Next tweet: “Someone sign this girl a reality cheque. And get her a book on baby names.”
Anyway, I’m not getting any luck with accessing the internet so I put my phone in my pocket, just as Keesha’s want-to-be-mum hangs up and turns to a portly man sitting in front of her.
“I’m sorry about the music playing earlier, I really didn’t mean to disturb you.” He nods and says it’s not a problem, obviously a little taken-back that she’s apologised in such a sincere way.
“Anyway,” she continues, “How was your day?”
He looks unguarded and it gets my attention too. Do strangers really ask each other this these days? Most of the time we’re plugged into iTunes or grazing through Facebook and Twitter. Or even, going old-school, reading a book.
“Um, it was, as usual, quite routine, as most days are in fact.” He answers with a fumbled honesty. She continues to pursue the conversation.
“What is it that you do?”
“I’m retired, but I was a lecturer at TAFE.” She goes on to tell him about her abandoned studies in hospitality, a sleazy boss and her desire to return to learning. She tells him it’s marvelous that he’s a teacher, that he must have worked hard to achieve that, that is must be lovely to have a job where people look up to him.

“Well,” he says in a quiet knowing voice, “It’s not really that esteemed, most people regard lecturing at TAFE to be that thing you do, when you can’t do anything else.” She disagrees. And he thanks her. He looks a tad more chuffed than just chuffed.
I’m at my stop. My signal returns. I walk off the platform, glad that I hadn’t tweeted earlier.
I type: “Endearing conversation between two strangers next to me. A heart-broken 20-something and a retiree. Feeling a little heart-warmed.”

I walk off wondering how often I’m disconnected from the people around me.

I’m not discounting online connections, I think it’s possible to become close and value those whose 140 characters drop through your day. After four years of some followers, I’d say I’d know them pretty well, and yes, having even not met them I refer to them as “friends”. But a lot of us would admit to being seduced by the Twitter vortex, and it’s so easy to become drawn into – when nothing can happen without a desire to tweet it. I think sometimes there are sadder implications for relationships and family life, when we become so seduced by our need to be constantly connected to others outside of those immediately around us. I’ve seen it happen.

I’m not going to read Twitter on my commutes anymore. And then maybe, a little less when I’m at home. I don’t know how successful I’m going to be. I’ll let you know.

But someone just signed me a reality cheque. And it’s best I cash it in.

Oh I get it now, it seems that because popular culture portrays women as being sexually exploited that means that it’s acceptable. For the latter they deserve to be publically vilified, peeked at in the shower, sexually harassed and abused for speaking out on the matter. Oh and broadcast unknowingly on Skype while having sex. As is tradition.

How do these sentences, these statements, these propositions, cohere? They don’t.

But that is how Bob Ellis sees it, in his piece published on The Drum, titled “Why are heads rolling at the ADFA?”.

Ellis appears to argue that because women have been always been portrayed as objects to be leered at by men, then surely men doing just that is acceptable. He gives the example of Hot Lips Houlihan in the movie M.A.S.H. being oggled at when her shower is unwittingly lifted by a crane. Of which, Elllis writes:

“Are these uniformed men thereafter court-martialled, their commanding general sacked, and Congress made to interrogate all participants? No. Extremely hard to see why. They are guilty, surely, as charged.”

Leaving aside the fact that we’re talking about a movie, Ellis claims this behaviour and what happened at the Australian Defence Force Academy, when a cadet was broadcast having sex via Skype, is acceptable. You know, in the traditional way.

Incidentally, in the movie M.A.S.H, Houlihan and Burns unwittingly broadcast an encounter between them over the PA system. Burns eventually cannot stand being teased about the encounter and is sedated, restrained, and leaves.

Ellis doesn’t go there and realistically Burns probably got over it after he sobbed on the phone to his mother. That is after all, what Ellis suggests might have happened to this cadet had the incident not become a national debate.

But M.A.S.H. is only one film and Ellis has TV examples too!

The Simpsons. Seinfeld, Cheers, Frazier, The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy all show “bungled copulation” and as audiences we judge them as “good sports”. And then there’s his historical evidence, with similar incidents in Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Suetonius and Bible (rather notably, Ellis adds.) Men and women copulate, we all get that. Some of this is fodder for sitcoms, some of this is fodder for poetry, but as soon as you introduce any notion that a sexual act is taking place without consent it is not funny or romantic, more importantly it shouldn’t be normalized. I can’t think of any times that any of these sitcoms, or the Bible for that matter, sought to do this.

