Luke Alexander's blog

Very interested to see the announcement, in the same week as thelondonpaper’s demise, of a web-to-print newspaper for london based on crowdsourced articles: theblogpaper.

The premise is that anyone can write an article, and then the community votes on which articles make it to the actual paper.

The main site seems a little light on detail, and while the FAQ offers a neat explanation of the mechanics, it doesn’t explain the history of the idea, who is running it, or how it could make money.

The latter of those concerns is particularly crucial: how will advertisers react to a newspaper whose editorial stance can’t be predicted until the paper goes to print?  If it is a truly democratic organ, the placement and choice of ads could cause a problem if they end up appearing next to a massive article attacking the brand.

I can see some young, local brands making use of the opportunity, and it could be a very cool option for advertising entertainment events / unusual sponsorships etc.  But I’d love to know more about their plans.

For my part, I’m torn over the idea.  A democratic free paper is a nice idea, and it makes sense to take advantage of the massive blogging community.  On the other hand, it may end up with none of the benefits of online media (flexibility, frequency of updates, open fora for discussion, freshness), and retain the downsides (variable quality, lack of consistency, superficial observation by unpaid writers)…

Greek tragedy has an extremely public dimension which can be very difficult to imagine today.  Performances were in the open air, in front of the entire citizenry, generally as part of a religious or public festival.  In Athens, the home of Western drama, public performance was intrinsically linked to the concept of democracy during the period in which it flourished.

What better location is there, then, to put on a dramatic performance of one of the most famous plays in Greek drama, than in the very public, semi-political performance space at More London, the Scoop, next to City Hall.

The play itself is arguably one of the most accessible of Greek drama, and the company have updated it masterfully.  With a fantastic, passionate new translation from Stella Duffy which maintains the play’s direct emotionality as well as the poetry of its language, it feels as fresh as ever, and the crucial context of ‘us and them’ comes through strongly.  Re-inventing the chorus as a horde of duplicitious journalists sounded like a terrible idea, but I needn’t have worried: it was handled wonderfully, and was a clever way to emphasise the importance of reputation and public action.

The acting was very good, with some well-judged humour which didn’t detract from the gravity of the piece.  Jason and Medea were both given the chance to argue their case without vilification as the audience’s empathy shifts uneasily between them throughout the performance.  Jason’s doublespeak was spot-on, while Medea bubbled with rage throughout.

If there is a criticism to be made, it is that the company makes slightly overenthusiastic use of the rather sparse set.  Characters jump in and out of the main action in a slightly disconcerting way, and the points where characters are seated in the audience were a little offputting, and created a confusing grey area around who was supposed to be part of the action at that time.

That minor quibble aside, I would thoroughly recommend anyone to head down to the Scoop for this fantastic free event.  I cannot imagine a better use for the location than a festival of free classical drama in the middle of the summer, with a beer tent and gastro-pub style roast potatoes, no less.  Would be 4 stars if I’d paid, but it’s an unmissable 5 stars for free – particularly if you’ve never seen Greek drama before.

(Do also check out the children’s performance of Jason and the Argonauts beforehand.  It looked great, though I wonder how many of the parents who chose to keep their kids on for the Medea performance knew what was going to happen in the latter.)

News that thelondonpaper is to disappear from our pavements and vacated tube seats was met with the bare minimum of surprise in my office today.  Not around long enough to morph into a proud British institution like other failing media of our age, it nonetheless attained the slightly muted accolade of being slightly better than its competitor, the London Lite.

I for one am sad to see it go, if only for the daily dose of vicarious romance offered by its missed connections column.

On a slightly less nostalgic note, however, it’s fascinating to take in the paper’s journey, from its initial launch at the top of the economy’s climb where it was a direct threat to the more established London papers, through to the relaunch of its struggling website, and to its eventual demise.  It’s strange to think that there was a time it looked like it would upturn the paid-for newspaper industry.

At the same time, more specialised local freesheets seem to be surviving and even thriving (as far as they can given the economic climate): Shortlist, Sport and City A.M. are all reasonable examples.

For my part I hope that this trend will continue, and that we might hope one day to see a variety of more focused, light, website-linked free local publications which can effectively act as digests of excellent content available online.  One newspaper I’d certainly love to see replicated in the UK is The Onion.  Anyone up for it?

A fantastic piece of non-news reported widely today was Pear Analytics’ report which claimed that around forty percent of content on Twitter is ‘pointless babble’.  A scientific definition if ever I heard one, and one already enthusiastically adopted by the Twitter community in the time-honoured fashion.

The report, which inspired headlines truly worthy of The Onion, also somewhat scornfully pointed out that almost as many tweets were ‘conversational’.  Ignoring for a second the relatively small sample size and the selective US work-day only timings, this in itself is interesting.  One of the benefits of microblogging media like Twitter is that it is fundamentally conversational, designed with replies and mentions built-in.

Many have already reacted to the report, and – in the UK – to Janet Street-Porter’s comically superficial analysis of the service.  Of these, the majority offer good rebuttals and analyses of the issue – and I won’t spend any time defending Twitter.  Indeed, even these responses often go too far in over-stating the importance of the service, which I am confident will in a relatively short period evolve into a distributed, potentially open source, system with multiple ‘suppliers’ (more on this another day, perhaps).

