Sam's World Of No

It was widely reported today that the population of the UK is projected to 65m by 2016, an increase of 4.4 million from the current level. 2.3m of this is categorised ‘natural increase’, whereas 2.1m is attributed to the expected rate of migration. Let’s leave for a second that migration is a natural part of the population rate. Let’s also leave aside the fact that every news outlet’s concentration on migration was spurred by the National Statistics Office’s emphasis on the point. And let’s also, foolishly, leave aside the fact that there is a reason that people are trying to come into the UK. It isn’t the weather.

Let’s leave all of those things aside and look at pretty pictures. Now, in my view, this is primarily a story about statistics. So the Telegraph’s choice of the National Statistics Office’s own graph on the subject seems reasonable. But there are, obviously, wider ramifications. Find a property obviously had a specific slant on the effect, talking about the need for more housing, and they too have chosen a picture of lots of people in the street. Seems reasonable.

Politics.co.uk agrees, choosing a picture of a busy street in their coverage, with the caption, “Concerns raised over how the increase in population growth will effect public services”. Of course, the usual slant on the whole migration issue is the perceived effect it will have on infrastructure, so in some ways the BBC’s choice of image, which furthers the theme of this particular problem, is understandable. Their article features a stock picture of a busy commuter train; it was on the front page of the site for most of the day.

I think the underlying and specific message that choosing this headline image for the story is clear - our public transport system is at breaking point, and all these immigrants are going to just make it worse. Does anybody else feel that perhaps the person sourcing that image had a rough time on the tube this morning?

In my view, the BBC has in this instance crossed the line between telling the news and shaping the news.

The BBC are a credit to the national and international media, and are trying hard to push boundaries with their online presence. They are deeply postmodern in that you can read introspective blogs, such as The Editors, and after the Hutton report they are allegedly committed to being answerable and being open about the way they work. They are better than most, for sure, and they are leaders in this area where other, commercial, entities are allowed to sit on their hands. Oh, and they have a reputation for simply sucking at their choice of pictures for articles.

My academic background is in history. 20 years ago, the idea that historians, as well as journalists, would not adopt an objective and abstracted view of their material was ridiculous; it was their job to be impartial. Nowadays, we mostly accept that all façades of objectivity are conceited and create inaccurate reporting of the facts, so we admit our own subjective influences, and for many historians, these are often the more interesting parts of the stories we tell. Recognising your own subjectivity, however, is a very different thing to becoming objective - and acknowledging that you have influences that are individual and uncontrollable does not mean that you are forgiven for when your reporting is slanted and biased.

This bias isn’t limited to choice of vocabulary or choice of subject matter - choice of image is just a powerful a tool for shaping the theme of your story, and this is a story that has a serious emphasis on the migration issue. In fact, little else is mentioned. Both government ministers and right-wing pressure groups are allowed to give their point of view, as are some of the people from the other side of the debate. The image, though, takes it a step further. It makes us all think back to our morning commute - the busy roads, the packed trains and the smelly buses. It says in a message clearer than words and stronger than bold text that immigrants are going to make your life worse.

Apparently.

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What I like about Zeldman is his can-do attitude. Earlier this year, a set of rants and comments about the demographic of people engaged in web design, and particularly the male/female debate, was marked by its lack of informed data. So Zeldman and various other happy cog people, through their A List Apart/An Event Apart vehicles, commissioned a full survey to try and plug the gap. It was published on the 24th of April this year, and open to responses for almost a month. There were 32,831 respondents, and the full report is available online, along with the data breakdowns.

I took the survey and have had a good old read of the report. I am sure that many of us will have something to say about this in the days to come. Here are some opening points after my first glance at the report; these are the ones I feel most strongly about or are, in my view, the most important findings in terms of the project’s scope and the wider web.

