Bass culture

[imomus]

In the comments section to yesterday's entry I quote an article in Monday's Guardian in which Julian Baggini and other philosophers examine imaginary scenarios designed to present typical modern problems and paradoxes. I particularly liked the first example, in which a "cosmopolitan" called Saskia is annoyed that a white waiter brings her poppadoms in an Indian restaurant, because she wants to be multicultural herself but prefers the wait staff in the "exotic" restaurants she visits to remain monocultural. "Saskia highlights one of the great inconsistencies of contemporary western liberalism," comments David Goodhart. "The Canadian scholar Eric Kaufmann calls it asymmetrical multiculturalism, meaning that minority groups should express their ethnicity while dominant ones should transcend theirs."

I usually refer to "asymmetrical multiculturalism" as the strange collusion between liberal internationalists and conservative nationalists. Marxy put it rather more bitchily in a debate we were having yesterday about the meaning of a swastika he saw on a Harakjuku fashion-punk: "I'm against right-wing politics, Momus is for, as long as they aren't Western peoples." (My counter-argument was that there's nothing inherently right wing about preserving national cultural differences: artists, museum curators and restauranteurs do it as well as right wing bigots. What's more, the punk in question was decontextualizing a foreign symbol; he was more like the non-Christian Japanese women who wear crosses around their necks than a rabid nationalist.)

To me, the Guardian piece is great journalism. It gives me an outline of a plausible situation, a familiar contradiction, one I've attempted clumsily to describe myself, and it gives me a handy term for it, one I can carry around in my pocket and produce at dinner parties. I'm free to google "asymmetrical multiculturalism" or order books by the Canadian academic who coined the term. It's exactly the kind of thing that didn't happen in the piece about blogging I participated in last week, broadcast by BBC Radio Ulster last night.

Radio Ulster blogging item (3.2MB mono mp3 7min 01secs)

Now, maybe my memory is as selective as any editor, but when I think back to what I said in answer to the intelligent questions producer Stephen O'Hagan was asking me over the satellite line last week, I think the two most important things I said were citations of other people's ideas. I mentioned Thomas de Zengotita's book Mediation and spoke about blogging as "self-mediation". That made it into the programme in highly edited form; the word "self-mediation" appeared, but not the reference to Zengotita or his book. I also explained how network theorist Clay Shirky had somewhat changed my mind about my aphorism "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 people" with his essay "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality".

Now, I understand that the show's producers thought that these academic references were too clunky for a seven minute piece on blogging on a local BBC network. I realize that editors have a layman listener in mind, a kind of internalized granny character who's never even heard of blogging and doesn't want her first meeting with the concept to be cluttered up with incomprehensible jargon. I realize that you can't put links in a radio broadcast, and that the books I mentioned probably aren't easily available in Belfast. I realize that to make the references useful I'd have had to spell "Zengotita" and "Shirky" on air. I realize that the producers had to condense ten minutes of Momus-on-blogging to about 90 seconds, so that they could fit in the highly relevant (and much more accessible and amusing) points being made by Rhodri Marsden (rhodri) and Neil Scott (neil_scott). But the result of all that "plain commonsense" and "professionalism" was that the bit in my spiel that did make it past the gatekeepers of the show was a reference to Hollywood and blogging as a star system. The piece got bookended with a Moby track and much talk of Moby-as-blogger. In fact, at the end of the item it was Moby's blog address that was given out instead of mine (although Rhodri and Neil got their blogs plugged). It was assumed that the putative granny who hadn't heard of blogging had heard of Moby. "Ah yes, that nice young Christian vegan with the bald head and the coffeetable techno records," says your putative granny.

What really irked me about the presentation was the attempted populism of it: the assumption that people want recognition rather than cognition, repetition rather than revelation. So the producer inserted something familiar, a track from Moby's "Play" album, left in a bit about Hollywood but took out the "ladders" I deliberately inserted, googlable references interested listeners could have used to climb from what they already know to things they don't yet. Zengotita and Shirky are both "ladders" to really important stuff completely relevant to the debate on blogging, stuff that might have been made accessible even if there was no time to discuss it on air. I wasn't there for the money (there was none) or even to get my blog plugged, but I do feel I was there to point to those "ladders", and I feel irritated that they were kicked away.

I'm disappointed with the BBC Radio Ulster piece because I'm actually a big fan of Lord Reith of Stonehaven, the BBC's stern, tall, somewhat Presbyterian leader who, from 1922 to 1938, propounded the network's public service ethic of informing and educating the audience. I don't think you have to be populist on an arts show on a publicly-funded network like the BBC, or use baby talk, or indulge in "repetition culture" (only tell 'em what they know already), or prioritize recognition over cognition, or play fucking Moby records to get people's attention. "John Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service which enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation." The 6'6" ghost of Lord Reith still stalks the BBC — he's hovering over Paganism in the Renaissance, for instance. But in some weird way I think Lord Reith now belongs to us bloggers more than he belongs to the BBC.

