Hull Digital Question Time
Posted on 29. May, 2010 by helen in all posts, blogs, featured
This week I had the pleasure of sitting next to some digital heavy weights as part of a ‘Question Time’ style debate. I felt suitably unqualified, but then I always do, despite somehow managing to find coherent arguments around the use of digital technology. I’m assuming that this ability is no coincidence as technology is not a dark art just another vehicle for progress. I’ve always considered myself as having a traditional media background but I’m not so sure now. It’s less than 15 years ago that I was editing tape using a razor blade! It wasn’t for long as I was soon one of the first broadcast journalists to learn how to use ‘Cool Edit’ a revelation at the time allowing the creation of multiple tracks with music and FX and providing me with hours of creative enjoyment and reducing my then rather old fashioned BBC Radio York Editor to outbursts of despair at my over produced packages on dry stone walling or cheese making in the Dales.
Then came bi-media – an opportunity to learn ‘video’ skills followed by 2 weeks intensive training with one of the worlds most admired and celebrated ‘video journalists’ Mr Michael Rosenblum. A small an in stature made up for by a BIG personality straight out of New York city. He had just one mantra: ‘Close up on the hands, close up on the face, wide shot’! Multimedia is now a part of everyday life and my presence on the HDQT doesn’t seem so out of place. I, like most of my contemporaries, have been new adopters from the moment digital was introduced into the media workplace. We have seen how technology has changed workflow, communication and work life balance. We have embraced new practices and watched some of our colleagues fall by the wayside unable to cope with the pace of change and we have predicted what the next big thing will be and been surprised and envious when it turns out to be something simple we all failed to think of!
The questions presented to the panel were questions we could all answer in part as we have already experienced great change. For example the issue of privacy is an issue society has always had to deal with, email is only another form of correspondance, managed in the same way that we used to manage letters, legislation will continue to engender creativity by confining the environment within which it is fostered and organisations will continue to battle for market share.
What stumped us all was a question asking about the future of digital and how connected will we be in the brave new digital world. My answer was to highlight that connectivity is reliant on infrastructure. Without the means to deliver new services the opportunities are curtailed, the services not required and the ideas not realised. Hull Digital Question Time raised a very important issue: without the means to innovate we cannot create the environment to create. An ironic end to a debate held in a city whose autonomous infrastructure put it at the forefront of communications innovation and yet the very same network has the propensity to paralyse it’s future.
Recent Comments