6 critical issues: Why the super injunction story represents a major social turning point

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Much ink and many pixels had already been shed on Britain’s super injunction laws before the last week, but the Ryan Giggs case has pushed this into the stratosphere.

In case you’ve been hiding in a closet, Manchester United star Ryan Giggs was awarded a “super injunction” from British courts, forbidding the press to report that he was alleged to have had an affair with Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas, or even that they had been forbidden to report on it. Some 75,000 tweets and 1 use of parliamentary privilege later, everyone knows anyway.

This is one of those seemingly small incidents on which major social turning points hinge. So many fundamental issues of society, media, and our future are tied into this that it is difficult to disentangle. Here are a few compact thoughts and critical issues on what is at the heart of this extraordinary situation.

– The current super injunction law was created to respond to excesses of the press
The British tabloids have a tradition as world-leaders in muck-racking and invasion of privacy. Their excesses led to what were probably at the time reasonable laws to limit negative social impact from their activities. However the media landscape of today is barely recognizable from when these laws were enacted in 1990.
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Music videos are the new journalism: learn about fracking!

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After watching the documentary Gasland my wife Victoria has become incensed about the practice of fracking, as hydraulic fracturing is commonly known. The issue has received global attention, but is also being practised close to home for us near Sydney’s water supplies. Victoria has been wondering why people don’t seem to be paying attention to what seems like a major environmental issue on our doorstep.

The US public interest news group ProPublica recently teamed up with New York University’s Jay Rosen to create ‘explanatory journalism’.

ProPublica has an existing three-year running project reporting on fracking and drinking water contamination. However their latest initiative may get more attention than the rest combined. The team has created a great music video which explains fracking in graphics and music in 2 1/2 minutes.


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The rise of participative TV (hint: that’s better than social TV)

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The opportunity for television is to become a truly participative media.

Over the last year or so my views on the future of TV have significantly shifted, to be far more optimistic for the media. Last year I gave the opening keynote at the Regional TV Marketing conference, and subsequently wrote how The Future of TV is community. In my keynote I reflected on how the power of big screen will remain truly compelling. However TV must transcend the classic broadcast mentality that implies a passive audience. It needs to create participative experiences, from which comes real community. Which, incidentally, will lead to the most powerful business models for the future of television, as I mentioned in some thoughts on TV in 10 years from now.

After a very slow start, TV channels appear to be getting the message and getting on board. The latest is What’s Trending, a “new kind of news show” from CBS News. Here is the trailer.


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Beijing social media/ future of media meetup on May 19

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I’m in Beijing next week to do the keynote at the AICD conference on How Technology is Transforming Business and guest lecture at Beijing Foreign Studies University on The End of Newspapers and Future of News.

While I’m in Beijing I’m keen to catch up with any local folks on Twitter/ Weibo/ social media and those interested in the future of media. As such I’ve set up a Beijing Future of Media/ Social Media meetup on Eventbrite. Please register on the page if you can join us.

Date: May 19
Time: 12pm – 2pm
Location: Union Bar and Grille
S6-31, 3/F, Bldg 6, Sanlitun Village South, 19 Sanlitun Lu, Chaoyang District
朝阳区三里屯路19号三里屯Village南区6号楼3层S6-31

If you’re in Beijing next week would be great to see you there, or if you think there are people who might like to come along, please pass on word.

Thanks to @beijingboyce and @benjaminjoffe for the pointers and support!!

Beijing lecture: The end of newspapers and the future of news

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When I’m in Beijing next week I’ll be doing a guest lecture at Beijing Foreign Studies University, China’s premier international studies university, where many of the country’s foreign ministers have studied.

I will be speaking on The end of newspapers and the future of news. While many are familiar with my Newspaper Extinction Timeline, that is just one aspect of what I consider a far more interesting topic, the future of news.

Here are full details.

Date: May 19, 2011
Time: 4:30pm – 7:00pm
Location: 北京外国语大学东院日本学研究中心三层多功能厅 (Multimedia Hall, 3rd Floor, Japanese Studies Center, East Campus, Beijing Foreign Studies University).

Please do pass on word to people in Beijing who may be interested. I’ll also be doing a Beijing Social Media Meetup at lunch same day – I’m keen to meet interesting folk while I’m in town!

Where news website traffic comes from: Google vs Facebook

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The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has recently released some very interesting research on Navigating News Online, digging into how people navigate to news sites and what takes them away.

Among the interesting insights was data on how news website traffic comes from Google and Facebook, shown below.

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Making sense of and filtering information overload

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I wrote up some brief notes from the Gallery of Modern Art’s recent panel discussion on the future of the 21st century.

Radio National’s Future Tense program subsequently broadcast the discussion and provided a full transcript for those who would like to see more of the content.

One of the many interesting topics of discussion was dealing with information overload. This is an issue that often comes up as a futurist, as people wonder how you keep across everything that’s happening. I’ll write in more detail on this later, but for now here is the transcript from the panel (somewhat mangled from the original) including comments from myself and Tim Longhurst. Some of the key points were:

* The new generation of web tools are enabling us to collaborate to filter massive information overload
* Creating visual frameworks can be a powerful way of making sense of information
* The role of futurists is pattern recognition
* Selective filtering to reinforce our biases is not new
* Most of us will experience more diverse views than before the web

Antony Funnell: Ross Dawson, I’ve given up looking at the technology section in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald because I just can’t keep pace with it – there just seems to be so much change going on. As a futurist, I just wonder how difficult it is to actually keep ahead of all that, to be involved in trying to forecast trends for business or organisations and be on the money, not feel like you’ve suddenly fallen behind the curve.
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6 uncertainties that will shape the future of mobile operating systems

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Yesterday I completed co-presenting the three-part Ketchum webinar series on Tapping the Power of Mobile. The feedback was excellent, with record audiences of Ketchum clients and staff for the series. Here is an overview of the content we covered over the three webinars.

The final session was on Where Mobile is Going, which looked at the mobile industry landscape, as well as the implications of emerging technologies such as 4G and LTE, next generation augmented reality, NFC and mobile payments, new interfaces such as video glasses and pico projectors, mobile sensors, and far more.

I began by looking at the mobile operating system landscape, showing the forecasts recently made by Gartner, as below.

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Telling the story of how the Osama news came out on Twitter first

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This definitely counts as big news. Osama Bin Laden is dead after over a decade of trying.

Interestingly, in many news outlets the fact that the news leaked on Twitter before President Obama’s announcement to the nation almost rivals the news itself. Just in following my own Twitter stream I knew the news (or at least the rumor) well before it appeared in the mainstream media.

ABC News has compiled a stream of the Twitter messages and mainstream media responses as they came out, as below. They used Storify, a service that just came out of beta last week. Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify, spoke at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit last year to talk about how it provides a platform for people to collectively tell stories.
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Tablet computers as seen from 1994

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The rise of news on tablets such as the iPad is one of the defining themes of our times. This was foreseen by some, even down to the language that we use. The following video, created by Knight-Ridder in 1994, describes their vision of the future of tablet newspapers.


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