Editorial notes:
This is the first of 51 Evernote entries titled according to the date on which they were written, making this a personal, chronological journal of observations, lessons learned and conclusions, together with an element of diary writing.
Synopsis: Today I discover a foreign news service, muse about its benefits, get side-tracked onto developing an open mind. And then finally added some musing on the possibilities of story-telling when content can be separated from the medium.
Meta: One perspective that offers itself for writing about each and every day are the novelties discovered at that time. This can include cultural media (film, books, internet).
I’ve rediscovered the value of local news channels. In the first place, they are often the best coverage for that particular locality. I say “often” due to the inevitable limitations of all controlled media, but it might be closer to being a rule. Take, as an example, the case I am considering today: the Egyptian Ahram Online. In its capacity as a “local news channel” that I seek, I am looking for it to present its particular brand of foreignness (the type which knows that everyone else is foreign). Ahram Online achieves this by three parameters. First, it demonstrates the inevitable obsession with anything occurring within its nation’s borders. Second, it sees the world from its nation’s own region, in this case, a curious combination of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Islamic and Arabic worlds. And thirdly, its perspective onto the rest of the world is always a consideration seen from within itself. It does these things in the most obvious way by the “news” it selects to present, i.e. in the act of selection. But it also – and this is a mode that should not be dismissed – by the opinion editorials it publishes. These are important too because they articulate (hopefully the range of) the population’s opinions, and also what are the various (local) concerns about news event x.
Reading news from a radical other’s perspective caused an inevitable appreciation of the existence of my own perspective, and the fact of perspectives’ diverging. This awoke in me an awareness that I am not always aware of my perspective as being such. Most of the time it is far more expedient to merely know that I am correct but that there are dissenting opinions which are themselves the result of a compendium of erroneous experiences. In other words, it is hard not to be dominated by the sense of wrong when presented with whatever is intuited as being wrong. This is a useful heuristic, no doubt, but I feel like there’s also value to be had in a mind that is honestly (and not merely expressively) open. To be open-minded in this way means firstly acknowledging the existence of alternative opinions. Second, seeking out sources that express alternative opinions. This should be approached in the same way one would seek out instances of their own opinions – in the best way that respects my intelligence. In many cases, this is easy, since for most given opinions there exist an intelligent population that believes them (e.g. religion). And thirdly, when reading these alternative sources it is important to read them with honest consideration. “Honest consideration” does not mean naive input, it means thinking about it critically in a manner that befits your intelligence. Thus I am still allowed to reject claims for which I’ve also had an intuitive dislike, but I do so in the best possible manner. Where the alternative opinion directly antagonises my own, then by investigating it I gain further advantage in that it might help me see the limitations of my own position. This is especially likely as I see more of the evidence that the alternative opinion depends on. And, even if I reject that evidence (or perhaps its claims to implications) I would at the very, very least have to admit that such evidence exists, and occupies the thoughts of others. That too is a level of appreciation, one that admits not only of alternative viewpoints, but also of the people who hold onto them.
To be continued…? What else today?
Has content become liberated from the medium? The Walking Dead is an example that can be imbibed as either/all of comic (read), tv show (watch), or game (play). However, as an example, it begs the question. After all, to what extent did the franchise retain its essence across the media? I choose that nasty scholastic term as an obvious provocation. It is obvious that some cases fail to promote the argument. Consider the multitudes of inevitable games produced with the mass-production mentality that denies any place to originality or art, but which bathe assured that their title owes them an inheritance no matter what else they might fail by their own measure. But: that is not a fatal argument in any case, especially since it parallels the difficulty in defining all the while bad art is still admitted to exist. With all that in mind, the problem can reinstate itself into a peculiar model (out of many) that still addresses the initial wonder: What essence of story-telling can be removed as content from media, and retold in such a way that still requires there to be some unity to the experiences between one form and the next.