Comments

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

No-one likes being edited, or their views distorted. I suggest that you're not necessarily annoyed about an opportunity squandered to educate the middle-classes of Belfast, rather that it irks you that you didn't quite come across as you would have liked. Plenty of things that I said were more incisive and less laden with stuttering than the ones that were used; Neil also said some interesting stuff that ended up on the modern equivalent of the cutting room floor.

Surely you give radio interviews, knowing that certain things you said will never be heard. It wasn't Newsnight Review, it was a short piece on an arts programme on a local (albeit national) radio station, for chrissakes. Probably listened to by a good number of people who might not know what a blog is (lucky them), let alone sat at a computer, ready to absorb "googlable references", and then google them with gay abandon. Most people don't even have a pen to hand when they're idly listening to the radio.

Stephen had to sling together a piece, and yes, he probably had to tick some "accessability boxes". But it wasn't Radio 1, with a breathless presenter talking to us as if we I were 5 years old. And at least you weren't actually misquoted. That's the prerogative of print journalists - equally loathsome characters, I'm sure you'll agree.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ed's notes:

Para 1: I think you're projecting your own feelings here, Rhodri.

Para 2: Cut this para, Momus already covered this in the para with all the "I realize..." sentences.

Para 3: Good point that it wasn't Radio 1, let's go with that bit, maybe Library can send up a Moby track and lay it in under your point.

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

1. No, I was happy with it.
2. No, I was pointing out that maybe Stephen's didn't feel able to include references that the listeners would then have to follow up for "homework". I mean, I don't know. I just think it's an over-reaction to label a young chap's early attempt at putting together a radio feature to be an undermining of Reithian values.
3. Oh, yes, good point about "Good point that it wasn't Radio 1."

In my eternally clumsy way, I'm trying to say that you're not a typical radio listener - particularly because you were on the programme. I enjoy reading your journal, but often I skip chunks of it because, frankly, I can't be arsed. It's not because I'm stupid, or don't have an urge to learn, or expand my horizons, it's because sometimes the information is presented in an impenetrable or intimidating fashion. Maybe those are the same issues that Stephen had to deal with when editing the programme together. As I say, I don't know.

Although none of that excuses the Moby track, obviously.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's not that I'm against accessibility, it's just that what passes for accessibility often seems odd to me. The assumption, for instance, that your granny who's never heard of blogging has heard of Moby. The assumption that people prefer to hear about Hollywood being interested in a blogger than to hear about what the term "self-mediation" actually means. I mean, there are no Hollywood stars living in Belfast, but there are a lot of selves there who might well want to self-mediate, so I'd think that would be a ladder you'd want to give them.

If your granny has heard of Moby but not blogging, it's because of "repetition-recognition culture", the idea that you should just keep feeding people redundant information, stuff they already know.

It seems to me that Britain is a place where people are capable of putting an enormous amount of work into memorising trivia for pub quizzes and so on, but would never, ever let you cite the name of an academic. Radio is full of phone-numbers being read out for competitions in which they're giving away a balloon and a signed bottle of Ribena, but try to slip a short and simple explanation of the concept of "power laws" in there and they'll tell you it's confusing jargon. Well, how is that more of a waste of air time than "Call 0800 288 29383 for your signed bottle of Ribena, and we'll be repeating that number at the end of the programme"?

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

Well, how is that more of a waste of air time...

You're right, of course, and the majority of television and radio makes me want to cut my arms off with a teaspoon – but at the same time I recognise that I'm not the average viewer / listener either.

So I suppose my defence of Stephen's piece is "well, come on, it could have been a whole lot worse", a stance which I would find pretty difficult to defend. As ever.

But I do take issue, again, with your lazy dismissal of everything British... Clearly there are a few million Brits who would not sneer if you cited an academic in a conversation. Yes, possibly not as many in percentage terms as in Germany, or Japan, but I, uh, don't have the figures to hand right now.

[reggie-c-king.livejournal.com]

Just a few notes so that you know:

Nick's contention is really with the editing of the piece, which I was not wholly responsible for. I edited the interviews of as many ums and ahs and
pregnant pauses as possible and cut out some indulgences, but
certainly left some five minutes of him and a good three minutes each
of yourself and Neil. Then it was up to the producer to stick it
together, for the reason that it's her show and I was in a field in
Leitrim. She certainly edited exactly as it should have been for the purposes of the show as it is. It is perhaps not how Nick, Rhodri or myself would have edited it.

I would have much prefered a more intelleigent piece that allowed for
the sort of references that Nick was making - I went to the extent of
looking them up myself - but such would have required a documentary
rather than the slot allocated to me (which went some two minutes
over, as it was).

The Moby I cannot apologies for more. I had left in a copy of 'Ping
Pong' and was under the impression that it would be used, or possibly
that both would be used at appropriate moments. O well.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the explanations, Stephen, and I do apologize for rolling the mummified corpse of Lord Reith out of the cupboard on this occasion. I'd be happy to come along and talk about, well, anything really, on Arts Extra anytime you want.

[reggie-c-king.livejournal.com]

All's well that end's well.

I'll make some breakfast now, I think.