A case for reviving dialogues
In all the many newsrooms where I have worked content has always had priority over form. Except one.
In any business, if we knew better how to fuse form and content, how much more successful we would be. All around us is change, revolution, competition. Against such a confusion nothing is more important than clarity: clarity about what you are, what you stand for, what you offer.
I will go to the stake arguing that the media renaissance unleashed by the internet is not killing print but reinventing it. It is like the affect of electricity upon domestic lighting. The lamp changed from wick to bulb but it is still a lamp. Today, print still does something that only print can do as well.
Anyone who is in the media needs to understand more about fusing form and content and about what it is that we can do best. In the past I believe we got away with getting it 30% wrong. Those days are long gone. Today 30% wrong means walking the plank.
The Daily Mail is a properly fused product. It may not be beautiful but it is what it is. The typography, the colours, even the shape of the paper, marries with its message, with what is trying to do and what it is trying to be. The Economist is a fused product too. It is as comfortable in its skin as a horse by Stubbs. Slick, dense, clear, reflective, synthetic. So is Google, for that matter, and many others.
The importance of this should hardly surprise us. We’ve seen it in the arts. Every form has its intrinsic character. Nothing, for example, seems to match the novel in its ability to create a concrete world. (The fact that such a world is build entirely in the imagination of the reader is the novel’s final stroke of genius). Nothing seems to dominate the emotions as directly as music. The fact that music is an entirely abstract medium which works without images, makes it the form of choice for the alchemy of human feeling. (Watch any great conductor to see a human being in a full-blown trance). Nothing has the mesmerising power of a great painting. The sheer power of light to shock and overwhelm the viewer, is an effect that other art forms cannot strive for. A person can reach for a blanket, a shot of whisky or sit by a blazing fire. Each will warm them - but in a different way.
After thirty years working in media I am surprised there is so little appreciation of the power of form. We talk a lot about formats – broadsheet or tabloid, analogue or digital, video or film. However, formats are to form as haircuts are too looks. They help but they don’t really get to the heart of the matter.
Perhaps we are simply too superficial and therefore lack any interest in what lies beneath. Form is an idea that is anything but superficial. Plato’s forms were the archetypes. Everything started there. And still today the word includes the notion of the essential nature of things.
Or, more likely, we have been taught to focus only on brands. To survive today, any business must be good at what it does. We tend to forget that it is just as important for it to do what it is good at. In a consumer culture dominated at every level by marketing, only a fool would say brands are not important. But long before you can have a successful brand you must know your intrinsic strengths and weaknesses. And that knowledge is at the heart of fusing form and content.
We should have listened harder to Marshall McLuhan. Around 50 years ago he said the medium was the message; or more precisely, that a medium has its own intrinsic effects which constitute a great part of its unique message. He said: “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”
If we were clearer about different forms and what they are intrinsically good at, then we would not only be better at using our existing media to greater effect but would see that we need to keep experimenting with form. Like any industry with a history, the media industry is essentially complacent, lazy and stuck in a rut. Now we are fighting for our future, we have to do better.
Five years ago only a tiny handful of people foresaw the forthcoming surge in social media. The massive dominance of Facebook and MySpace could not have been imagined. Yet the appetite was clearly there. It was latent. And the technology was there. It took a spark of genius to marry the appetite with the technology and come up with a product so fused that it immediately make sense to millions of people.
Do we really think about or understand what the mainstream media is for, what print and television is really good at? Maybe we understand at some level that print is the pre-eminent medium of information. We understand that it is particularly good at filtering and condensing huge amounts of knowledge; that the human mind can absorb more from a well-designed page of text and graphics than it can in any other way.
Maybe we understand at some level that television is the pre-eminent medium of entertainment. We understand that to bring a vivid replica of the world, of thousands of worlds, into the living rooms of millions of families is an incredibly powerful means of distracting people. However I believe we waste a lot of our energy too – trying to achieve things in each medium that are never going to work as well as they would in another. To anyone who knows better, how often we must resemble a man who is using a hammer as a golf club and a golf club as a hammer.
Against this backcloth, I believe there is at least one gap in the market worth mentioning. I think there’s both an unsatisfied appetite and the means to meet it. Yes, it would always be a niche but it would make up in influence for what it lacks in scale.
The gap I see is for ideas. Why? One reason might be education levels. We are introduced to life-changing ideas at school and then the river dries up. Our minds are kept busy but remain stubbornly un-appeased. Another reason might be information overload. The demand for meaning is strong. We are deluged with data. Information springs at us from every angle at every moment of every day. Some of it sticks. We learn a little. But meaning is elusive. Without ideas it is very difficult to translate information into meaning. And without meaning, life is pretty unbearable
A leading publisher explained not long ago the current formula for a best selling book. He said you had to have a proposal (not necessarily a new one) that explained a condition that affected a large number of people (being overweight, for example). Then you had to explain your idea in an easy but convincing way so that once people had read your book they would feel they understood. “Everyone wants to feel wiser”.
Of course ideas are everywhere – in newspapers, magazines, books and on TV. However I do not think any of the above are best way to communicate ideas. People are hungry for more.
What is the right form for a medium of ideas? Firstly, ideas happen best when people are together. The spark of an idea is almost always in a conversation or a meeting. Secondly, ideas connect best when people can experience them being unpacked step by step before their eyes. To bring an idea alive you must participate in making it. All teachers know this. Therefore, what I am essentially suggesting is the relaunch of the dialogue – live, fluid, unpredictable – and surely one of the most effective forms of idea-making available to us in the world.
I see this as the complete antithesis of the ubiquitous business conference, with its keynote speakers and its endless Power Point slides. These are usually dead (and deadly) events in which self-important people from a particular sector get to stand on stage for 20 minutes and give everyone else the benefit of their experience.
The point about dialogues is that they are living discussion. They can not be prepared in advance because you can never tell what paths the discussion might take. There are already signs of a nascent revival in dialoguing today. In the United States the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation has around 800 members and exists to promote the spread of ideas through dialoguing. In
Ever since Socrates and his friends, newly-scarred from fighting in the Peloponnesian War, sat near the forum in ancient
What if our great institutions and universities were to launch travelling road shows in which leading thinkers were brought together in different cities to grapple with the world’s great problems? Is it impossibly romantic to think that there might be a few thousand people in each city who would pay for a ticket for the chance either to be actively involved in the discussion or to witness it at first hand?
I don’t think so. When you consider the numbers that will turn out to see a favourite author such as Margaret Atwood, giving her stump speech and answering questions, or to hear Gore Vidal talking to Melvyn Bragg in a big auditorium, I don’t think it is merely a romantic thought. Couldn’t we have the intellectual equivalent of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or the London Philharmonic turning up in cities such as
As it happens I do know of one great American college that is doing just this. The Art Center of Pasadena, one of the top design schools in the
Being a design school, these dialogues will have a design focus, naturally, but not a narrow one. In fact, one of the fascinating results of planning the dialogues has been to realise how design awareness is now almost as much a part of science or business as it is a part of architecture or town planning. Art Center is taking 24 brilliant minds and putting them together for a day of intellectual fireworks on the stage of the Palau de la Musica in the heart of
I believe they are tapping into a idea that, five years hence, will be ubiquitous and as much part of a civilised life as concert going, theatre going or queuing up for the latest exhibitions.
Add comment February 19th, 2008