Video and rebellion: the Middle East

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Continuing the theme of my penultimate post, a documentary report has appeared on Al Jazeera (‘Images of Revolution’, dir. Ibrahim Hamdan) presenting ‘the story behind the iconic images of the Arab uprisings as told by those who filmed them’. It’s a pretty good film for anyone thinking about the subject, or teaching social media, from whatever angle, for two reasons. First, because it covers many of the questions that people have been asking about the role of the social media in fomenting the revolutions in the Middle East, and of social movements everywhere. And second, because it does so without the unctuous commentary or tendentious presenter that remains obligatory on our own television channels, but entirely in the voices of participants themselves: reporting from Tunisia and Egypt, with a postscript from Libya, Hamdan seeks out people who filmed some of the key mobile phone videos that helped to galvanise the uprisings, and interviews them in the places where they did their filming as they tell us how they did it.

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What happens when you privatise universities: now on video from Chile

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The world represented by the mainstream media is still governed by a division into centre and periphery which has been thrown into doubt by recent events—not only the global effects of economic crisis, but the popular protest movements which have sprung up in Europe, the Middle East, and now the USA. It is nowadays the general rule that news from the old periphery, as well as the margins and the interstices of society, arrives in the social media before reaching the mainstream media. It was three or four weeks before Occupy Wall Street was picked up by the mainstream, and predictably it only broke through when cameras on the streets caught the first acts of gratuitous police violence and posted them on the web.

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Urban riots: the imagery of cognitive dissonance

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The riots which started in North London, and astonished everyone by spreading so quickly through the city and round the country, have produced massive cognitive dissonance throughout the media—mainstream and social—for which they provide a new and highly polysemic symbol for accumulating fears of social disintegration. The flood of photos and videos join a gallery of images of social breakdown from disparate causes, some natural, some social—from hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis to solitary deranged gunmen on the rampage—which have this in common, that they all suggest appalling consequences in store for a world spinning out of control—without the fantasised redemptive ending of the disaster movie. Read more

What are we fighting for?

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The following appears in ThreeD, Newsletter of the MeCCSA, No.16

In the view of Terry Eagleton, speaking recently to a protest meeting at LSE, ‘There are two incompatible and contradictory versions of education which are now fighting it out: the right wing version is education for the economy, the left wing version is education for society.’ (LSE, 18 January 2011; see On Campus at the New Statesman)  Eagleton takes a long term view. When the humanities as we know them first emerged, he explains, they did so at exactly the same time as early industrial capitalism. Academia served as a space in which creative, imaginative and critical values expelled from early industrial capitalist society could take shelter, find nurture and flourish. Read more

The economic crisis seen from Argentina

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A new video at the New Statesman. This one’s very short. It’s based on a slide show sent to me by a friend in Argentina, which I’ve translated and visually elaborated. Thanks Patricio!

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20531687[/vimeo]

 

We Will Not Pay

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[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20236904[/vimeo]

At Saturday’s Progressive London conference, I caught up with comedian Josie Long and Mehdi Hasan, the NS’s political editor, and listened to Unite’s Len McKluskey and False Economy‘s Clifford Singer, plus ukuncutactivists take on Barclays Bank and South London celebrates a Carnival Against the Cuts.

Additional filming by Kaveh Abassian and Philippa Daniel. Philippa’s own video of the Carnival Against the Cuts is here.

 

 

Why Education is not a Commodity

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The arguments advanced by government ministers like David Willetts for the draconian reform of university funding are confused and specious. They would certainly fail any exam in logic. Rather than reason, they depend on various forms of mediatised rhetoric, like Orwell’s newspeak, or doublespeak, or what the writer Steve Poole has called unspeak—although sometimes they amount to simple misrepresentation, derived from hasty and inadequate statistics, or falsehood resulting from denial. Read more

On Campus

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[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19471489[/vimeo]

In On Campus, Terry Eagleton speaks at a meeting at the London School of Economics about the contradiction between education for society and education for the economy. South of the river, the Vice Chancellor of Roehampton University, Paul O’Prey, considers the implications of government measures with colleagues.

With Terry Eagleton, Paul O’Prey, Joe Kelleher, Nina Power, Laurie Penny and Ruby Hirsch.

 

Video blogging for the New Statesman: Camera in hand and idea in the head

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For the last few weeks I’ve been out and about filming moments in the developing protest movement against the unconscionable coalition government and its programme of swingeing cuts in every department of social provision.  The result has been a number of short videos posted here on Putney Debater. I’ve now been invited by the New Statesman to become its first video blogger, so from now on, that’s where my videos will be posted first (although I’ll continue to post written blogs here). Here’s the first one, which condenses the videos posted here previously with some additional material.
The idea I have is to build up a picture of the movement as it evolves, so I’m working on the basis that I’ll end up with a documentary record of three or four months of struggle. The method is simple: to return to Glauber Rocha’s formula for Cinema Novo in Brazil—to go and make films with a camera in the hand and an idea in the head. (Too simple for the section on methodology in a grant application, and there’s no time for that anyway, so I’m not making one.)

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