Domestic journalism

Yesterday I made my first film for the You Decide 2007 website. It was very time consuming, so I might not make too many more, but it was a good way to appreciate how much work is involved in trying to do something even this tiny. I’m not computer illiterate, but I don’t veer too far from writing and photo publishing, so having a go at something new was an attempt to appreciate what I’d already suspected about citizen journalism as a concept. That is, the people who are able to engage with it must have a bit of spare time up their sleeve - and that rules out a fair chunk of the electorate whose thoughts and opinions I’d really like to be hearing right now. But, by having a go I wanted to offer another example of what politics and journalism might mean, and perhaps to expand the kind of topics that might be worth thinking about over the next few weeks.

As you might expect, for me this was less an exercise in screen aesthetics than it was a theoretical experiment, and if you watch the video you might wonder why I chose something so incredibly bourgeois and marginal as SBS reception for a topic. The election is hardly going to be decided by a bunch of apartment-dwelling New Farm yuppies - nor should it! But there were a few reasons behind the choice, including:

- an ongoing curiosity at the parlous state of television reception in the capital cities I’ve lived in over time (Sydney and Brisbane most recently);
- a sense of mischief in wondering how lazy one could be in making a news story (hence the title, ‘armchair journalism’);
- to stage a mini-commentary on the forms of representation that count as ’serious journalism’ (which explains the different voices in the film, the journalist’s tone and the distracted mumblings of an ‘ordinary’ television user.

The footage of the TV isn’t really watchable and it goes on too long and seems kinda pointless… but it’s precisely that aspect of television’s boring and mundane potential that I wanted to capture, along with the sense of powerlessness and frustration in the face of existing media provision that certainly I often feel. When I think about how badly the government has managed important new opportunities like pay or digital television I get incredibly grumpy, and I’m genuinely concerned about the ways the ALP is trumpeting broadband access as the simple answer to the transition to an information economy. This is especially problematic when it refuses to relate this transition in any useful way to its history of trade unionism, and the reinvigorated understanding of workers’ rights to limited hours that we will urgently need with the widespread uptake of always-on technologies.

I’ll have more to say about this in the special issue of MIA I’ve been editing with Gerard Goggin that comes out next month. But it’s the idea that we should always be enamoured and charmed by the promise of more and better technologies (”high-speed internet 40 times the speed of what we have now”) that seems like an increasingly dangerous form of common sense at work in our culture today. Having started my interviews this week on how workers’ lives are being affected by new media and ICTs, it’s far from clear that more speed and more information is what we as a country desperately need.

And that’s why the movie is so strategically centred on the home, the loungeroom: while journalism (’citizen’ or otherwise) is regularly thought of in terms of the voxpop on the footpath, playing ‘gotcha’ with sitting members or reporting on performances at carefully orchestrated public meetings, I think political feelings are instead decided in these quiet and distracted domestic moments, the cumulative effect of which makes certain people more or less confident or interested in participating in the so-called public sphere of consequential debate.

After posting the video last night I was lucky to be invited to the launch of the Australian Photojournalist, a publication coming out of Griffith University. The edition was launched by Peter Cave, long serving foreign correspondent for the ABC, and winner of 5 Walkley awards. His moving speech talked us through the editing process involved in just a couple of stories he filed from Iraq, including the capture of the first US Hostage, Thomas Hamill. It was an incredibly revealing insight into the skills and ethics involved in producing news stories, as well as the untold effects that the craft of this industry has on those who practice it. And it’s this level of detail, care and consideration that we tend to overlook when - as citizens, bloggers, writers, voters - we feel entitled to evaluate ‘the media’ that produce the information we use to bolster our preferred ideological readings.