Tech & Biz

Have you read "Transmetropolitan" by Warren Ellis?

by biverson | April 27, 2007 at 05:55 am

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"I knew it was something way more serious than that, so I started taking the video," he said, adding that he often visited CNN.com and knew he could send his video to I-Report.

An eyewitness who knew how to submit video was on the scene. So, what should can a reporter or journalist add to the citizen feedster's eyewitness report? That is the future of journalism.

Transmetropolitan is a graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson. But don't write it off. The main character, Spider Jerusalem, is a projection of Hunter S. Thompson the gonzo reporter, into future. The truth about Sci-Fi like Transmet is that it isn't really about the future "future." As artists, the authors are really just showing us a view of how things are now or will be shortly.

Ignoring the plots of Spider's various episodes (though they are interesting in a political sense) what the story depicts is a world connected by the "Feed," an electronic network that anyone can connect to and then broadcast news to "the World." In Spider's metropolis, there are Feedsite screens in building walls, the sidewalk, everywhere. Of course the main story lines concern Spider getting a big scoop, jacking into the Feed and being able to bring the story to the "people" without editorial interference.

On the periphery of this connected world are the citizens who walk around strap on cameras, audio devices (their cameras are on their heads and thus view the world like another set of eyeballs) and record everything within their range and transmit the information without filtering to the Feed and the World.

I think this little nugget from CNN about the kid who was ready to supply the "Feed" via his personal recording device to the world when he was an unsuspecting witness to the shootings at Virginia Tech, is only a few degrees away from Ellis' depiction of citizen witnesses who for their own reasons will connect us all to physical locations that are remote from us and provide "eye-witness news coverage" of any locale.

In a time where a bystander can produce a live or near live feed of unfolding events, what should the professional news people be doing? Loading competing feeds or putting their resources into getting out information to make sense of a breaking story? Reporters will be the thought and organization that goes into producing context and putting what we see into the form of a narrative.

Visual information floods into our brain and hits the older part of the brain first, before going through our cognitive thinking process, eliciting immediate emotional responses. We need to work out what happened through words, whether printed or spoken to make sense of events. That is where we will turn to journalists. Reporters of events, the eyewitnesses, will stand mute showing us unfolding events. It seems that journalists will be putting the visuals into a fact-based narrative we can use, not chasing fires.

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Brian A Kennedy

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 06:02 on April 27th, 2007

biverson, insightful commentary as always -- thanks for this.

jordan

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 05:06 on April 27th, 2007

biverson, an excellent meditation. The future is here, as all good sci-fi shows us; journalism was revolutionized by those crappy little cameras in phones: It burst onto the public scene with the VHS capture of Rodney King's beating and evolved into the phonecam documentation of Saddam's execution, and then the VT shootings. We're all potential witnesses.

levmyshkin

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 14:53 on April 27th, 2007

biverson, Good stuff. I've read a few of the Transmetropolitan comics and enjoyed them for the reasons you mention.

Nice commentary on the rapid rise of a 'net connected world, and how it has the potential to turn regular citizens armed with cellphones into a massive journalistic force.

I can't remember if it was the last election, but I remember a series of videos that ran on CurrentTV where average people went out to polling places armed with camcorders in order to document any laws that were being broken (people being turned away by racial profiling etc.) and uploaded the process.

It gave normal citizens the power of the press at an exponential level--when there's a camcorder at every poll and an easy outlet for the material, who's going to storm in with billy clubs or start stuffing ballot boxes?

It was really a beautiful thing.