Here at Cardiff University School of Journalism, we have been told for weeks by speakers including Matthew Yeomans, Andy Williams and Anthony Mayfield about how the internet and new technology will change the face of society by bringing the powers of publishing to the masses.
People can publish what they want, when they want, and make it available for all to see. People can likewise read what they want, when they want. No longer do people have to rely on a rich few to publish their take on today’s news, and they can get there news from literally anywhere. The oligopolies of old have been blown apart and anybody can come in and seize a sizable chunk of this new market.
Matthew Yeomans told us in his lecture how:
- the record industry has been hit by online services like iTunes, where people can buy whatever single they want to buy from a band’s album, rather than relying on what the record company chooses to sell as a single in shops;
- the advertising industry has been hit by Sky Plus, where people can wind on adverts they don’t want to see; and
- professional journalists have been hit by the rise of ‘citizen journalists’ with mobile phone cameras and an internet connection.
Andy Williams told us how CNN’s iReport now allows anyone and everybody who has news to tell to upload their video news story directly to their website, which could then be broadcast by CNN.
Anthony Mayfield said that with the rise of blogs, forums and mass publishing techniques, we were in the middle of a ‘technological revolution’ comparable to that of the printing press. Never before the rise of the World Wide Web, which was created in 1989 by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, did we have access to so much information literally at the click of a mouse.
However, as I highlighted in my last blog, the downside of this rise in the availability of information is the ‘fast food’-esque culture of absorbing facts that has arguably come with it. Nicholas Carr argues that the internet, in particular Google, through its nature of regular linking and providing lots of distractions, has made people digest information in a rather ‘artificial’ way, whizzing through texts to find quick answers, rather than thoroughly absorbing and understanding texts and what they tell us about the world – a more productive way of thinking that was encouraged by the printing press revolution, but not this one.
But the common man, coming home from an exhausting day behind a till, does not want to spend hours reading Nietzche – he wants the information in a ‘lite’ format that he can easily understand. And the internet gives him exactly that. The internet is not a replacement for long texts, as Carr presumes; it is just an additional resource.
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What caught my interest this week is that comics are doing exactly the same thing. David McNeill writes: ‘Japan’s prolific comic culture has distilled complex issues into pocket-sized, graphic books that can be read in the office or in transit.’ Japan went into recession this week for the first time since 2001, and McNeill writes: ‘A string of publications have found success capitalising on Japan’s growing inequalities and economic insecurity.’
Image courtesy of filmonic.com
For years, the Western comic industry has been trying to prove to the public that comics are not just for kids and geeks. Alan Moore has dealt with issues including rape (in Watchmen, which is in the process of being adapted into a movie), and Victorian drug abuse (in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) in realistic detail, while Frank Miller has painted harrowing modern cityscapes in comics like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, not unlike those painted by Marx, Dickens and other Victorian writers.
The same real life topics of depravity, inequality, death, love and survival are examined in comics as they would be on any other platforms – be it film, novels or politics. But they are looked at with far less words and a more simple sentance structure, with the added componant of fantastic artwork.
Fans are still commonly dismissed as geeks, as were avid internet users only a few years ago.
I would like to, half-seriously, suggest that comic book and internet geeks could be the ‘middle-class intelligentsia’ spoken of by Marx in Capital that will lead the workers out of their oppression as the economy crumbles and into a communist paradise where everybody is equal.
Tags: Capital, citizen journalism, comic books, communism, google, Karl Marx, news technology
