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Sir Berners-Lee and the African journalist

There is an image that has fascinated me for years. It is Tim Berners-Lee’s first draft on what we would come to know as the World Wide Web.

It is a simple paper, like thousands written around the world every day. A diagram illustrates how ‘Mesh’, the first name the creator of the web dreamt up for his new invention, would work.

When Berners-Lee was awarded his honorary doctorate from the Open University of Catalonia in 2008, he recalled that then-director of CERN, Mike Sendall, kept one of the original copies with a note he pencilled in himself, defining the web project as “vague, but exciting.”

The way things stand

I can grasp how that drawing full of things with strange names might have seemed “vague” to Sendall at first glance. But I want to stress the fact that a mere sheet of paper in his hand was enough for that man to grasp how “exciting” all the changes the web has triggered in our lives, everything that has changed so quickly that it is hard to imagine that it were possible, would be.

We feel excitement and other emotions in all shapes and sizes, for better and for worse. I remembered Sendall’s statement a few months ago when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer went out of circulation. The old American newspaper had hit the streets every day for 164 years. It had ridden out everything: wars, sudden epically proportioned economic crises, the advent of television. Yet it could not hold on any longer.

The newspaper itself published a video in which editors recounted what their last day of work was like and what they would miss the most.
It is an exceptional document, and yes, an exciting one as well. But it is a testament: a testament to a time that will never exist again, not just in Seattle but around the world. It is the testament to a model of communication that is rumbling – and how! –  under the impact of the unstoppable tsunami unleashed in that document that Sendall defined as “exciting.”

Twenty years after the web was created, the world of communication in general and the press in particular are at a historical juncture. Hulking old products, even the excellent ones, which have held out for decades, which have served their community constantly and tenaciously, which have known how to do business by spreading the news, are simply fading away.

They are melting away while the editors look at each other with incredulousness in their eyes and tell on video how they would have liked their history to be.

When people ask why all of this is happening, the reasons are many and varied, but one echoes time and again: Internet, Internet and Internet. Whoever says this, whoever blames the web for today’s crisis in the world of communication, is making a simplistic analysis because the answer should actually be much more complex.

Something like, “the Internet has spotlighted the fact that much of the press and television today are irrelevant.” Of course no one likes to read the writing on their own tombstone, and that is why it is difficult to accept such a categorical judgement.

But that is the way things stand.

And yes, in the end, the Internet is to blame.

Not only

At the start I said that I am fascinated by that seminal depiction of the web. I often wonder whether Sir Tim Berners-Lee was aware at any point of the upheaval he would cause to everyone. He says he wasn’t and of course we have to believe him. But the incontestable fact is that 20 years later no human activity is immune to the mind-boggling yet creative impact of the web. This includes journalism and communication.

It is not… that this or that newspaper has to fold or this or that publication that seemed solid as a rock suddenly resembles a lump of sugar melting before the astounded gaze of its creators.

It is not… that television is beginning to accept the fact that its days of glory and the carousel of millions and millions of dollars invested in advertising products or politics are indeed a thing of the past.

It is not …that every last newsroom on the planet or every last journalist is wondering what their future holds, and the word Internet appears on every single draft, scrap of paper or jotting where communication professionals try to organise their ideas.

No, it is not only …that, nor is it primarily that. What has changed for good is that the web, just like so many other things, has upended the social structure, the convention that made us journalists like brokers between power and society, between those who knew too much and those who did not know enough.

After all, a journalist’s job is simple.It is limited to being where things are happening, to seeing and analysing them and then explaining them as thoroughly and honestly as we can. That does not require much technology.

Nodes

The richest, most vivid newspaper I have seen in my life was in Africa: I do not recall which city and I do not want to err by saying one that just randomly comes to mind.

At a crossroads, a man simply had a large blackboard where he wrote down the news as he got it; the people going from one place to another literally yelled it out to him.

Because the journalist at the crossroads, the man who was himself the newspaper, knew most of the motorbike riders, passersby and bicyclists, he very judiciously asked them questions, comparing the information he had gotten from other bystanders.

He then enthusiastically wrote the day’s news on the blackboard in real time so that his customers could read it. Constantly.

This is the journalist’s job in a nutshell, but I recall that when I saw him what came to my mind was the idea or concept of ‘node’ more than ‘journalist’ as we have understood the job until now.

With that constant writing and erasing, my street journalist gradually reshaped the image of his own community at a speed that our complex newspapers in the West are incapable of even dreaming about. And in this sense, without even an iota of technological involvement, that street journalist was closer to the Internet age than I was.

He worked the way the Internet does, accepting that others shape the day-to-day reality at a breakneck speed and try to give a bit of order, by cataloguing and honing to the original cacophony.

