Interview: Adam Phillips, On Balance (for BOMB Magazine)
Posted: 04/09/2010 | Author: Sameer | Filed under: Human rights, Journalism, Work | Tags: adam phillips, BOMB, interview, literature, music, psychiatry, publications, social media | Leave a comment »I mentioned before that I had interviewed Adam Phillips for BOMB Magazine. Well, they’ve posted an long extract on their site (to read the whole thing you’ll need to buy a copy of BOMB). Here’s that extract for your interest, minus my introduction. (And when you’ve finished this, take a look at his epic essay on happiness in today’s Guardian):
BOMB Magazine – Adam Phillips by Sameer Padania
Originally published with an introduction at http://bombsite.com/issues/113/articles/3623
Sameer Padania (SP) Let’s start with how your new book, On Balance, has come together.
Adam Phillips I prefer writing essays rather than books. Over a period of time I’m invited to give various nonspecific talks and lectures. Nobody says to me, Will you talk about X? That tends to crystallize things that I’ve been preoccupied by, and a piece fairly quickly writes itself once that happens.
I don’t think too much about whether it all hangs together. I just write things that engage me, and then, when they get collected into a book like this, I trust that certain preoccupations will work themselves through. Otherwise, it becomes too tendentious and too focused and I don’t want that to be the case. When I read through the essays, I’ll keep the ones that I do still think are good and then I’ll think of what sort of order they might go in. The writing of the book, in a way, is putting them in an order.
In reading the book over, different things emerge at different times, but clearly one of the themes of the book is excess—that seemed to turn up in lots of different places. The idea for the title of On Balance, I don’t know how it came to me. I had read the Auden piece again, “Forms of Inattention,” where there’s that bit at the end about the tightrope walker. Ideas of composure or equanimity or balance or integration—all those words that have something to do with a kind of harmony—are at the heart of psychoanalysis in what it sets itself against, and also relate to what I seem to be preoccupied by.
I rely on the unconscious work of these things. When I sit down to write, I have a lot to write, but beforehand, I don’t. I’m not full of ideas. Writing is the way I think. Read the rest of this entry »
My response to Nick Bilton on “Hey, ‘Friend,’ Do You ‘Like’ My Sad Story?”
Posted: 08/03/2010 | Author: Sameer | Filed under: Human rights, Journalism, Technology, Work | Tags: Hub, language, Nick Bilton, NYT, preferences, social media, web design, WITNESS | Leave a comment »Today, the NYT’s Nick Bilton writes:
I recently “liked” a story about five people dying in an explosion in Connecticut.
I didn’t actually “like” the fact that five people had died in a terrible accident. Technically, I didn’t even “like” the story — I found the reporting and writing informative and the narrative engrossing, but not the contents of the piece. On Facebook, however, the only option I had to tell people I had read the article was to either add a comment or press the little “like” button that appears at the bottom of everyone’s status update.
When we were designing the Hub, we ran into this exact dilemma – which I described in a comment to Nick’s post, reproduced below (and here it is in situ):
I run a human rights video-sharing website – the Hub, http://hub.witness.org – and when we were working with our developers we ran through a range of options for this exact function. We eliminated “like”, “favourite”, thumbs-up or -down symbols, and so on as being inappropriate for a human rights story. Because we were designing a site that was serving human rights activists, but that had a public audience too, we felt that we needed to reflect the idea of solidarity for both sets of participants, and to offer more appropriate ways to show your support for or interest in human rights struggles, campaigns, crises.
The first commenter above (Hern, East Rockaway) puts it in a nutshell – seeing stories and images of this kind doesn’t necessarily mean you feel the need or expertise to comment, they’re inherently difficult, often problematic images – so we tried to find other ways in which you could contribute – by watching, forwarding, taking action on the video, for example – that required you to take a small action, without needing to write a response. I don’t think the system we came up with for “liking” – a rating system with three slide bars asking how informative, how relevant and how action-provoking the video was – is by any means perfect, but hopefully it makes a contribution to the debate.
I think Nick’s point is worth talking through further, and not just from a human rights perspective. As the web gets more semantic, as we get more and more literate and intuitive online, and are able to express ever more granular preferences and nuances through our behaviour online, it’s only right that the basic metaphors we began this all with get redesigned periodically, as they’re maybe not quite nuanced enough any more. Social media spaces are increasingly one of the primary ways in which we share news – whether that’s from media organisations, NGOs, activists, governments or our networks of “friends” – and news includes a lot of bad/sad news. These spaces need to change and adapt their ways a little as the types of information in them changes and augments in the same ways that other spaces, institutions and media have done before them…
Keep asking the questions, Nick!
InfoWar over Gaza
Posted: 07/01/2009 | Author: Sameer | Filed under: Human rights, Journalism, Media, Technology, Work | Tags: btselem, comics, graphic novels, Hub Blog, information war, infowar, joe sacco, nablus, palestine, propaganda, social media, WITNESS | Leave a comment »[Originally published here on the WITNESS Hub blog.]
The information war being fought over Gaza is one of the most commented-on aspects of the current crisis - Israeli military footage, Twitter updates, Facebook groups, media interviews, blogs, the use of megaphone software like GIYUS. It’s not a new phenomenon, but the extent to which Israel’s government has made bypassing, controlling and marginalising the media, and using YouTube and other platforms to disseminate core messages a central part of its information strategies is unprecedented.
On the Palestinian side, it seems to be happening in a more decentralised way: emailed photographs of injured or dead children, video documentation and interviews from within Gaza and from solidarity events around the world, but not on the scale or coordinated nature of Israel’s media strategy, as discussed in this Al Jazeera interview with Dan Gillerman, about Israel’s media strategy:
Both sides, of course, are provoking comment over errors and misinformation based on visual material. But this, and the exceptional level of message control and coordination, serve to saturate new media as well as news media with polarising talking points – and takes us further and further from the daily reality of life on either side. The work of organisations like B’Tselem to document daily, mundane, individual human rights abuses, and to ensure that these reach the sphere of public debate in Israel and internationally is a crucial part of this – here’s Oren Yakobovich on their Shooting Back project in Hebron.
I felt the American media had really misportrayed the situation [between Israel and the Palestinians] and I was really shocked by that.
I grew up thinking of Palestinians as terrorists, and it took a lot of time, and reading the right things, to understand the power dynamic in the Middle East was not what I had thought it was…
[...]There are two ways in which Palestinians are portrayed – as terrorist and as victim. There may be truth in certain situations for both descriptions, but Palestinians are also people going to school, who have families, have lives, invite you into their home, and think about their food.
View Sameer Padania's profile
