Media Diary

Inconsequentiality

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

When some three years ago, during a lazy afternoon in Beijing’s Bookworm café (still on the old premises), I laid my hands on a copy of Granta No. 42, an issue from the year 1992 with the evocative title “Krauts!”, I subsequently decided to never again buy or read any copy of this renowned literary magazine.

Editor Bill Buford had dedicated No. 42 to nothing less than an evaluation of the “New Germany”, but all he had found to focus upon were the recent ugly events of Rostock-Lichtenhagen. With this narrow mindset, a rather uninspired and clueless selection of texts, and an outrightly insulting cover blurb, Granta 42 was one of the worst and stupidest books I’d ever seen.

But yesterday I had to betray my resolution. Granta is celebrating its 100th issue. Guest editor is one of my favorite writers: William Boyd. The cover has been designed by one of my favorite painters: David Hockney. And the content is absolutely first-rate, with many established names like Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi and even Harold Pinter, but also some less-known authors to keep the selection alive. Makes for wonderful late-night reading.

Allgemein

Taking Stock

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

It’s time to get Orchis Tower going again, after an involuntary break induced by an overflow of other, teaching-related work. Followed up on my China feeds today. Read and tried to digest a few hundred blog posts. Mostly about the Tibet crisis, mostly depressing, with a lot of noise. Some signal – like most entries on the very good China Beat. I especially liked this posting, which is pre-T, but highly applicable to the issue. Another interesting item was this article on The Guardian’s Comment is Free website. Its author, Pankaj Mishra, also contributed a portrait of the Dalai Lama in a book review at The New Yorker, a little too favorable to my liking, e.g. sparing the reader the tibetan leader’s known involvement with several bloody CIA plots in times of the Cold War.

Many German media really did a poor job (follow the link and scroll down for some examples) during the Tibet crisis. Even experienced China correspondents like Kai Strittmatter (Süddeutsche Zeitung) contributed biased and clichéd reporting. And, especially with the Germans’ infatuation with the Dalai Lama, the willingness to come to uninformed and quick conclusions seems to have been overwhelming.

No fun being a Chinese in Germany these days. Read this sad protocol of a young Chinese’ conversations with his german co-worker in some german office, ripe with arrogance and misunderstanding. (Of course he’s wrong in assuming that it is the Germans who block the Internet connection to his favorite China-based BBS, but this just shows how much mistrust has already been caused.)

There have been exceptions, of course, like an early interview with Georg Blume, a ZEIT and TAZ correspondent who was at Lhasa during the first days of the riots, or this thoughtful article at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about the communication breakdown between chinese and western media. But even the Blume interview was tainted by the editorial staff of SPIEGEL ONLINE with a misleading headline.

Celebration/Mind Works

“either ‘faded out’ or simply, pop! disappeared”

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

Standing in front of my bookshelves today I randomly picked out a book from the philosophy section called “The Thinking Self”, by Jay Rosenberg. Rosenberg, student of the late great US philosopher Wilfrid Sellars and author of one of the best introductions into the craft of philosophizing (german version), was a Humboldt scholar and guest lecturer at the University of Heidelberg during the one year I’ve studied there. At that time he was working on that very book, “The Thinking Self”. He courageously and generously distributed the manuscript pages to teachers and students alike, and I spent many days trying to understand his Husserlian and Kantian constructions, not quite succeeding but learning a lot along the way.

After leafing through the pages of “The Thinking Self” today, I googled Jay for an update on his whereabouts, just to find out that he’s passed away on February 21st, aged 65. For commemoration, let me point you to a book many consider his best. Its title and topic is – “Thinking Clearly About Death”. Like all of Jay’s books, it doesn’t provide for handy quotes. Because, and here I can quote him, “authentic clarity in philosophy […] does not arise from easy accessibility. Authentic clarity comes from penetration. It emerges at the end of inquiry, not at its beginnings, and then only if the problematic which moves the inquiry has been pursued relentlessly through all its obscurities and complexities to the point of laying bare the root posits upon which the whole of an intricate and protracted dialectic ultimately rests.”

