Good afternoon. Today is the 15th of June 2020. And I guess what we want to ruminate upon journalism in the modern age, and specifically, the technology used both video and audio to get the story, capture the story, record the story. Tell the story, show the story. Communicate transparently to the readers, viewers, fans and the reason We wanted to do a recording right now is because we were thinking about the audio recording device, which most of us see on television in shows and movies. You they ask if they can record and they press the button I put it in the middle of the room. And so not the middle of the room. They put it directly in between the interviewer and the interviewee, the journalist and the source. And very plainly, that is a piece of technology a very emotionally sensitive technology in between The people who are attempting to communicate and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Okay? Because you’re elevating the psychological and physical tension of the environment of the scene of the scenario and that that that is affecting and felt by both parties. One party obviously the journalist, the filmmaker, the recorder is far more practiced than this The object or the source. So that’s one thing, the technology in between. Now think about news reporters, broadcasters, on live television, and they have a microphone. It’s the same thing. You know, they’re holding a microphone in their hands. Shout out to the side talk. And why boys, but you’re doing the same thing. You’re, you’re taking a piece of technology, and you’re not even just putting it in between you You’re, you’re placing it in their face. And that’s just another piece of technology that’s going to raise the intensity and the emotional stakes, if you will. Because usually there’s a limited amount of time and you know, you’re again, you’re You’re forcing the situation. And let’s say even outside, outside of that you have the cameraman with the big camera, a lot of the times on the shoulders or the iPhone, which you’re holding, again, you might be holding it in your hands near your body, but it is in between. A lot of times people are looking through the, the actual phone, the viewfinder, the screen. So in some of the worst cases, where these filmmakers are trying to get, you know, POV sort of, they’re trying to get eye contact with the camera. They’re literally hiding their face and this is what a lot of photographers do. You hide behind the camera. And again when you do that, and you also try and present yourself as this interview Then it becomes an incredibly impersonal experience that is being, again forced onto somebody, which is really very cringy you know, in a lot of documentary films and a lot of news. It’s very, very cringy when you have people who aren’t practiced, and even sometimes with people who are practice like newscasters, it’s, you know, just talking robots like, or, you know, emotionally manipulative Whom do you deal with the tones, the rising and lowering of tones, you know, like, it’s very robotic. It’s very, for lack of a better word, manipulative, they have an agenda. And they’re trying to, you know, they’re they’re clearly bias just in the way they’re speaking their attitude. Their tone, the aesthetic of what they’re creating around this communication of the story. So that leads us to what’s next. And in this case, we’re going to talk about a potential new genre of journalism called POV journalism or point of view journalism, which is a form of experimental filmmaking and possible impossibly entitled experimental journalism. Right where there is no camera or recording device in between. It’s because it is hidden in between the eyes in a normal pair of glasses. It is not in between the two people, it disappears. So there’s multiple benefits to this, you don’t have to hold the camera. So you can be in the field and talking to people without disruption without technological disruption. And then there’s eye to eye contact with the audience. And obviously, that comes from idi contact between the interviewer and the interviewee. And a lot of the times in this context, it becomes just a conversation, not even an official interview or a formal interview, it becomes just a conversation, informal conversation. And there are times when letting them know is but if we’re talking about street Level journalism. And in this case when we’re having when we’re having the streets, the public spaces filled with activists of all kinds, going out and fighting for human rights, equality, justice, freedom, liberty, you might not want to slow down, you might just want to go out there and be, you know, go out there and disappear is how I like I like to sort of be with the streets and the people need you to be to magnify and to, to to echo their voice. It’s it’s simply to go out there and create a stronger, create a louder, a louder in a softer way, you know, in a more intimate, personal up close way because Again, there’s no technology in between the story the POV story, the, these, these films just become, you know, very visceral through the eyes of just a person, it’s not even about the person whose eyes You’re looking through a lot of the time, it’s about who they’re talking to what they’re talking about. And a lot of the times the POV journalist or or filmic POV jirt POV filmmaker. They, a lot of the times they are the listener, right? So it’s just to capture the essence and the culture and the