A Spanish View
A view of Calpe and the Peñon De Ifach from Portixol
A tall slender woman was sitting on a chair by the podium where her husband was delivering a presentation to a hall filled with people. Each group of four people had a white board in front and on this board was the name of the deleguation. Canada, USA, France, Lithuania and more. In the balconies NGO names could be spotted. The location is the general assembly hall in Geneva and the occasion is Abdullah Il bin an Hussein the second of Jordan speaking to all these deleguations. I was the cut away camera and I was told to focus on cut away shots.
This took place on my second year of working for the International Labour Conference, general meeting of the International Labour Organisation. My job during this time was to cover the plenary sessions. Whenever a deleguation requested for their presentation to covered I had to be there and record it, either on VHS or Beta, depending on what the client wanted.
When the ILC began you would always find every seat was filled but as breakout sessions took place so the general assembly hall would empty. You would find only three or four deleguations at a time and quite often you would spot them leaning back in their chair with a beige object over one of their ears. This was the simultaneous translation. Quite often the deleguate would have both eyes closed. Was he sleeping or focusing on what was being said. I’m not sure.
You can see diplomacy in action in such halls. Occasionally there would be an important person speaking and many other deleguations would come and listen. Once the speaker finished talking everyone would get out of their seat and go and congratulate them on their great oratory and the things they had brought up. Some of these speakers did deserve the praise but most of the time they speak in droning monotonous voices, hence the closed eyes I described earlier.
Occasionaly I would get something fun to do like press conferences. There are two press conference rooms where i might have gone. Room 1 and 4. Room 1 is an informal room with tables and the personality would speak at the head. Each of these rooms had a breakout box so that placing a microphone was not necessary. Room 4 is one you have seen many times in news items from Geneva. That’s the room with the blue UN logo repeated over and over again. Above is a mural. The drawback to working at the UN is the long corridors you walk down to get from place to place. When you’ve got a camera, two batteries, a tripod and two or three tapes you’re lugging quite a bit of wheight. Add the summer heat and you see why it’s not to everyone’s liking. Personally i miss it.
Once the press conferences were over I’d head back to the general assembly hall and sit through ten more plenary speeches. Occasionaly i would take the camera and the tripod and walk around the room getting cut away shots. That’s quite fun. You look at people and you see what they’re doing. You isolate people. You see a person writing something down, you get a shot of that, someone else yawning you get that. If someone is focusing on the speaker you get that. In certain cases you get shots of the deleguate and the board saying which country they represent. Other times you’d get a behind the shoulder shot looking up at the speaker.
There are some press conferences that are emotional than others. I remember taking one of the nicer cameras and recording a press conference about slavery. During that event some experts talked about the situation in certain countries before getting to the special guest. One of these guests started to talk and described her ordeal, how she had left her country of origin only to end up as a slave in a western country and how she was never allowed to leave. Hearing someone speak about this and not having a television screen or monitor to separate you from their reality has a powerful effect. Such occasions take certain things from being abstract to reality.
When I went to Tanzania I was one year away from completing the IB and I saw such a different way of life that I wanted to stay there. I was impressed by the improvisation and happiness of those children. I also liked having to walk for fourty minutes through banana plantations and fields to get from one place to another and experience their culture, at least fleetingly. If there’s anyone reading this that needs to cover the humanitarian work that they are doing to bring awareness to their work then let me know and I’d love to be part of those expeditions.
Thanks to the incompetence of leadership during this pandemic Switzerland went from a low of 21 cases per day in June 2021 to a high of 3600 or more over Christmas. This is really a shame. For a short period up to the 21st of June Switzerland really looked as if it would end the pandemic.
On the 21st of June the government made a mistake. It reopened society. The rational was that the pandemic would soon end and that slowly we could return to life as normal. Within a week or two the number of new cases started to go up again, but rather than go a step back until the number went back down the government went ahead with the next diminishing of sanctions.
Over time, we could see the number of new cases climb and climb and I really expected to see a peak within two weeks from the 1st of August. It came about three to four weeks later and that’s close to when the second wave was declared. Bad decisions continued to be taken until it was decided that people should have their Christmas and new Year. Two weeks after all the Christmas shenanigans were over tightening came back, and instantly the number of new cases went down.
We’re now a year into the pandemic with little chance of the pandemic ending anytime soon.
As I see it the government has two possible avenues. The first is to vaccinate everyone, but the drawback is that you need vaccines to vaccinate people, so for now this idea is on hold. The second idea, and this was definitely possible in June, and is still being proved by New Zealand, is that you can end the pandemic with proper government directives.
Last week Switzerland finally got down to just 1000 cases per day, which is excellent news, and with a little effort it looks as if the pandemic could end sooner, rather than later. Unfortunately the government decided to reopen society yesterday, so we are now condemned to go through another wave of infections and the end has been blown away by bad policy.
One weakness during this pandemic is that lockdowns and restrictions have been pictures as political rather than scientific. As a result of this people are guided by their emotions rather than their rationality. This irrationality means that people fail to see that the sooner the pandemic ends, the sooner normal life returns.
The more often society reopens, the longer the pandemic will last, and the longer the pandemic lasts, the more businesses will go bankrupt. It makes sense to have a lockdown like we had this time last year, for the pandemic to end, so that life can resume.
There is another cost to the pandemic. Teenagers are unable to have a normal university experience. Add to this that around 36 percent of homes in Switzerland are one person and this is a theoretical 36 percent (I don’t know the actual number of people) who might have gone without a hug, a kiss or a handshake for almost a year by now.