Bullshit Detection/Media Diary

Sloppy SpOn

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

blume.gif

Spiegel Online has earned a reputation for hyping up their articles with blatantly sensationalist and biased headlines. Latest exhibit is an interview with ZEIT’s Asian correspondent Georg Blume who has just had to leave Tibet. Blume gives a very careful and balanced report, warning against the predominant picture of Chinese security forces as a trigger-happy bunch of brutal suppressors. Most significant quote: “Fest steht für mich, dass man bei diesen Protesten in Tibet nicht von einer blutigen Niederschlagung reden kann.” (“One thing is clear to me: With these protests in Tibet we cannot talk of a bloody crackdown.”) For the headline, the SpOn newsroom staff picked the only sentence in the interview that can be read to serve their prejudices, and even misquoted him with that, for good measure. Translation of the headline goes along the lines of: “The Raids Are An Ominous Sign” – which is true, of course, but by far not the most important message of the interview.

Announcements/Sports et divertissements

Ensō

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

Watched Howard Rheingold trying to get a little Attention into his classroom. That reminded me of something from a former life: 7 o’clock in the morning, sitting in an unheated dojo in Hamburg-Ottensen, before Aikido training. Sitting in seiza or full lotus, 20 minutes of breathing, counting breath, 1 to 10, and again. The beauty of a seemingly simple exercise that grows on you, time after time. Will take that habit up again, without the following acrobatics. Good counter-measure to the distractions of the Net.

Allgemein

The Power of Thought

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

“China’s New Intelligentsia”, this month’s Prospect title story by Mark Leonard, provides for some highly fascinating reading. Even though Leonard does not cash in its headline’s ambitious promise, he quite efficiently places the thought of some Chinese intellectuals into the context of The Middle Empire’s recent internal and external actions and development.

In my eyes the foremost value of informed articles like this one consists in the fact that they serve as an invitation not to talk about, but enter into a discussion with people representing widely differing world views, presenting them not as naive or even as authoritarian brutes, but as people quite able of giving reasons for their positions.

Let’s face it: Liberal western democracies may have had their high time during the 90s, but more and more they are experiencing a legitimacy crisis, due to many factors: the US’ rapid descent into unilateral authoritarianism, a declining trust into the traditional party systems, the diminishing credibility of the media as a safeguard of public knowledge and awareness, among others.

Of course we’ll still hold that free media, free and secret elections, the division of power, a system of checks and balances etc. are all necessary ingredients of any really good form of societal organization. But this might not be as self-evident as it seemed to us after years of liberal complacency. And it is not only for the sake of human rights in some places we haven’t even begun to understand that we have to re-enter the market-place of ideas and test or defend our positions. It might turn out that the pragmatic discourse of some Chinese thinkers could help us come to grip with some of our domestic problems as well.

Earthly Powers

Imperial Logic

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

Like many Chinese scholars, Yan Xuetong has been studying ancient thought. “Recently I read all these books by ancient Chinese scholars and discovered that these guys are smart–their ideas are much more relevant than most modern international relations theory,” he said. The thing that interested him the most was the distinction that ancient Chinese scholars made between two kinds of order: the “Wang” (which literally means “king”) and the “Ba” (“overlord”). The “Wang” system was centred on a dominant superpower, but its primacy was based on benign government rather than coercion or territorial expansion. The “Ba” system, on the other hand, was a classic hegemonic system, where the most powerful nation imposed order on its periphery. Yan explains how in ancient times the Chinese operated both systems: “Within Chinese Asia we had a ‘Wang’ system. Outside, when dealing with ‘barbarians,’ we had a hegemonic system. That is just like the US today, which adopts a ‘Wang’ system inside the western club, where it doesn’t use military force or employ double standards. On a global scale, however, the US is hegemonic, using military power and employing double standards.”

Mark Leonard: China’s  New Intelligentsia, Prospect March 2008

With remarkable consistency, the Bush doctrine proposed this logic for our time. In this thinking, the idea of global dominance is to today’s world what the idea of national sovereignty was to the time of the foundation of nation-states. It would amount to a system of something like Earth-rule by one nation. In a very real sense, Bush was proposing the United States as a benign global Leviathan. (His unprecedented assertion of presidential powers at home, under the doctrine of the “unitary executive”, would make the president a kind of sovereign over the United States as well.) In such a system, a double standard, in regard to nuclear weapons and much else, is not a flaw but a first principle and a necessity, as all consistent absolutists know. Whether in the context of nation-state formation half a millennium ago or of international order today, as large a gap as possible in both rights and power between the lord and the vassals is essential, for it is precisely on this inequality that the system, promising law and order for all, relies.