times of an environment. And you know, it’s sort of a reflection. It’s like a mirror. People looking into your eyes. As the camera is rolling between the eyes, and that’s their reflection, they’re literally, you know, we’re we’re literally recording their reflection. So, the when the technology is pulled out, you don’t have this heightened emotional state where, you know behavior is being manipulated really. But it’s being it’s being changed because of these heightened states. Because of the, you’re bringing anxiety or excitement and you’re in a lot of the times when the camera or the recording devices rolling. It’s it’s turning these subjects into performers. And you just you have a hard time getting to the the softest part of their story, which is the most, you know, the realist reflection And the most truthful, most devastating, most beautiful, you know, truth inside inside them so yeah, this is a again a rumination on technology in the future of journalism and present day journalism and yeah we need we need these glasses, these POV camera glasses his eye camera, if you will, we needed to get better battery live streaming, live stream POV is really the the technological singularity in a way if you can just close your eyes for a moment and think about that like well What? Maybe not you but maybe politicians or public figures of any kind really CEOs, artists of all kinds, teachers, etc and beyond and so on that you know that these people might it might be a better way for them to livestream, let’s say teaching piano when we’re looking right through their eyes or fixing something with their hands, it has a lot to do with the hands. So that’s just this is just a, again, a brainstorm a thought experiment or rumination. And if we’re led towards thinking about, obviously, law enforcement and how they use body cameras, rows and how and why they’re so those are so ineffective. But also thinking about the TV show, body cam, and how it’s sort of this virtual extension of the show cops, and it’s very impersonal, and the psychological experience of wearing a camera on your chest, or wearing a camera on your head versus wearing a camera quietly in a normal pair of glasses in between your eyes, the camera sets and how that psychologically affects the people around you. So I think there’s a there is room for experimentation there. For sure, too, because we just haven’t done it before, to see how this affects police officer when They know that every single thing they see we see, you know, and and making sure the technology is strong is, is powerful enough to record all day that it never the the officer never turns it off and on. And then this makes us also think about surveillance cameras in general and also data. Shout out to eyebeam because they’re talking about how to own our data, as opposed to being products that are better really bought and sold on the on the market, on the mark on the social media markets. And that data is being collected and sold to advertisers by Facebook by Google because our data is very, very valuable. But our data is really if you put it together and you map it out into this 3d virtual cloud, it or even even a straight linear timeline, it really tells our story, you know, the things we’re doing, where we are, what kind of conversations we’re having, what we’re talking about what we’re publishing, you know, what kind of art we’re, we’re taking in and, and expressing out. And so that’s very interesting as well via the idea of like, how our conversations our communications could elevate our stories and and, you know, use our stories at the least own our stories at the most just by simply hitting the publish button more often. And this makes me think about Elon Musk when he talks about total output, and how our total output right now based on social media, let’s say posts is very, very, very low. So this this idea of oversharing, you know, that was probably possibly created by either Gen X or, or the baby booms is sort of this, it’s to reduce, but we’re not we’re nowhere near where, where we’re going to be. And this, this leads to our final thought about, you know, transparency and privacy and why they’re different. And what what we really what do we care about keeping private, like, what’s, you know, being in the home? And then do we care about our privacy outdoors or is that sort of transparency when you’re out in public when you’re at your job, you know, depending on what your job is? Yeah, the last thing we have written down, you know, outside of this whole cultural sort of uprising and awakening and this new awareness of what, you know violence, human violence in in first world via police brutality, what it what it is what it looks like. And with cameras really that’s why we’re talking about this where where we go from here and how we can use technology to help create more transparency and also more privacy within the systems and within the structure but obviously much more transparency within politics within government. Within police departments, that is, you know what, we don’t even know what police in the near future is gonna look like. But this leads us to, you know, a vulnerable question, which is what is the greatest injustice? What is the greatest injustice you ever experienced? That’s individual. And that’s global. You could say, because you’re, you’re definitely a part of this story. So, I mean, if this is again, transparency, telling your story, using your