Album of the Year: The National, Boxer

In a year when American guitar bands continued to stand head-and-shoulders above most of their British rivals, Ohio’s The National provided a urbane, mature, and deliciously dark counterpoint to the psych-folk of artists like Spoon and Iron & Wine. Taut and fiercely intelligent, Boxer captures, instead of turning away from, the brooding anxiety that has stalked American culture in recent years. Matt Berninger’s rich voice achieves an impressive emotional impact without a shred of affectation.

Listen to “Mistaken for Strangers”
Download audio file (the%20national-mistaken%20for%20strangers.mp3)

Runner-up: Jamie T, Panic Prevention

Damp squib of the year: Live Earth

Let’s face it, it always sounded a bit rum. Gigantic concerts for poverty sound illogical at first, but if they raise masses of money - or even if they influence the debate - they ultimately make sense. Gigantic concerts to stop climate change just sound wrong. Yes, if it builds awareness, it’s worth the jet flights, the lighting, the fireworks, the car journeys made by the thousands in the audience. But only a genuinely passionate, political event - at least as much so as Live8 - could have made all the excess seem justified. In the end, it was anything but. From the UK concerts being hosted by Chris Moyles - a man who probably thinks climate change is for girls - to David Gray and Damien Rice’s baffling decision to sing “Que Sera Sera”, a song that seemed to encapsulate the very complacency the concert was supposed to shake us out of - the event was vacuous and soulless from the start. Without an actually-great moment along the lines of Kanye West’s appearance at the Concert for Diana, it just felt like being stuck inside one of those green adverts full of smiling children that oil companies make.

Runner-up: Playstation 3

I-don’t-see-what-all-the-fuss-is-about phenomenon of the year: Heroes

My brother loves it. Critics like it. People who liked Lost before it got all silly like it. It’s slick mainstream sci-fi, what’s not to like? And yet, I hate it. I hate the cliched Japanese character and his absurdly wide face. I hate the uptight politician’s ludicrously square chin, the central-casting blandness of the actors playing

minor characters. The villains in Lost, as baffling as the mythology has become, remain genuinely discomforting. Malcolm McDowell spewing stock evil-genius stuff about the Survival of the Strong? The pretty, evil one eating people’s brains, for god’s sake? I just don’t get it.

Funky new web thingy of the year: Tumblr

As anyone who monitors my ever-declining rate of posts to this website can tell you, it isn’t easy finding time for regular full-length blogging. And how often do you have something really new to say, anyway? More often you just want to share something cool you’ve seen on your travels around the web. Enter Tumblr: simple, in many ways quite limiting software with one killer feature: predefined templates making it one-click simple to share audio, video or photos. The result? A lot fewer posts here, maybe, but a whole new avalanche of web-highlights shared over on my “tumblelog,” Ravindr.

Love-it-or-hate-it-you-can’t-ignore-it innovation of the year: Facebook applications

2007 was, of course, when the rest of the world finally joined me and a handful of US student friends on Facebook. No sooner had they piled in that these blasted applications came along. Suddenly I was being thrown cows and zombie-zapped by people I hadn’t seen for years. This is, obviously, rubbish. And yet, buried underneath the mile-high pile of crap that has built up since applications were allowed in the Spring, are some real gems: iLike, despite its ridiculous Apple-lite name, is great for adding songs to messages and wall posts; What I’m Listening To finally puts all that last.fm information where you need it; and apps like My Blogs, Flickr Gallery and del.icio.us let you use your profile as a hub for all your web 2.0 shreds of personality spread across the web. There are plenty more needed, instant messaging being a priority, but having hundreds of companies working on the task must be better than having just one. Now, if only someone would ask me what sort of pirate I am.

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You can’t show it on a screen, but the print version had a nifty mirror effect on the TV screen. Whether the grey-eyed executives picking up a copy at their local CVS feel like they’re reinventing the internet remains to be seen, but either way, user-generated content (UGC - not to be confused with the cinema chain) had well and truly arrived on the cultural map. As well as its Time cover, it had its coffee-shop friendly bible: Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, describing how a top-down model of media dominated by large producers was about to be supplemented - and usurped - by a near-endless supply of independent content. The difference, of course, was money. Letting people upload videos from their mobile phones had always seemed like a good idea. But not necessarily one with a lot of money to be paid. The moment Google dropped $1.65bn into Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s laps, that changed.

Now, no sooner has an internet trend reached cultural penetration, then traditional media begins hamfistedly to try to get in on it. Web 2.0 was to prove no different. Quickly, fevered speculation began about how best to bring UGC to TV. Never mind the fact that this had been happening ever since the popularisation of video cameras - think You’ve Been Framed! - now a new generation of UGC-TV cropped up, led in the UK by Trouble Homegrown, an offshoot of the teen cable channel.

