letsgoglobal! (with an exclamation mark but no apostrophe)

Recently, on a blog we at chez Digital Mancunian find irresistible, letsgoglobal.tv felt moved to comment on an earlier comment I had made which had ended with the question:

         What's it like being a 'digirati'?*

I cannot be sure exactly what their motivation was but here is their comment:

[AUTHOR'S NAME REDACTED]...Letsgoglobal. x said...

Oh why is it that the snide, bitchy comments are always anonymous! Full of bile and bitterness but never willing to back it up with an identity!! [AUTHOR'S NAME REDACTED], in my humble opinion this is a brilliant review of a dynamic and thought provoking festival. But then I suppose I'm one of the digirati!!

Putting to one side the notion that anyone would want to "back up" some bile and bitterness with an identity (isn't the best kind of bile and bitterness anonymous?);  and also putting to one side that I really wasn't trying to be bilious or bitter, I think it was the fact that letsgoglobal had unthinkingly repeated my deliberate misspelling of 'digirati' (the original author of the blog had bizarrely referred to 'digiterati', so I was playing with the language) that made me wonder what sort of professional organisation would make such an error.  It did not take long to find out.

Unfortunately letsgoglobal seems to be very much a part of an on-going effort lead by young Media Groups to dumb down such traditional 'artistic' crafts such as film-making and graphic design.  A cursory Google search revealed:

A Vimeo page with a hideously pixellated JPEG logo;

a sadly neglected youtube channel forlornly declaring "we're sorry, this module has not been set up";

a Facebook page with yet another pixellated version of their logo (and by the by, has no-one told them "let's" should have an apostrophe? I mention this as they claim on their website to provide 'scripting' services, which presumably abide by standard English grammatical rules);

a home page featuring a behind-the-scenes shot of their "fully equipped broadcast studio" demonstrating at a glance that it is badly lit, badly set up and probably contravenes health & safety law with its stray BNC video cable waiting to trip up some poor suspecting studio guest (is gaffer tape really going to break the budget?)...


...But perhaps my favourite is their quite shameless 'Open Call' for a Creative Graphic Designer to produce and design not just a logo but an entire branding for £500.

Now then, professional designers can command anything from £40 - £100 an hour so presumably they are wanting to give young graduates a chance here.  Therefore let's halve that hourly fee to £20 to give us a total of (£500 ÷ £20) 25 hours or three eight-hour days.  Three days to implement and design a full corporate branding.  Well, at least the lucky winner will probably be able to advise on JPEG sizing.  Hey - they might even attempt a little Flash animation after attending letsgoglobal's one day course - though that would remove a sizeable part of their fee.

And yet, despite all this amateur hour nonsense, letsgoglobal are keen to be perceived as professional.  Trafford Council describes letsgoglobal as "...a pioneering community media project: an arts-led, internet TV channel run by and for the local and diverse communities of Greater Manchester", whereas letgoglobal themselves claim that they have "...evolved from an arts-led, internet TV channel, to a dynamic media organisation offering training, workshops, video production, project management, venue hire and consultancy".  Well, which is it?  Also, that last part sounds like a commercial enterprise doesn't it?  And yet their Facebook page describes them as a 'Non-Profit Organisation'.  And do Trafford Council really mean that the channel is "run by... the local and diverse communities of Greater Manchester"?  I thought the channel was being run by 'professionals'...  But of course they have to say that or else it would fail its remit and the money from Europe would dry up.

Identity crises can quite often be a problem with organisations like this. You can see it in their name:  Sometimes it's letsgoglobal - no apostrophes on URLs you see, sometimes it's Lets Go Global (Facebook), sometimes it's LetsGoGlobal (Vimeo).  Lack of funding, skills and the practical means to do things properly or professionally can sometimes end with inexperienced people in the uncomfortable position of promising more than they could ever competently deliver.  The strange thing with organisations such as this is that, in my view, the answer is staring them in the face.

If they stuck to their guns then instead of claiming they are in some way related to the broadcast industry, they could come out and engage the world as a completely different beast.  True pioneering spirit.  Maybe they are so conditioned by traditional perceptions of what TV is, that they cannot truly embrace the enormous creative potential just sitting there.  Maybe they so much want to be part of the real TV industry, that they finish up merely playing at it just so they don't feel left out.

And as the media landscape around us changes beyond recognition at unprecedented speed there are, for sure, hundreds of thousands of untrained, undisciplined people available to populate that illusion.  As the Digerati convince every commercial enterprise - no matter how small - that they simply have to have a Twitter page and must as a matter of course webcast their breakfast meetings - demand is outweighing supply.

So grab your HD camcorder and your MacBook Pro and enjoy it.

...but it's not real telly.  Not yet it isn't.