Ellis goes even further, by suggesting that this young ADFA cadet was just having his “bedroom technique” observed, “in an almost traditional way, by his flatmates.” I’m not sure what Ellis and his mates got up to in their youth, but I’m guessing there’s a sigh of relief among some of his “conquests” that Skype did not exist at the time.

He is of course right that popular culture continues to objectify women. Yes, a lot of man/woman/sex humour can be funny, but perhaps this complacency has normalized something far more serious for far too long. That a woman could be filmed covertly while having sex with her partner and have it broadcast to his mates is just plain wrong. There are no variations on that fact. That we live in a culture that sends out the message that it could in fact be funny, traditional or normal – Ellis has the evidence (or more correctly, Ellis is the evidence) – perhaps highlights the need for a much broader inquiry.

In an age of apparent gender equality, when I have as many supposed rights as any man in Australian society, when wolf-whistling a woman on the street is frowned upon, how is it that women continued to be objectified by popular culture?

This week a Brisbane Catholic school launched an inquiry into students who were rating female teachers on their physical attributes. A few years ago, members of a Sydney boy’s college started a “pro-rape” facebook page.

Do we all, as Ellis does, shrug our shoulders and say boys will be boys?

If this is the only option, then let me be the first to say, let the wowser-fest begin.

Steve Coll writes:

I learned something about journalism while covering my first earthquake, in northwest Iran, in June, 1990. Tens of thousands of people died. After some travail, a small group of us newspaper and broadcast correspondents from the West arrived by helicopter, after dark, in a flattened village. I was still pretty green but I had seen enough death and devastation by then to know that it would not affect me emotionally. Nonetheless, as I stumbled into the village off the helicopter, I felt paralyzed, professionally. There were no houses or buildings left standing; there were so many dead; there was so much audible suffering. What was one supposed to write in one’s notebook to capture and convey this scene?

It’s something that a lot of journalists can quite probably relate to. The series of natural disasters in Australia, has exposed more journalists to this dilemma. The floods in Brisbane, the cyclone that followed – these were extraordinary events in the history of Australia. For those not there, the devastation was hard to fathom. But I, like many other Australians, stayed glued to Twitter, as Yasi passed over Queensland. Some of the addiction came from the constant updating of news. But for me, more importantly, a larger story formed from the tapestry of tweets, a story woven together and loosely knitted by the hundreds of people sitting in their houses as the cyclone passed.

“Our lights have gone out now”, “We can hear the windows rattling”, and “It’s eerily quiet now, must be the eye,” are not quotes that would make the news. But that night, in the face of the unknown approaching, it was an insight into the fear of so many in that moment. And, in some strange way, a lot of us felt as if we were there.

And this was also where the New Yorker article caught my attention. Steve Coll writes:

My memory of what followed is vivid. I was in the company of one of those lions of foreign correspondence at the Los Angeles Times—I think it was Rone Tempest. Perhaps he noticed that I seemed confused. Anyway, he said—grunted, actually—like some veteran baseball player spitting tobacco in a nineteen-thirties movie: “Make lists—all the little things.” And so I did. A tin cooking pot with rice still in it. Five boots, none matching. A bicycle wheel protruding from a pile of rocks. Like that. We rode back to Tehran that night on a bus. I wrote my story on one of those ancient Radio Shack portables. When I flipped through my notebook with a flashlight, I gradually came to realize that I had something particular—and for American audiences so distanced from revolutionary Iran—something useful to say.

Sometimes, in the rush to denounce Twitter or even to talk it up as the ultimate breaking news source, we forget that it’s the little things that count. It’s the small stories in the bigger drama that make it so real. The mundane among the madness. The one voice among hundreds.

I was captivated, like many, by the recent events in Egypt. Late one night I came across the stream of @ bloggerseif. I think I found his tweets from Andy Carvin, who did an amazing job of creating a “curated” twitter stream of all that was going on. That’s a story in itself. But, that night, it was Ali Seif’s (I do not know if that is his real name) tweets that made the whole situation so real for me. In the chaos of that night, his often disjointed and emotive tweets, told the story of a small child they found; lost among the chaos in Tehran square. They had no way of knowing if the baby’s parents were alive, or even who he was. I think he could only say his name. Amazingly, they located the child’s parents the next day. It was hugely emotional to read, but I felt like I had some insight (and empathy!) to the bigger picture through the tweets of Ali Sief and the plight of this little child – that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the revolution around them.