1. Exactly what is “Web Design”? I am certain that a lot of thought was put into the name of this survey, but I am not sure that “Design” is the right angle. Happy Cog and Zeldman are, primarily, a front-end/look and feel shop, so I can see why they chose it. For people like myself, who work full time on the web, create interfaces, build systems and create architectures, but would never consider themselves to be a ‘designer’, it’s just an inappropriate title. But then again, all the other terms are loaded too. The only one that isn’t, “Web Worker”, doesn’t sound like anything you would be introducing yourself as any time soon.
2. There is blogging well and there is blogging badly. The survey finds that roughly three quarters of all web professionals keep a blog or personal site. This proportion stands, broadly speaking, for all salary groupings, job title groupings and age groupings. The title of this section of the report states that “Ownership of a personal website has little or no bearing on success”, which is true. Unfortunately, no account was taken of the amount of traffic/popularity/PR/”importance” or other value factors related to these sites. It would have been interesting to see what proportions of these sites are regularly updated, which are regularly read, and which are ranked as ‘important’ by search engines and social bookmarking systems. I think that it is fair to say that the people who earn more and are higher on the career ladder would also have more popular blogs; some data about this effect and its causality would have been good. As it is, it’s a little bit like saying everyone who works on the web has a website. It’s a bit like getting data that says that racing drivers have cars.
3. There is no widespread practical education for web development. We have this rant at least once a week at work, where we wish we could employ more people (we employ people as fast as they can apply), and more people who had been academically educated in the field. Computer Science is a great degree but courses rarely provide practical, real-world training on the web, and certainly doesn’t formally educate in the soft skills that web development shops need. With marketing, it’s even worse. We long for people who have been formally trained in product management for the web, and wouldn’t need teaching even the most basic information about syntax, how to write for the web and how to manage product and brand identity. I guess this skill is not admired by very small e-commerce ventures, is mostly covered by senior management or customer service in medium ventures, and is utilised by highly-corporate executives and leading marketing experts in larger ventures. So it is not surprising to find that most web professionals did not take a degree which they themselves do not consider to be relevant to their current work. Whether this takes into account soft skills (for me, problem-solving, communication and analytical skills were large and relevant parts of an education in history), cannot be determined. Interestingly, people like project managers, whom I would have thought would be those who are specifically trained in ‘management’ are amongst those who see their education as the least relevant. Perhaps abstract management training just doesn’t provide them with the technical skills they need. Or perhaps technical training didn’t provide them with the management skills they need.
4. “Increased educational attainment generally appears to correspond to increased earning in our sample”. Yes, and in every other survey ever completed. Across the board. But…
5. …“As income level increases, the percentages of respondents for whom their college studies were relevant decreases”. This one is interesting. As is pointed out, salary tends to increase with age, and the time since graduating tends to increase with age, and the relevancy of education decreases over time. Most web development professionals will move into a more managerial role as they progress through their career; this will necessarily involve more people skills and fewer technical skills. In addition, it seems to be that the industry is still, broadly speaking, biased against people with specialist technology degrees. I argue again that this is because these degrees do not have enough web focus to make their applicants suitable for this kind of work. Perhaps this because other types of programming jobs pay more, I don’t know.
6. The proportion of women is just low. Sometimes there really are statistical realities, and the women argument appears to be one. 1 in 10 workers in this profession are women. This is interesting because it addresses the debate that sparked the survey in the first place. They occupy the mid-salary ranges, not the high-salary ranges that high profile people would be expected to occupy, and they generally are happy with their salaries. I hate to say it, but it looks like there really aren’t that many women to do things like speak at conferences and write books. The problem that needs addressing is that there aren’t enough women, not that they don’t get invited to conferences because we are scared of them. I mean, we are scared of them, but we’d get over it if they were around.
7. Nobody wants to be a webmaster. It’s not a cool title, it’s not the sort of title that a dedicated and going-places web shop would use. Frankly, I think it’s pejorative. And in terms of job satisfaction, the people that hold this title are the least satisfied. Of course, the different between their satisfaction and that of the most satisfied category, “Project Manager” is only 10 and a bit percent, but still. Let’s get rid of this title once for all and give the sometimes extremely talented people that hold something decent to put on their business cards. While we’re at it, let’s get them some business cards. We’ve been promising them for ages. The design guys were supposed to be sorting it. I don’t know.
8. We need to learn to write. Possibly so that we can communicate better, possibly so we can improve the amount of success a blog gives you (see point 2), or possibly because of all the under-rated web skills, writing is still the largest. Almost 50% of respondents thought this was a major skill gap for them; I predict that this number will, slowly, change as the importance of the word on the web is finally drilled into skulls everywhere.
9. Let’s all go on holiday. Or a vacation. Just exactly where are we going? It isn’t mentioned in the report (that I could see), but the questions about ‘holiday’ vs. ‘vacation’ were nonsensical to non-US English speakers. I’m a British English speaker, and I barely understood the distinction. Europe has ‘public holidays’ and ‘bank holidays’, guys. Make this distinction clearer next time and you’ll get some meaningful data.
10. Where is the section that tells us who earns more? Finding out your friends’ or co-workers’ salaries is not always a fun game - kind of like when an inappropriate animal documentary comes on when you’re visiting your grandparents - but it would be nice to know which professions are making the money. This is such a glaring omission that I’m sure I must have missed it. Granted, I could correlate the data myself as it has been provided, but why would a couple of stats experts miss this obvious point?

