Business management he re-iterated must be woven into the new structures – for gain even as non-profit – because without financial independence, how will the journalism be sustained?  More to follow….