Curiously, at the dawning of digital journalism in our country many years ago I defined the role of journalists using a familiar image: I said that a journalist in the Internet age had to be more like an “urban cop” of information, situated like my African colleague in the middle of infernal traffic, trying to give the flow of data a logical order when circulating it.

Some of my colleagues took issue with that definition, viewing the figure of “urban cop” as overly authoritarian, and I, in a fit of doubt, gave in and replaced the metaphor with that of a “cartographer” of information.

But I was wrong.

Cartographers look at what is before them but do not touch it. They sketch it and gather it in the guise of legible information, but they try not to interfere with it. Journalists, especially Internet journalists, can no longer do this: they have to interfere, they have to be part of the circulating chaos.

Not just for the sake of it, but because it would be absurd for journalists to be precisely the only human beings not to communicate via the web. When millions of people tell millions of stories simultaneously (on the web, Twitter, Facebook or their blogs) every day and at all hours of the day, it is inevitable that the storytellers, we journalists, regard it with surprise – now everyone is doing what only we used to do! – but we should regard it mainly with excitement.

Myspace lyrics

It is true that huge towers have come crashing down and many more are yet to fall. But seeing this should not blind us to the fact that we are witnessing the birth of a new world, the one that is getting underway now. A world where the version of events that the correspondent who experiences firsthand death on the streets of Teheran relates is just a pale reflection of the death portrayed live by a mobile telephone and immediately posted on YouTube. One thing does not compete with the other; rather we simply have to learn how to live with the new world.

Everything races and everything is hurried, but there are sectors within the world of communication that are revealing the future because they have been capable of racing even faster.

Personally, I think that the best of them all is music.

In recent years, we have heard chroniclers of the music industry ring the death knell of the business, and in the most extreme cases, even the death of music itself. The MP3 was the first revolution, and we all stuffed our hard drives with songs and music of dubious legality but amazing efficacy. It is true that the music business as it used to be has bitten the dust. CDs had replaced the old vinyl records at a disconcerting speed, but they did not even have enough time to become entrenched. Now more people buy mp3s and their successors than records as they existed in the past. And it is logical that in an industry that was based on commercialising a physical object that we called a record, the advent of the intangibility of the web has had a devastating impact.

But would anyone venture to say that music is in crisis today? That it is more crisis-ridden than three years ago? I think that the majority of readers would concur with my analysis that the music scene is, if anything, only getting better.

However, the first condition of this improvement is that the industry should forget what it used to be and will never be again. Records are no longer sold, and selling records is no longer the musicians’ main business, neither for their work nor for their income.

But they have found the trick, albeit only incipiently. Musicians are once again focusing on concerts and making money with them; they allow themselves to give away much of their music as a promotion or make entire albums available to buyers.

And on iTunes or Spotify, users listen to and buy music, song by song, whenever they want, à la carte. And not in inconsequential numbers.

In fact, in April, 2008, the statistics spoke clearly when they revealed that more music was sold – and I stress the word sold – via iTunes than via any of the traditional sale channels, Wal-Mart foremost.

For those who heralded the death of music from the Internet, suddenly the Internet became the resurrection of music, and not just through the volume of business. No one can deny that today music from anywhere in the world circulates with a freedom that was impossible to imagine decades ago. The other night Xavi Sarrià, my friend and the singer in Catalan band Obrint Pas, told me about his surprise when he played before thousands of people in a concert in Zagreb and realised that they were singing along with his songs in Catalan. He spent half the concert trying to understand the phenomenon until suddenly the audience fell silent when he sang one of the most famous songs in Catalonia.

There he found the key to what was happening: that specific song had not been posted on MySpace. And that is why they did not know it…

Back to excitement

So the first condition of this improvement is to forget what used to be and will never be again. The world of communication, in journalism or cinema, in all its realms, simply needs to regenerate. It needs to reinvent itself and go back to the basics: notes, tones and lyrics for music; visual texture and a plotline for film; a well-written examination of a specific issue for journalism.
This means going back to excitement, in any case and in all cases, the excitement that Tim Berners-Lee talked about in the investiture speech he delivered for his honorary doctorate.

The rest – business, huge skyscrapers, endless warehouses, industrial production, dissemination channels, the ways of getting paid and selling, power or what we think power is, show business… – wobbles.

The Internet has changed the communication and art industries, giving them back to the creators, democratising them, opening up their doors and windows, facilitating their dissemination and, truth be told, unleashing upheaval in the established order.

But it is creative upheaval that, by generating a new world, is opening up more doors than it is closing. Regardless of how spectacular the last days narrated by the lead characters or suffered in silence may be, these shadows cannot conceal the ray of light that is beaming down on culture and communication – and democracy as well – thanks to that piece of paper with diagrams and balloons that, as I have said all too often, still fascinates me today.

—-
Flickr images from users Pixel y Dixel, Br3nda, White African, Patrick Q, Tawheed Manzoor

 

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