Of course, what will be most interesting about this will be the charting of data over time. Without patterns, controls and averaging, we can’t see what’s actually going on and we can’t spot blips. I would also like to know the average time of year for pay rises and job changes - does the timing of the survey make a big difference?

That said, it’s a terrific start and good on people for getting it done and laying important foundations. Now lets build on them, and get the diversity of our industry up to a respectable level. Because it will help us all in the long run. Seriously.

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My television habits are distinctly modern; I very rarely sit down at the tv praying that it will entertain me. Homer Simpson’s “Come on television, give me some of that sweet sweet pap” I am not. Like a lot of people, I now download the shows I like, either in the “illegal but who cares because it still makes us money” Bittorrent sense, or via dedicated sites such as Mr Twig for South Park. A lot of BBC programmes are available on the iPlayer, another great idea crippled by executives who fall in love with acronyms like DRM and the other usual suspects, and I know that Channel 4 have some stuff available online too.

So for me, my PC is my TV. One of my secret pleasures however, and I don’t think I’m alone in this either, used to be the stupid quiz programmes they had on late night channels. Hilarious questions, desperate presenters trying and failing to “make it” in TV, terrible effects and shoddy production - it was a winning combination. But its legality was always a bit suspect, but at that time in the morning after a couple of pints, who cares.

Strangely, they were not the biggest culprit in the recent “television self-destructing” fiasco. Nor were they the most amusing - the story of Blue Peter, the ever lovable children’s programme, faking a poll to name a cat was just awesome. It’s the story of the whole thing; frankly, it’s the story of the year.

But it’s over, we’ve had our fun and Jeremy Paxman had the chance to give one of the most memorable MacTaggart lectures of all time. Heads have rolled where necessary and television had the wake-up call it needed. Unfortunately, it’s still news, because a lot of media outlets have missed a crucial point of Paxman’s speech - that television is, by its very nature, not real. The people you see aren’t living in a box in your living room. Most of it isn’t live. Supposedly ad-hoc dialogue is scripted, stuff is filmed in a different order from which it is shown, and generally the editing process is necessarily subjective in order to meet the aesthetic necessity, time concerns and narrative effectiveness.

Top Gear is a fine example. It’s of the very few programmes I make an effort to watch at the time of original broadcast, and at the start of the new series last Sunday, after a summer off the air whilst all this “fake” commotion had started up, they opened with a joke about how the whole thing was real. By way of a punchline, Richard Hammond, noted for being short, stood on a box that was out of shot, making him look taller than the gargantuan Clarkson.

I cringed. Top Gear is one of the most heavily faked and edited programs in current production.

Now of course it is all real; the races are real, the timing is real, the interviews are real. But the bits where they are in a car talking to you, and then they come over voice over doing part of a conversation, or an introduction to a comment that they will then make “live”, are all deceit to make an effective narrative. This is good; it works well at creating a cohesive story for the viewer.

Top Gear’s news section is filmed like it’s at the pub and the banter is flowing randomly, but of course it’s all scripted. Or at least, the topics are discussed in a pre-determined order. This helps with crucial issues like the right background pictures, or graphics of the news item they are discussing, appearing on the screen in the background.

The filming of the large events is not real at all - the shots of the cars driving are done after the time, especially in the races. There are chase cars and planes that you never see; these are a normal part of filming. In the Bugatti Veyron vs Cessna race, May even had an instructor in the plane with him as he hadn’t passed his flying tests; this is never mentioned.

I know all of this because Top Gear make their production notes available. Imagine if all of these small deceits were removed - the program would be just awful. It wouldn’t fit together; it wouldn’t entertain. So we have to accept some lies, because it is what makes television believable.