story, owning your story, if you want to say it that way. And then letting people letting people that you’re the closest people around, you know, these, this greatest and the greatest injustice, you know you’ve ever been through and then and then use that as a place to kind of rebuild all these relationships because it’s all it’s all about relationships. And first if you’re not, you know, if you’re not transparent enough to sort of open up and just free yourself from the fear of like being found out or being exposed for this thing, which is a great, great injustice, you know, we all you know, make lots of different kinds of mistakes, lots of small mistakes, lots of big mistakes, and we do them to other people. And then, you know, but they’re always done to us first. Always and you just got to go You got to go back back back. And for a lot of people, these are memories that they don’t even have anymore until they do psychedelics you know or even or even smoke a joint you can you can reopen these pads and these memories. So this is what’s going on right now. The we’re doing a lot of watching of films that take place in the 50s and 60s, civil rights human rights. Ollie, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers. Those are the ones We’ve been on recently a couple films by Loki, Mulholland that are about the modern the history of racism and race relations and, and even modern day situations. So and then there’s YouTube, you know, there’s a lot there’s incredible bah bah bah, you know, YouTube. So get you brushing up on this education that I think a lot of us never had. But really I mean, it’s, it’s your this whole thing can only raise you know your level of physical and mental awareness of what’s going on around you. And that kind of tears down the walls of, of the bubble that you’ve been living In which is everyone Yeah, that’s what the brain is. It’s a it’s a bubble brain. And then slowly you kind of you are exposed to, you know, new videos and new lessons and new experiences that helped that that bubble to kind of fade away little by little. And and the more you the more you’re there for it and open to soak it up. You know, the more you kind of lower your mood, you call it an unconscious racism, rating, you know, a score that everyone has based on where they’ve cut where they come from, where they were raised, where their parents were raised, where their parents were raised. I think at the end of the day, we can’t discount this. We have When we go back in history like this, it always, you know, we come from war. There’s all types of war. And, you know, one thing in the notes, that’s that was interesting from today is that divorce, which my family went through, when I was 13. My other brothers were 11 and four, that the divorce was very much so a war in itself, and you could call it a civil war. And that’s a metaphor, but we’re talking in this case, we’re talking about a mental war, there being two types of war, physical war and mental war, and they they definitely cross into each other quite often. You know, it’s, it’s hard to, you know, it’s probably very rare that you know, a mental war doesn’t include any physical But this metaphor of a war, and that’s sort of maybe the most intriguing idea that we’re sort of writing down about every day is this idea that slavery, which began 400 years ago, was a war was an actual war. And potentially America’s first war. I have to do some research to figure out when America started going to war with the original Americans, you know, the new Americans started going to settlers started going to war with the original Americans who lived here in the North American continent in North America. But that slavery was a literal war, potentially America’s first war. on Africa, and then as the centuries roll on, the war becomes a war on African Americans. So the thing about that is that I think we’ve talked about this yesterday is that, you know, if we can acknowledge it as a war, of actual war, America’s longest war, that might be an interesting way to reframe it, America’s pretty much on its lifelong war, you know, similar to how I feel about my life. 33 years, I feel like it’s, I, I’ve written about how this has been a 33 year war. And there’s evidence that, you know, when we were very young, the psychological emotional war started in certain ways. So I there’s I it’s lifelong war that I’ve experienced. In my family, and again, the Civil War, the it was like the real, the real battle like the the battle to sort of like, begin the rest of the battles. Because now you know, the nation is divided and they’re going to rule in their own way and and be aggressive in their own way. And so Okay, so getting back to this final point, which is just the thought experiment again, that if we can acknowledge that this was a this is America’s longest war, then war reparations, which in context here, for example, Germany is still paying out war reparations to certain countries. And I believe the last time I looked this up, it was Poland. I think that I read Greece actually made a new request for war reparations based on the devastation done to the country of Greece in World War Two. So, there are still requests. There are still war reparations being paid out. Now that’s very specific, quote, war reparations. Okay, so maybe that maybe within that context, there’s more viability. And you know, those war reparations go towards a reconstruction period, which