Now Britain’s first entire channel focussed on, if not quite dedicated to, UGC, has launched. Named - slightly craply - Current TV, it’s been onscreen less than a month, and I just discovered it tonight lurking on Virgin Media channel 155 (it’s also on Sky 229). At first glance, it’s predictable YouTubeTV - a succession of three-to-five minute films, many made by viewers, strung together by pretty, dumb, mildly trendy young hosts. And it makes no attempt its internet-me-too roots, even calling its mini-shows “pods.”¹

But watch a few minutes of Current TV, and it’s clear this is a little more than bedroom video on the big screen. First of all, the quality - if not creatively, than at least in ambition and production values - of the content. In one hour, I saw a brief documentary about Glasgow’s “neds,” another comparing Iraqi opnions of the American occupation, and another on an American community gym, all slickly edited and complete with graphics. And the filmmakers weren’t all the 14-yr-old boys every user-centred website depends on. The “pod” showing when i first stumbled upon the channel featured a stocky, goateed man in sunglasses and a beanie hat doing martial arts on the beach. “Hang on,” I thought, “that looks like The Edge.” Of course, all goateed men in shades and beanie hats tend to look like The Edge. But, as it turns out, The Edge it was - in a four-pod day-in-the-life documentary made by bandmate Bono. Now, Bono hasn’t always been selective in his embrace of new media forms - think the ill-fated plans for a Zoo TV cable channel in the early 90’s. Nevertheless, it’s a big step up from films of people falling over drunk.

But it’s not just the production values that makes Current TV surprisingly impressive. It boasts something that’s inreasingly rare in mainstream new media: ideals. Current seem serious about political and news content, with an army of so-called “vanguard journalists” delivering quick-fire images and commentary from inside everything from China’s prostitution industry to African mineworking conditions. And the user-generated content, too, has real political bite. The aforementioned pod on Iraqi views of the occupation (made by Iraqi independent media group Iraq Eye) delivered more of an Iraqi perspective on the occupation in three minutes than I’ve seen in the mainstream news in the last year, while a brief introduction to the growing Nigerian film industry was a classic example of the kind of broader coverage of Africa - more than just starvation, war and misery - that many have been crying for more of in mainstream media.

It was clear that Current wasn’t just a low-budget startup. The tip-off came in the credits of Bono’s film: “thanks to Joel Hyatt and ‘Big’ Al Gore.”

Al Gore?

It turns out (praise be, Wikipedia!) that Current TV is, in fact, the invention of the world’s favourite loser himself. I do recall, after the 2000 election, Gore rumbling about the need for an independent new cable channel to challenge the conservative domination of the news media. It turns out Current is an evolved version of that idea. It also turns out it’s been onscreen over 18 months in the US. Think about that for a second - the pod-based format was invented before YouTube even launched. Far from a quick cash-in, Current seems to be the true TV equivalent of web 2.0, drawn from the same ideas but independently developed. What’s more, it trumps it on ideals. Gore’s plan from the beginning was to give space to independent voices. The YouTube founders just wanted somewhere to put videos to show to their friends.

Of course, ideals and TV are a difficult mix. This Nation article recounts the evolution of the concept - from a well-meaning grassroots network to the slick MTV-with-brains we see now. Being the Nation, of course, it goes way over the top.

“Less and less they’re trying to run a company with a social mission,” says Orville Schell, dean of the Berkeley School of Journalism and a member of Current’s board of directors. “They want something that’s new and interesting and economically viable.”

Interesting! Economically viable! The fascists! Current’s three-minute format certainly doesn’t allow for in-depth, nuanced reporting, and the previews of saw of “vanguard journalism” certainly privileged get-it-on-camera correspondence to proper reporting. But while I’m a huge fan of big-’n'-balanced documentary, it’s not the only way to expand the horizons of the traditional media. Rather than “MoveOn.org in prime time” - which, let’s be honest, sounds horrendous - Current has the potential to offer something much more powerful: a TV analogue to the blogosphere. The messages may be quick and simple, but they will hopefully come from a bewildering range of sources - providing a forum for, as Current put it, “any story that traditional news media won’t touch because it’s too big, too small, or too something.” The high standards required by TV transmission, as well as the quasi-democratic selection process (pods uploaded to the website are voted on by users, but it’s not clear how much influence this has on selection), will inevitably silence some voices. But given the number of 9/11 conspiracy movies on YouTube, it’s hard not to think, “good.”²

Current TV isn’t going to change the world, and it isn’t going to infiltrate everyday life to the staggering extent of YouTube. But perhaps that’s not the point. What it is is the first new TV channel I’ve seen in years that’s genuinely different. Isn’t that reason enough to be excited?

Current TV: www.current.com and www.uk.current.com; Sky 229; Virgin Media 155

1. You have to really think about this to see just how horrible it is. The “pod” in iPod means, essentially, what the word pod means - a small, cute vessel. For all the overuse of the suffix since - and I say this as the proud owner of a knackered Korean “GoGoPod” MP3 player - that sense has generally, until now, been retained. But if you apply the word to content, as Current have done, it becomes totally meaningless.
2. They will, of course, also face a host of potential problems over political evenhandedness or otherwise. Do they show the well-produced pod in favour of Palestinian terrorism? What about the one expressing sympathy with al-Qaeda?