In the 21st century plenty of people live alone, and when you live alone during a pandemic it implies that you do not see many people. In fact the only person you see during the day is the cashier, if you buy food.
Switzerland decided to close petrol stations on Sunday, and my habit of seeing one person in the physical world per day was lost. I sometimes go three to four days at a time without speaking to another human being.
This pandemic is teaching us to live in absolute solitude, for days at a time with no contact, and weeks, months or even seasons without even a handshake or hug.
I don’t watch normal television anymore. If a podcast has someone speaking about relationships I pause or stop listening. I avoid films. I avoid certain topics in podcasts. I listen to very little music.
We’re in a pandemic, and we live in solitude. Normal people think “the pandemic will take two years to resolve, and it isn’t that bad”, but to people in solitude it is that bad. Solitude is fine, as long as it is not made to feel like isolation, and that’s why I changed my media consumption habits. I went to be comfortable in solitude, not distressed in solitude.
With how people behave, and how the government behaves, we are in for a few more months at best. Maybe the summer of 2022 will be less lonely.
However, many purported Social Media experts are merely engaging in cultural voyeurism at best. They look from afar and roam the perimeters of online societies without ever becoming a true member of any society. This means, they don’t truly understand what, where, or why they’re “participating,†only jumping in because they have something to say and have access to the tools that will carry it into play. This is unfortunately a representation of the greater landscape of Social Media Marketing and it’s time to take a step back and study the sociology of Social Media in order to keep communities intact and unaffected by outsiders.
Social Media is much more than user-generated content. It’s driven by people in the communities where they communicate and congregate. They create, share, and discover new content without our help right now. They’re creating online cultures across online networks and using the Social Tools that we learn about each and every day to stay connected. And the societies that host and facilitate these conversations cultivate a tight, unswerving and mostly unforgiving community and culture. As Shel Israel describes it, people are populating Global Neighborhoods.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157624344703307″]
Every year I go to the lake parade and this year I tried something different. I decided to take photographs rather than video.
By the same opportunity I am testing Flickr gallery, a plugin that makes including your flickr images into wordpress a two step process.
There are many podcamps but Podcampuk was my podcamp. This was an event which was similar to just one previous experience. It was an event where everyone you talked to had at least one website and others may have had several. They also used twitter and prepared radio programs.
What is great about the podcast UK crowd is that they’re a creative entrepreneurial group. Rather than take a 9 to 5 job some work as freelancers. They have a variety of skills from drivers to information technology people, university and schoolteachers and more. They range in age from mid twenties and upwards. It’s a nice sample of people.
When I arrived on Friday night I heard John Buckley talk about his podcast Dissident Vox and it was interesting to see him describe the cost of creating podcasts. He was talking about time. For certain topics he would spend more than seventy hours researching the topic in order to gain an in depth understanding of his topic. Another podcaster mentioned how the personal nature of podcasts, reaching their audience through earphones, meant that he should be careful about how to present his research. In reality certain podcasters are highly informed people who want to present their ideas and worry as much as academics about what they present.
Podcasting I simpler than some thought initially. One great example of this is the presentation by Jason Jarrett who talked about how he had complicated his own life when learning about podcasting. Equipment requirements for podcasting are not as great as some had expected. He talked about how he had purchased one piece of technology and then another to attempt to resolve an issue he was having, sound in just one ear. It’s only after a few weeks that he was informed that the problem was mono sound. He was a great presenter getting many laughs from his audience.
Another presenter that was of interest is the one by Trevor Dann from the Radio Acadamy talking about broadcasting. What I got from his presentation is the contrast between professional sports and broadcasting. In both mediums people who are at the top of the scale can make really good money whilst those at the bottom do so mainly for the pleasure. One point which I thought was of particular interest was that of amateur cricket players not taking money away from the professionals. In other words both could cohabit quite easily. I really appreciated that sentence.
For months or even years I have been worrying about the new media and what effect it will have on me whilst I look for work. If more and more people want to get content for free and appreciate mediocrity would this mean that there is less space for professional content to be in demand. According to that speech I understood that whilst people’s consumer habits are changing the need and appreciation of well-produced work will still be great enough to make a living. In effect both complement each other.
As more and more people pick up a microphone and camera to create their content so the same passion from amateur footballers watching the best of the best is transposed from the amateur viewer to the professional player.
Podcasting has a great diversity of talent and some participants of podcamp UK looked at this from an education point of view. Joe Dale from the Isle of Wight was telling us about how he was using podcasting within the classroom. He is in charge of students ranging from 7 years and up and encourages them to create audiovisual content which will help them learn French. They have to produce, write and script their own shows. As a result of this they are involved in improving their written work as well as their aural skill. This is a great, and for young students, far more fun way of learning. It also creates an opportunity to link with people living in different parts of the world. If you’re in England and you’re learning one language then via the World Wide Web it is easy to reach a global audience who may give feedback as to how you could improve.
What made Podcamp UK so interesting is the European flavour of the event. One person travelled from Rome to be there whilst UK podcasters came from everywhere in England. As a result of this we saw what the British podcast environment has to offer rather than be limited by what’s going on in San Francisco. I’m glad I got to meet so many interesting individuals with so many interesting projects and I hope to remain in contact with them and see how their ideas progress. It was a great look at the podcasting sub-culture and how it’s progressed in parallel with mainstream media.