Jonathan Schell: The Moral Equivalent of Empire, Harper’s Magazine February 2008 

Online Publishing

Late Afternoon Lamento

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

Preparing an Online Journalism supplement for a media magazine I suddenly notice how much our trade has evolved in the last, say, two years. Changed to the better, I mean. In principle, albeit not necessarily in practice.

Whereas the focus of online journalism 101s used to be mostly on text-related topics like Writing for the Web (mostly: how to write headlines and teasers, how to handle links and pictures, or how to make long text more easily scannable for on-screen reading), now you can (and have to) confidently tackle more advanced topics like the intricacies of multimedia storytelling, the strategic implications of journalistic blogging, or possible contributions of the collective ‘big brain’.

Not that the german online media are really up to the task, yet. Instead of fathoming and experimenting with the genuine possibilities of their platform, they still follow the dubious imperative of breathless ‘newsiness’. (Do we really need another Google News? No, we certainly don’t.)

Just recall the recent, highly trumpeted, developments. Some Web2.0 features, like comments and recommendation functions, have been added to the mainstream german news sites. Many sites even provide weblogs by staff writers or celebrity guests. The results are mostly arbitrary, with some notable exceptions, like the blogs of Knüwer or Wermuth & Co. But these are not more than disconnected individual achievements, the rest being deservedly ridiculed by the enemies of the trade.

Very rarely, if at all, do the reforms add up to something that makes new sense, that ‘wows’ the reader/user, thrilling him or giving him an as yet unknown and significantly better experience. It may be cheap to summon the ‘vision thing’, but that’s exactly what I feel when I look at this miserable german online media landscape: There is no one around with a coherent and comprehensive vision of what online journalism could be.

No one, that is, who starts from an essentially journalistic point of view and then makes creative use of the medium’s strength. No one who thinks the stories first and then dives into the ocean of possibilities that the Internet provides. Want to know my wish list? I want great, hit-in-the-guts online photo- and videojournalism, like many projects in Fabian Mohr’s impressive link list, instead of brainless picture galleries and Reuters’ standard newsreels. I want blogging being cleverly and incrementally used for daring investigative reporting, like at Talkingpoints Memo, instead of blogger ghettos at the margins of faceless news sites. And I want more services like Perlentaucher or Facts2.0, that use brains instead of stupid algorithms to aggregate the Best of the Web for the users’ benefit.

What I’m looking for has to do with passion and dedication, not with the assiduous fulfillment of Web 2.0 textbook assignments: Comments? Checked. Blogs? Checked. Social Bookmarks? Checked. Being utterly average and boring? Checked.

I want less, but significantly better, content. And I want sites that make exactly this their trademark.

Asia

Buying Bits and Pieces

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

Beijing shows its friendly side. It’s sunny and pleasantly warm. Today I went to one of the Zhongguancun Electronics Markets to replace a broken recharger for my notebook. Those huge, noisy places are very special: With their hundreds of booths they look like 21st century versions of old-style oriental markets. As a western customer you are constantly pestered by boys and girls wanting to sell you some overpriced digital equipment. But the more you understand the architecture and mechanism of the location the nicer it gets.

Last time I’d been to Zhongguancun I had wanted to replace an Aigo MP4 player with a broken screen. But the girl in the booth insisted on me having it fixed, instead of selling me a new one, and personally guided me to the basement of another building where all the big brands have their repair shops. I had to wait for 30 min and pay a reasonably small amount of money, and left the building with a big, satisfied grin on my face.

Today’s experience was similar. Once I’d found out better not to rely on the Hewlett-Packard branded booths (they asked for 1,800 Yuan, the equivalent of 180 Euros, for the primitive device) I entered into the world of no-name, everyday trading places with helpful and practical staff. Not much need for bargaining, these people sold me what I wanted for 210 Yuan.

Allgemein

Riding The Blogbus

Posted on by Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer

Saturday evening I’ve met Héng Gē (横戈), CEO and founder of Blogbus, the oldest independent blog service in China, in a small café opposite of the Shanghai Public Library. Heng Ge, whose regular name is Dòu Yì (窦毅), founded the service in late 2002. With more than 4 million accounts they are not the biggest, but probably the best-reputed blog service in China, sporting a lot of users from the oh-so-important “creative class”. They don’t do advertisement for the service, just word-of-mouth campaigning.

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