everyone, most people know about, you know, when we studied the Civil War, and you know, at very least it was a 12 year reconstruction period. All right. So That, you know, that obviously there was a new flag after the Civil War and the reconstruction period and the reparations were paid by the south to rebuild America. There was a new flag, the Constitution, a new constitution, was there. Believe the constitution was 1776 and then we’ll have to see what happened in 1865. Civil War Well, you know, the slavery slavery was officially You know, that’s in quotes also ended. So that that whatever bill was that Emancipation Proclamation, so you have a new very, so whatever its constitution or some new proclamation, but the new flag, you also do you also have, you build an official Memorial, where you take all the names, all the all the families and the people who are murdered, you know, even people who are in, you know, even people on you could say, people on both sides, but really no, you can’t do it on both sides anyways, but a memorial and you know, since between 1880 and 70 and 1968, there were at least 4700 lynchings and we have the names so we could do something with that. And I know there are memorials out there for for the this genocide that was slavery like, like slavery museums and whatnot but this would be an official War Memorial. Very much so like in Vietnam after the Vietnam War, they had a contest, and they voted. And now there’s this incredible peace in the hills in Washington, DC, you know, with all the other monuments, and they had a contest and voted and I believe it was a young woman who won the contest, and it was a big deal. It was a big deal. And I think after reading Ben and Jerry’s website, there’s h r 40. For those interested, that’s why there’s this idea. There’s this talk of like how to officially ask for forgiveness for this. The longest war, the 400 year war, you know, for an apology, but it’s not an apology. Really. It’s an asking a formal asking of forgiveness for this, this human, this 400 year human atrocity, this, this, this this war on humanity, but a war on Africa. So it’s kind of like, Africa is not, you know, maybe Africa has a bigger role here. Because we did you know, this, this country did actually steal people from that country. I don’t feel I don’t, I don’t hear a lot of talk about, you know, Africa and where they stand on this, you know, because they have their it’s like their lost families and their lost children and their lost relatives. so devastating All in all, but so that’s, I think, where it’s a lot of, you know, this is all from the notebook. And I suppose we’re giving it some sort of organization right now. And in the future, we’re gonna have our, you know, our in the writers room, that will take these ideas and they’ll get more even more organized, and they’ll just be out there for anyone who wants to use them. Because at the end of the day, we have a lot of people who are, you know, very scattered on the internet. And if you like an idea, you can sort of have it to play with for a little while, and then you can you know, put put some energy put some creative energy behind it, and launch a company or initiative or campaign. And, and that can be very, very powerful. So we just want to, we want to open it’s like an open sourced, and then a democratic you know, we want to democratize we want to be voting all the time on these ideas and, and the angles to take and and how to bring them to in this case you know going back to POV journalism to wrap it all up going back to the street. And and bringing these kinds of questions to real people in the street to hear what they have to say and then sort of recruiting people into this sort of, you know, it could be it could be street I like street power news, street power news and the W is two V’s but it could be just fun POV news as well or it could just whatever. It’s not the name isn’t actually important. Even though the back you know, our business brain Business bubble brain will tell us over and over are the names got to be. The titles got to be perfect. the working title street power, you know, and I mean, street power. And it makes us think of we wrote down about the film we are many, which is essentially a film after we entered the the war on iraq after 911 and, and people were going to the streets every day they were going to the streets, protesting the biggest, you know, gathering in the entire world. At one point, I think they said it was 5 million people around the world protesting this war, in this war changed everything, you know, 911 changed everything in terms of national security. And in terms of, you know, how we quote protect this, the citizens of this country, and then what that allows us to do, diplomatically going around the world and and bossing other countries around or taking their resources or whatever we do with our military power and our aggressiveness. So, yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s the end the wrap. Okay. So the the reason why we bring that film up and we’re going to wrap here is that we are many. There’s a moment in the film where they just said I, I wish, you know, they were talking to an activist and activists and I wish we just kept going out there every weekend. So you work your job all week. And then you believe in the end of this war, you go back to the streets every weekend, and I think there’s enough momentum right now, that, you