So maybe we shouldn’t have too much heavy editing on news programmes, but we really shouldn’t care if the judge’s “houses” on X-Factor aren’t their own. Frankly, the people that need this much explaining to them should stick to children’s television, and the fact that this story got onto the BBC News front page for most of today is just depressing. Television has had its wakeup call. It heard the alarm, it didn’t hit snooze, it didn’t fall back asleep. It had a shower, it went to work. Now can’t we just let it enjoy a hard-earned beer at the end of a long day?

That is all. I’m going to now enjoy my own hard-earned beer.

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Radiohead’s announcement that people downloading their new album would name their price was unusual, but it wasn’t revolutionary. Many commentators have suggested that this meant that their album was free - in fact, this would have been a much more run-of-the-mill announcement. Free music is nothing new - putting aside piracy and the associated and ridiculous lawsuits, every popular musical outfit in the world has a MySpace page where the vast majority of them allow visitors to listen to full versions of songs. Some bands even take it further and, prior to the album release, put their entire album on MySpace for streaming, for free, for anyone. No pre-registration, no nothing. These aren’t small bands - granted they are not the size of Radiohead, but Bloc Party are a pretty serious commercial venture in the UK. People who know what they are doing have worked out, finally, that the whole idea that people wanted to listen to albums before they bought them wasn’t just an excuse for piracy - it was the truth. Bloc Party reached #2 in the UK with the album in question, Weekend in the City.

Smaller artists and unsigned artists, myself included, are even greater advocates of free music - Harvey Danger, for example, were not that unusual in their release last year, although it was one of the first times I personally had come across such a well-produced album for free - for them, their music is the medium by which they get known - it’s the way they get gigs.

Record companies have added a middleman to this process, and added value to the recorded music itself where, for each artist’s own individual chronology, previously there was none. It’s been a fun and profitable ride for them, but as I’m sure the formers printers of sheet music can attest, things move on.

So free music is nothing new. But what people seem to be forgetting is that Radiohead are not giving the album away for free - they are asking you to set your own price, they are making you perform a value judgement on their work. This is a massive difference, and I hope that soon they will release some figures about how much people chose to pay. Initial indications are that most people created a price that was around what they would normally pay for a CD or iTunes DRM-free download. Because you are valuing the work, the people who paid nothing - or worse, the people who paid 1 penny but got hit with the 45p transaction fee - are essentially saying that the new album from one of the world’s top artists is worthless.

Certainly, that is what one BBC philistine has implied with his rambling set of words put together onto a page that resembles an article. Frankly, anybody that considers Pablo Honey to be their best work is totally missing the point of the musical development that Radiohead have experienced over their career. I certainly consider it to be the work of the least artistic merit - a mediocre album that showed promise, at a time where promise in UK music was scarce. I don’t think I’m alone - in fact, I know it.

For the record, the album is really good. It isn’t a massive departure from the stage that they reached with Amnesiac, in particular, but I have the feeling that they’ve finally found what they wanted to make all along. The continuity is no better illustrated than in the fact that track 3, Nude, is perhaps one of their oldest-but-never-recorded songs. If they have reached a point where they can finally make a version of something they’ve had knocking around for years that they are happy about, it sounds a lot to me like the style they have created is what they craved all along.

In my view, it’s worth the full cost of a normal retail album, and I would have happily paid £12-£14 in a music shop. As it turns out, I’m a Radiohead nut so I bought the £40 discbox. And I won’t be alone, but I won’t be in the majority of customers. That said, almost certainly, we will find that when people are asked to value a piece of work, only an insignificant minority will price it as worthless.

Of course, to get stuff for free is the logical follow through of the ’set your own price’ idea, but it’s a novelty. Perhaps this will be an important stage in the history of music, the current chapter of which almost seems to be the demise of record companies, or perhaps the unique situation that Radiohead are in (bags of money, no record company) will not be repeated. I think that both are true - I think that it is the latest in a series of high profile media events that show that DRM was a stupid idea that won’t work, that people aren’t petty thieves but music lovers, and that the internet is going to change music. And everything else. Of course, that is cliché in the extreme, but I don’t care if it means that Ash won’t be making any more albums. For those guys at least, the next logical step should be to just stop writing and releasing music entirely.

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