*  For reference this was my original comment on the original blog:
Anonymous said...
Everything Future:
An event attended by vested-interest professionals, likening everyone else as peasants in the face of this Digital Revolution; promulgating the idea of 'free' content for all, whilst trousering their public speaking/consultancy fees; shrugging off the idea of a flattened mediocre mass culture crayoned by a multitude of ill-informed amateurs - the direct result of Web 2.0; ignoring the irony of it's very own website - which, even now, some three days later - still tiredly scrolls through the same five photographs it's had for weeks whilst exclaiming "we want your content"; and now finally blogged about by yet another wannabe creative artist who, in spite of tweeting some belated advertisements linking to it, will be lucky to get even one more comment after this one.

What's it like being a 'digirati'?

10:14 AM

In the interests too of full disclosure, I posted a shorter version of this post as a reply to letsgoglobal on the aforementioned blog, but it was deleted by the blog's moderator.

And hence, I guess, the fully illustrated version above.  I expanded on my original comment here.

FutureNothing

Is the world changing forever?  Can you feel the digital revolution leaving you behind?  You can't?  Well, you should!  Keep up - or you'll be lost.  Forever.

You see?  If I'd wanted to I could have given a keynote talk at Manchester's FutureEverything festival/event thing.  All you had to do was invoke the now widely held belief that t'internet is fundamentally changing society in ways that only Manchester's Digital Creatives truly understand.  The message was simple:  Teach the peasants we are not going back; the 'Spinning Jenny' is here to stay.  Oh, and while you're at it, make some money off those farmers and land managers who think they have to keep up or else the crop will fail for good.

Okay, so let's leave the Industrial Revolution metaphors behind (if only the majority of speakers at FutureNothing could have taken that advice) and step back a bit.

Yes, society has changed and is changing.  Very quickly.  Ask your grandparents what was happening in sixties  and they'll tell you the same;  spaceflight! television!  Ask your parents what was happening in the eighties and they'll tell you the same; the VCR! compact discs!  But, you know, none of these things actually changed human social behaviour.  We just had more to talk about.

And there are those of us who cast a jaded eye on the kind of events of which FutureEverything is a perfect example and think the same thing.  Is there actually more content in the world nowadays? Some observers, perhaps even most people wouldn't hesitate to say "of course there is".  But, if you can think back before the Web, to a time when taking up a new hobby invariably meant popping into W H Smiths to browse the hobby magazine section, a sobering thought might occur to you.  Whether it was trains, amateur photography or rock climbing you were faced with a range of mags all vying for your immediate attention and after glancing through the pages you were reluctantly forced to purchase a single copy of a single title.  But, of course, what you may have noticed is that all the magazines on a particular subject would carry advertisements by the same advertisers; the same new products were being reviewed; the latest news and events were being promoted...  Yes, it was the same amount of information being thinly spread out and presented in different ways in a handful of similar magazines.

Now if I can drag you out of that newsagents into 2011... The Web is the biggest W H Smith you can possibly imagine and under 'Amateur Photography' you will find more 'magazines' than you could browse in a hundred thousand lifetimes.  But it's just the same amount of information being spread ever more wafer thin.  A new camera will have ten thousand reviews, all listing the manufacturer's specifications. An advertisement for a photographic exhibition will be potentially seen by a million viewers.

And so to FutureEverything, an event that is almost completely self-promoting in that not only those involved in it, but even those merely interested in it, will endlessly blog and tweet in the preceding weeks leading up to the event (though, perhaps rather peculiarly, appear to then fall dead silent once it's finished).  The plethora of techie, geeky, digerati-related blogs and websites will fill up with 'news' about the event, announcements of guest speakers... and even during the event the humble hash tag will mean they can all txt and tweet to each other - even when they are separated by tens of yards.

"speakr just said something really interesting"

But guess what - and I think you understand where I'm coming from now - IT'S THE SAME STUFF BEING SPREAD EVER MORE THINLY.

There is something quite repugnant about the media-consultant types who attend festivals and conferences like this one. Vested-interest professionals, they habitually liken everyone else as peasants in the face of this Digital Revolution, promulgating the idea of 'free' content for all, whilst trousering their public speaking/consultancy fees.  They tend to shrug off the idea of a flattened mediocre mass culture crayoned by a multitude of ill-informed amateurs - the direct result of Web 2.0, but when it's all over will be found sitting in their first class train carriage listening to music or watching video on their iPhones that could never, ever have been produced by such an under-achieving, lacklustre underclass of 'hopefuls'.

And the final irony of all this is that it is now finally blogged about by yet another wannabe creative artist who, in spite of tweeting some belated advertisements linking to it, will be lucky to get a comment.

*By the way, this only applies to the speakers - the Music and Art at FutureEverything were excellent ;/)