I think Coll is right, it is about little things.

But that’s what makes Twitter such an invaluable form of journalism.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2010/01/earthquakes-and-journalism.html#ixzz1EaGchNbf

I did something the other day I haven’t done in a long time. I turned on the TV.
Some of you may still be familiar with this ritual, but I can honestly say in the last three years, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve even bothered to find the remote.
It’s not that I’m accessing TV shows through other nefarious time-shifted means, though I’m not denying that I have engaged in such acts, but rather that I find TV quite a solitary experience.
Unless you’re watching football, there’s pretty much an unspoken rule NOT TO SPEAK. And yes, before you all collectively scream at me, I know you don’t talk during the replays. Established that one the hard way.
So just who do you screech at when at Courtney produces sub-par pesto? #masterfchef
Why, Twitter ofcourse.
In fact, Twitter is bringing TV to life in a way that time-shifting will never be able to compete with.
Twitter brings a huge collective audience together to watch TV. If you’re yet to experience the magic of Twitter TV, you can’t go past Eurovision to fully appreciate its value. And you don’t have long to wait. Highlight 25, 27 & 29 May, 2010 in your calendar.
A few Australian programs have cottoned on to the this.
Mark Pesce (@mpesce), who has a healthy Twitter following, was one of the early pioneers of rounding up the troops on Twitter to watch the New Inventors, for which he is a panelist from time to time.
Then there was the infamous #nudierun on Media Watch, where twitterers said they would run around their neighbourhoods naked if Johnathon Holmes said “pwned” on TV. He did and there were some sightings of naked bottoms. Silly? Yes, but quite empowering for the audience all the same (not to mentioned damned funny). I think Holmes even cracked a wry smile.
Sally Jackson, who writes for the Media section for The Australian, tweeted recently that Q&A receives between 5000 and 10000 tweets per episode. That’s a very impressive statistic, which indicates if nothing else, that people enjoy having their say. It’s not even that these tweets need to become part of the show, though that is fantastic where appropriate, but rather that people enjoy being able to watch TV together. Quietly, but not alone.
Which begs the question why TV execs don’t announce a Twitter hashtag at the beginning of every show.
And I don’t think it’s something that can only apply to TV. Every major news article too, should carry a hashtag on it. Same for radio.
It would bring those conversations together in a clever, simple way.
Encouraging conversation is a function of the media. And this is an almost accidental chance for media to do that in a way not entirely possible before.
So, that’s my free advice to media execs.
Show us your hashtags and we’ll come to the party.

It’s great to see so many journalists here who are on Twitter and I think if anything it’s provided a great forum for some robust debate about issues facing media.

Perhaps many journalist’s natural curiosity has been piqued by the fact that they are in danger of becoming largely irrelevant?

I’m not anti-journalist, I’m not pro-blogger, I’m pro-journalism and it’s core function to inform. I didn’t say inform the masses on purpose there. Who performs that function is less relevant to me.

The way I see it, and for the purposes of this discussion, there are two main issues that remain largely misunderstood by journalists working in news organisations when it comes to engaging in social media.

The first pertains to the issue of control, or loss of control and the second is around transparency.

I don’t talk about old media and new media – I think it’s unconstructive and divisive.

But there has been a shift and I’m not averse to calling it a revolution. The revolution in media has largely been about loss of control and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

I use the term ‘control media’ to describe the mindset we have had until the internet came along and disrupted that.

I think it’s an important part of understanding how things like Twitter have turned media-as-we-know-it on its head. It’s also important for journalists in social media communities to fully understand the enormity of this change.

Until recently we’ve lived in a control media environment – the ability to report and share information was limited to those that controlled the technology that made it possible – those who owned the printing presses, radio and TV licences. But more importantly news was controlled by those in charge of deciding who /what /why and when something was newsworthy.

Twitter is an example of almost the exact opposite of “control media” because journalists are not in control the flow of information anymore.

It wasn’t journalists who covered the recent Iran uprising.

It wasn’t journalists who broke the news of the last major earthquake in China. in fact the previous earthquake of a similar magnitude was reported three months after the event and the Chinese Government still tried to deny it ever happened.

It wasn’t a journalist’s twitpic – that’s a picture posted to Twitter – I saw 3 minutes after the cable snapped on the bay Bridge in San Francisco – just over a week ago.

Participatory media doesn’t mean you letting your audience participate in the creation of news, it about acknowledging that you participate in news creation along with your audience.