know, we’re not going to be able to sustain maybe with Corona COVID-19 still in play, and the all the unknowns in that arena. When the vaccine shows up, how socially we we behave with distancing and masks And the opening reopening of the economy, how that happens, we will know. But this idea of, you know, going every week weekend to the streets, with the signs or just even silent marching, as I, as I found seemed very effective in when they were marching in Selma, Martin Luther King Jr. and ever and everyone, everyone behind him in Selma, you know, these a silent March, just walking and doing so as as this as this act of activism really. Maybe there’s one last very one last thing. So that’s the idea of maybe every week and there’s enough momentum that maybe it can transform into that. So and we can ride it for the next four and a half months, right. Up to the election and, and hopefully get this bit have a transition and an incredibly long awaited transition of, of, of presidency because I mean, the racism is just so obvious with this president, and this and the, his his cabinet and everyone in the white house right now. And let’s change the name of the White House to the President’s House or the President’s residence. Shout out to you know, who, you know, let’s let’s just be as sensitive as possible, right. So, so hopefully, there’s enough momentum that we can continue going back out there. And, and then continue telling these stories. And I suppose this last little clip is about is about Black Lives Matter and how if they were to launch a subscription. If you go to their website right now there’s just a Donate button. And you know this, this don’t everything that comes with the Donate word. But it’s not donation is one time. We’re looking to ask people for a life long commitment to the pursuit of equality. That’s a lifelong equipment of commitment. And it’s, and it will take the rest of our lives for all of us who are currently living and into our children’s lives and our children’s children. This is a 400 year long war that’s the longest war America has ever been in and they’ve done such a good job the system has done such a good job concealing that it is a war, you know, and that and so the, the the racist the racial tent, the racial racist tendencies of And, you know, kind of hidden inside the structure to make sure that whiteness is still superior. And, and everything else is just like completely shut on. But the but it’s important to note that racial inequality and economic inequality are so incredibly correlated far more than most of us, I think, truly understand in the in the front of our minds that you know, this is a the economic inequality is like a really obvious thing right now, where you have these, you know, you have just a handful of billionaires and you have all these, these socio economic issues like these these incredible problems that can be solved in our in our lifetime with creative solutions. But yeah, imagine if Black Lives Matter had a subscription to for a lifelong commitment to equality. And they were asking for $1 per month, and then whatever you want. So, you know, you could have different tiers three 510 100 1000 10,000 doesn’t matter, you know, there’s people can afford all all of these tiers. And then the last the very last thing is, that’s interesting is like, what if they did this, not just on their website, so you have to go to their website, Black Lives matter.com backslash, you know, membership, they would probably call it a membership, which is kind of boring, kind of, kind of dull when when I say it out loud right now. It’s like a pledge or subscription and commitment to a New America. It’s a defund and then a refund. Stage 1 and then 2 is the refund of education healthcare creativity the government and community guardianship. Imagine a subscription for BLM to sign up for a life long commitment to the pursuit of equality. Each city will have organization for weekend assembly. Each weekend until we’ve polled enough resource and economic power to get what we want. Voting is important too how we move forward as a human species that want to achieve a new level of equality. Well gather all the most studied people across all the subjects to rethink everything. Remember if you defund you will refund another thing or another thing with different tools rules and so on. BLM on Patreon would be a bigger headline for them patreon.com/blacklivesmatter and it’s $1 per month and I think it would rock the Internet by surprise and take it to the street for canvassing as well in NYC you know Greenpeace Planned parenthood etc ask for $30 per month BLM could easily do this on top for the campaign. As things reopen it could work. That’s the end of our notebook for now. We’ll be back. Your journal is practicing your voice and imprinted your ideas I’m not reading from it I’m just free styling with audio and transcribing you can also do phone calls with partners. Just a bit of diary details. Listen to audio piece at the end maybe one day. Otter App. Download it now. 45 mins logged today. Too long. 15 mins a day max is fine. Public and professional ppl who want to open up and go transparent. Shout out Jess for the editing help in the future can’t wait til I find and afford her artist assistance. Okay that’s about it catch U on the flip with the dip ship ship Love ya to bits signing off yours creatively,
FUN☆POV
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