One point which did interest me in its persistence, however, is the ‘fact’ that teenagers don’t use Twitter.

Some important caveats even at this stage.  Firstly, teenagers’ use of Twitter is extremely difficult to analyse, particularly across different territories, and actual evidence is scarce, comprised mostly of a single Nielsen survey which lumps teenagers in the 2-24 age group and anecdotal reports like the (again, Onion-inspired) Morgan Stanley report written by a 15 year old.

Secondly, as pointed out in this excellent response (along with plenty of other good points) the results actually show that the proportion of different ages on Twitter is closer to real-life population splits than we would normally expect from online media, not some wholehearted back-turning by under 19s.

And of course, thirdly, there is the question of whether we should care if teenagers use Twitter anyway.  My first reaction on seeing the news was that Twitter had somehow ensured an early maturity: much like usenet and IRC in the 90s, where the relative complexity of the medium tended towards a slightly older community than modern social networks like facebook.  That the service’s popularity is increasing so rapidly despite the apparent absence of teenagers makes it more interesting as a phenomenon, not less, and certainly doesn’t devalue its worth.

But even if we ignore these points, and assume that the most extreme case is correct and that teens and tweets don’t mix, I wonder if this is the start of evidence of a generation shift in internet use.  Those who are currently 13-19 are quite possibly the first generation for whom use of the internet is completely normal, in the sense that TV use and widespread availability of telecoms is for my own generation (say, 21-29 year olds).

To this generation, what is the value in being an early adopter?  Most of my contemporaries remember having to configure IRQs and DMAs explicitly just to play a computer game, and a time when they would run multiple searchs on AltaVista and Yahoo to get a decent crop of results, before Google.  The difficulty of using these computer systems (and the relative simplicity of the hardware and software at the time) effectively made early adoption the only option in many situations.

A culture of experimentation and community learning lies at the heart of the open source movement, of peer to peer file distribution, of ‘hacker’ culture, all of which have led directly to the majority of the software platforms we use today.  Aside from professionals or academics, many of those with the time and energy to contribute were young people: teenagers playing with the box in the corner of the room their parents were too scared to do much with, or students procrastinating between essays and lab work.

I certainly owe any technical ability and experience I possess to this phenomenon.  Do current teenagers gain anything from such experimentation?  I honestly don’t know – but if not, this might suggest why we would start to see new channels (particularly those which are arguably less user-friendly than facebook et al) receive less attention from this age group.

I’d challenge anyone not to enjoy today’s freerun championships in Trafalgar Square.  I popped in for the qualifying rounds, and then caught the rest on BBC 3.

If anything, the biggest problem it faced was that the standard of athleticism was so high that the athletes made it all look much easier than it was.  After half an hour of watching, I was perfectly ready to believe that anyone could flip backwards off of a sheer wall, flip in the air and land perfectly on the ground eight metres below.  I’m quite used to seeing freerunning moves executed in video games like Assassin’s Creed or Infamous, but thinking through what makes it possible for a human body to do the same is quite a realisation.

Aside from the physical prowess of the freerunners, the event was fascinating as a display of urban culture.  In cultural contexts, the word ‘urban’ has taken on a slightly overemphatic meaning, with its implications of inner city communities and suggestions of decay.  But from the point of view of the development of creativity and of specific art forms, the development of the concept of the city is a fascinating topic.

My academic background is in Classical (say, 5th Century BC to 5th Century AD, throughout the Mediterranean) literature and history.  Within this, the development of the city is of crucial importance.  The city states of Greece, such as Athens, Corinth, Sparta etc, saw the development of tragic and comic drama, of history in its fullest narrative sense, of philosophy, and so on.  Perhaps more importantly, the conflict of viewpoints between the urban and the rural is a feature which persists in its fullest form through to the literature of arguably the first modern city, Imperial Rome; often in Latin texts, it is simply urbs – city.

What I saw today was certainly an artform.  The movement of a body from A to B is as prosaic as the technical description of the light of the sun being affected by the curvature of the earth: and if poetry or photography can transform the latter into a perfect sunset, the former is just as altered by the tenets of free and aesthetic movement behind freerunning.

Cities have two fascinating attributes: human density, and persistence.  They collect people, provide spaces for people, and contain structures (such as residential districts, transport infrastructures, shopping malls etc) which define and encourage interaction.  They are also persistent, which means that the fabric of the city, imprinted though it is with the personalities of those who have passed through it, exist independently, to the extent that a city can be buried for a thousand years, then dug up and interrogated about its inhabitants.

What does this have to do with freerunning?  The answer is that freerunning is an artform which communicates incredibly poetically this balance between the human and the structural.  People build cities, but quickly they become fundamentally unknowable to their inhabitants.  If you live in a city, you will have felt this without question.  Walking through a city on one’s own during the evening, perhaps with no specific destination, we are faced with a philosophically fascinating but practically irrelevant distinction between the city and an old and comfortable friendship.

Today reinforced for me that freerunning works the same way as good photography, with the city as its subject.  It takes the familiar and the specific and makes them unusual, generic, and beautiful.