It still astounds me how many journalists on Twitter, many of whom have spoken here today (I know because I checked) only follow other journalists – and who are the first ones to complain that the internet is an echo chamber?

My second point about journalists using Twitter is the need for full transparency, which can run counter to the notion of objectivity.

How can you be honest and open about things – or have a personal opinion – when it might align you with one party in a story over another? It was something Mark Colvin and Leigh Sales touched on in their talks with regard to being cautious in letting their opinions on a subject known. I believe that if we knew where journalists stood on a matter, it would in fact increase their credibility and create a greater trust with their audiences.

As journalist Amy Gahran put it “when journos pretend to have NO opinions/biases, it *undermines* their credibility.”

The Washington Post recently published some guidelines for their journalists in using social networks like Twitter and Facebook, in which it said, and I quote:

All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens. Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website.

It’s quite alarming really. Instead of finding ways to encourage engagement, these guidelines are in fact doing just the opposite.

Its important in this time of change, that journalists are encouraged to have open conversations, not have restrictions placed on those.

Truth is, objectivity as an ideal was always somewhat flawed, and in part is responsible for the large cynicism that exists among audiences today.

I subscribe to the disclosure of personal views and opinions whenever and wherever possible, rather than a pretense that they don’t exist. And I encourage all journalists to do the same.

Can journalists do it better?

We’ve heard Jay Rosen’s quote here a few times today about “the people formerly known as the audience.” To which I’d like to add:

Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media.

I have set up a Google group that is free for people in the industry, or those with an interest in media, to join. It is an open group at present, but depending on how it is used (or abused) we could close the group (and we will!) I want it to be an open and intelligent space for us to throw around ideas on what we can do to save the things that are good about journalism and work on those things that need improving.

I’ve set the group up so that replies are sent to the whole group – I’m on another email group and this seems like a good way to make the discussion useful for everyone. I can always adjust settings as we go along.

So please help me spread the word, it would be great to get a large pool of working journalists on the list as well – from a variety of news organisations, as well as those working independently.

You can join the group here. All posts from a new member are moderated to control spam. I’m guessing that falls on me as the one who set up the group and I’ll try to keep on top of it as best I can. I think others can be given this duty as well, so let me know if you can help and I’ll see what I can do in the settings.

Lastly, please take a minute to fill out your profile on the group as I think it will make it a more useful experience for others.

Again, thanks and help spread the word!

Just a few hours ago I was having a very interesting discussion on Twitter about whether paywall could work for news. Without Twitter the conversation could not have taken place, we had @julie_posetti in Canberra, @jason_a_w in Woolongong, @natecochrane in Sydney, @Mediamum in Colorado, @barrysaunders in Sydney, @GreenJ Melbourne and me in Perth – there may have been others chiming in that I’ve missed. The point is, we are all people with some industry insight who, limited by geography/time/connectivity, would not have had that conversation otherwise.

It was one of the most intelligent and informed conversations I’d seen on the subject too, with input from many people in a thoughtful way.

I wish I could direct you to it, but I can’t. And that is Twitter’s biggest failure (bigger than the FAIL WHALE). Our conversations, insights and comments are unarchivable, unsearchable and lost the moment after they finish. Twitter search only goes back three weeks at the moment and then it’s still hard to track a conversation with so many involved, replying to different points and different people. Even if we’d used a hashtag (which we didn’t) the conversation would not be there after a month in Twitter search. Who is to know it ever happened?

The same goes when people comment about a blog post through Twitter. Those comments are gone in a moment.

Over the three years I’ve been on Twitter it’s become an easy habit to let my thoughts be known through Twitter over posting on my blog, my archive is testament to that fact – and the same goes for a lot of us I suspect. But 13, 493 tweets later, I’m starting to wonder if Twitter is actually a f**ked place for us to have these conversations. Thoughts?

Twitter
There is no quicker way to get news out of something happening other than Twitter – *by default it is one of the most important developments in citizen journalism.
*By default, because who would have thought a site that asked simply “What are you doing” and limited it to 140 characters would become one of the most powerful news “networks” we have ever seen.
I use Tweetie, but as far as I can tell there is no reason why Tweetdeck or any other of the myriad of iPhone apps for Twitter wouldn’t do as good a job. The power of Twitter has more to do with its real-time news reporting abilities than people’s preference for an app. But if you can think of a reason one Twitter app would be better over another for the purposes of citizen journalism let me know in the comments.

