What you know and how you know it, can fool you into thinking you’re an expert.
Experience versus epistemology (theory of knowledge) is a long running saga. I’m grateful for the time working in media. They were thrilling, and sometimes torturous days, but hands on knowledge is immeasurable. Yet inside the machine radical innovation can be a rare beast.
I once walked away from a regular national producer job, because each morning in the office I felt underwhelmed and defeated. You’re guided by the system you work in and hence generally work to the values and unwritten rules of the company.
Academia and theories of knowledge provide a space to scrutinise practice and theorise beyond the status quo. It’s necessary. But at times as captured in ‘News’ by Jackie Harrison academics can be pitted against practitioners and vice versa.
Both need each other, but the cross of swords regularly occurs with a slight to “what do you know?” Of course there’s a well observed tradition of practitioners becoming scholars, but the schisms between the two is there.
The Olympics breakdancing showed, if it needed saying, scholarly output is no match for practical experience. Einstein also proves you don’t need to be a scientist working in the Hadron Collider to conceptualise matter is concentrated energy.
This morning I was reading a paper on code and storytelling, namely journalism. It referenced journalism’s values citing its western centric approach, and intended differences with the Global South.
In theory, if culture were truly allowed to influence journalism, you could cite marked differences. There might be a recognition of diversity too. But there’s a universality, or generality to journalism that I doubt will ever change. Why? because its systems and rules are so embedded, we take them as natural.
Standing back as a practitioner, you could observe new theories of story forms offering change e.g. video journalism (VJ). Yet the underlying philosophies were still intact. Culture was redundant. Note too once vj was absorbed by mainstream it was changed. The danger is as we hurtle further into a code-environment we’ll only seek to replicate what’s dominant, what’s always been done. Yet here’s the rub it’s not necessary working.
Cinema journalism which I hypothesises from being a practitioner and creating the broad theory could one day land and looked at. Thus far I’ve taken it on outings to Russia, China, India etc. It offers a way to combat the excesses of political comms. It also provides some framework for algorithmic coupling.
Can I write code into a CNN (convolutional neural network) algorithm that will take into consideration my cultural and style index and how that shapes output?
Can the industry make do with the “squeezed middle” of practitioners, from different cultures towards to inform AI practices?
How can we bridge academic recognition to practice-based knowledge where theory of practice is displayed?
The call is for practitioners and theorists to come close together, with an emphasis on diversity of thought. Or as Apple’s iconic ad put it, the crazy ones (1997).
Diversity of thought is different in a heterogenous group that a homegeous one.
I had the opportunity of speaking to BBC execs and directors about this framing, how to move past journalism’s literal to structure that made watchers ponder the story. Perhaps it wasn’t pressing then. GenAI makes it so now.