Hat tip: Josh

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We think of the internet mostly as consumers - we read sites, use them, buy from them. But the internet started off as a community. The first websites were bulletin boards, designed to let academics share information. They didn’t have staff or managers, and they certainly wouldn’t get sold for millions of dollars. They belonged to the people who use them: they were democratic.

Wikipedia is the biggest democracy on the internet. It’s the 15th most-visited site on the web, and every one of its millions of users can take part in its decisions. Not only can anyone edit pages, but anyone can vote – or stand – in elections to its managing boards. One American academic thinks it might even be “the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration the world has ever known.”

But as Iraq is finding out, it isn’t easy maintaining order in a democracy of equals. Wikipedia has its own insurgents: vandals. It suffers thousands of vandal attacks every day – entries are deleted, defaced, or altered for political or personal reasons. “George W. Bush” is its most frequently edited pages. Politicians have admitted having campaign staff edit their pages to cover up criticism. And workers campaigning for better conditions have been known to alter their employer’s entries to put their points across.

In the early years of the project, such insurgencies plunged Wikipedia into civil war – between its co-founder and “chief organizer,” Larry Sanger, and a mysterious anarchist called “The Cunctator.” Sanger wanted a certain amount of authority to ensure the site’s quality; “Cunc” was in favour of total equality. After months of deleting each other’s edits to pages and sparring in the sites’ talk pages, the war ended with Sanger leaving the project.

Since then, Wikipedia’s reputation has been tested by the consequences of its democratic approach. In 2005, the American journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. laid into the site, calling it “a flawed and irresponsible research tool,” after taking objection to a paragraph of his biography on the site, that said he had briefly been linked to the murders of John and Robert Kennedy. Siegenthaler almost certainly overreacted - who hasn’t been linked to the Kennedy murders? - but a chorus of political and media concern blew up, alleging that Wikipedia was riddled with errors and unsafe. A study in the Journal Nature later in the year found that Wikipedia’s scientific articles were nearly as accurate as those in the professionally-edited Encyclopaedia Britannica, but Britannica hit back, calling the study “so error-laden that it was completely without merit.” (Nature’s response)

Is Wikipedia laden with errors and lies? It’s hard to tell, but Larry Sanger thinks it might be. And he’s proposing an alternative, Citizendium - a carbon-copy of Wikipedia’s database, but with expert editors who will have some authority to override regular users’ changes. Editors will appoint themselves, but be required to meet certain standards of expertise. And vandals and troublemakers will be barred from the site by “constables.” The aim, Sanger says, is to create a site that “John Siegenthaler could be comfortable with… not only enormous and free, but reliable.”

Sanger’s announcement has generated a mixture of delight and horror, with some Wikipedia users calling it “treason” (hey, if you thought Wikipedia was part of “the emergence of a new kind of person,” you’d take it pretty seriously too). But lovers of Wikipedia’s democratic ethos shouldn’t worry - this is a natural process for democracies to go through. In fact, it’s striking how internet history is mirroring real-world history when it comes to the development of democracy. After all, the first democracies - in Ancient Greece - were small city-states where every citizen - at least, every free male citizen - had a direct say in the affairs of state - not unlike Wikipedia’s founding all-are-equal ethos. As democracies have grown from cities to nations, populations have become too large for direct votes on every issue, and representative democracy has developed, with elected leaders making most decisions. Wikipedia has begun the same process - just like in growing democracies, pressure of numbers of participants has made ways of arbitrating disagreements essential.

As democracies have grown and the issues facing them have become more complex, their governments have needed to find ways to understand their tasks. But if the people won’t always vote for the most expert people, what to do? All democracies create ways of appointing experts to advise and even shape government, even if they’re not elected. In Britain, it’s the House of Lords. Of course, as Government gets further away from the people, the chance increases of people feeling free to disobey its laws. So democracies developed police forces, who are granted authority by the community to act against members of the community in ways regular members can’t.

So with its experts and constables, Citizendium, too, is just responding to the pressures of growth as many democracies have. In time, these safeguards may well see it overtake Wikipedia in popularity. But will self-appointing experts be reliable? Or will Citizendium have its own Cunctator, its own insurgents? There’s also a lot of fuzziness in Wikipedia’s system, with articles “generally recognized” to be reliable or neutral. Will Citizendium develop more specific processes? Will it need to? In real-world democracies, such fuzzy ideas tend to get sharpened by being tested in courts of law - think of phrases such as “cruel and unusual punishment,” incredibly vague at first, but gradually refined by the courts. Will our twin web democracies be forced to go through a similar process, in order to clarify their own procedures?

It’s too soon to tell, of course. But Citizendium needs to be recognised for what it is - not a threat to Wikipedia’s principles of democracy, but a refinement of them, just as real-world democracy has been refined over thousands of years. These kind of changes aren’t a sign of weakness, but of the flexibility needed to survive. Democracy was never easy, after all. Just ask the people of Iraq.

A nice backgrounder to the Wikipedia debate

Citizendium founding essay

UPDATE: eBay is undergoing a similar process.

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