Audioboo
Audioboo records audio as an MP3 and posts it to its own site, but can also autopost to Twitter. Its potential is in its simplicity. I’ve seen it used for impromptu interviews or reports from the scene of something. It’s fast, is good quality and the app is dead simple to use. Audio can be up to three minutes long and you can add titles and include a pic as well as locate where the recording was made. It’s free and you don’t need to sign up to Audioboo to start using it, but I’d recommend it to keep track of your recordings.

Twitpic
Twitpic is one of the many ways to upload pics quickly to Twitter. I like the way the Twitpic app is very simple and it’s been my photo service of choice on Twitter for a while. I actually have it integrated with Tweetie so I can post from there. Others may find the app easier.

12 seconds
The iPhone 3GS officially brings video to the iPhone (though a hack to the 3G also made it possible). Not everything requires a long video, and 12 seconds has a lot of great uses as an easy way to make a quick video update on a situation that requires a bit more than a photo. Like a lot of the other apps I’ve mentioned it is integrated with Twitter and you can set 12 seconds updates to go to Twitter if you choose. 12 seconds videos are also easily shared on other sites, an important feature when it comes to disseminating information.

YouTube
The inbuilt YouTube app on the new 3GS comes with an easy way to upload longer videos to your YouTube account. It’s simple and easy to use once you have set it up.

The top Cit J iPhone App that’s missing
The biggest way in which the iPhone fails as a mobile reporting device is that you are unable to livestream video from it because Apple won’t allow any apps that livestream from your phone – the reason is understood to be related to the deal they have with AT &T in the US as the network could not handle large amounts of livestreaming video. 3G users got around this with a hack, but this is not supported on the 3GS. Qik, which was built as a livestreaming service has an iPhone App, but it doesn’t allow for livestreaming. Hopefully Apple will do something about this soon, as it’s a major drawback in the capabilities of the iPhone as a truly breakthrough Cit J device and gives the upcoming Android a big heads up in this space.

The Foundation has been set up with help from the  Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research, which has been exploring new models for journalism. This is a big part of that experimentation.

From the press release we put out when the board was announced:

The foundation will support investigative, interactive journalism while exploring ways of making good journalism sustainable in the new media age.

The board members are:

Professor Michael Bromley: Head of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland.

Ms Bronwen Clune: Director of Norg Media (http://www.norg.com.au/)

Mr Chris Graham: Co-founder and editor of the National Indigenous Times newspaper.

Mr Jonathan Green: Editor, Crikey

Mr Steve Harris: Strategic consultant

Mrs Elaine Henry OAM: Chief Executive Officer, The Smith Family,

Mr Chris Masters : Freelance reporter and author, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland

Mr Gerard Noonan: Freelance business journalist, chair of Media Super, and active in the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors and the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees.

Professor Julianne Schultz AM: Founding editor of Griffith REVIEW, and a professor at Griffith’s Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, a member of the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Arts Minister’s Creative Australia Advisory Group.

Dr Margaret Simons: Freelance journalist, author and lecturer at Swinburne University, Simons has published seven books and numerous essays and articles over her 29 year career as a professional journalist.

Ms Melissa Sweet
Freelance journalist and author, with adjunct positions at University of Sydney School of Public Health and University of Notre Dame’s medical school (Sydney campus)

Professor Julian Thomas
Director of the Institute for Social Research and Professor of Media and Communications at Swinburne University.

Dr Margaret Simons has been appointed interim chair of the board, and Melissa Sweet is the interim secretary.

Simons said there had been more than 40 nominations for the Board positions, suggesting that there is great public and professional interest in developing vigorous new models of journalism.

In addition to the board members, Dr Simons said she was delighted that many other journalists, academics and community members had volunteered to lend their expertise and experience to advising the Board.

“We look forward to drawing upon a large pool of talent to assist with the Board’s work,” she said.

“We expect the new board will hold its first meeting next month, and that its priorities will include establishing a website and work-plan, as well as developing fundraising strategies,

“We will be seeking support from philanthropic organisations and individuals who appreciate the importance of a healthy, active media for our society.”

Donations will be tax deductible.

The foundation will fund worthy journalism projects initiated by either members of the public or practising journalists. Its first project will be to establish a website through which members of the public and journalists can come together to organise journalistic projects without the intervention of Big Media. This will be partly modelled on USA experiments such as www.spot.us

And if you’re still wondering how to eat burritos – the trick is not to eat the butt, it’s the biggest part of the burrito and tends to be messy and fills you up just that “bit too much”. It’s just gluttony. And we all know where that ended for Big Media