Now we’ll get the tactical retreat.

We’ll hear earnest media psycho babble like ‘so long as he’s learnt his lesson, this will make him a better, stronger human’, he’ll be a man the sinless (that’s us) should ‘be prepared to forgive, to welcome back’ – on our terms of course, with a solemn, patronising pat on the back. He’ll be ‘a tamed Tiger’ who should ‘be given a chance’. A chance to, to … I know, to resume pulling in huge audiences for big media and big advertising.

Gimme a sick bag. Stuff the media. Imagine it was your neighbour, your best mate. I hope Tiger walks away and doesn’t come back, he’s done everything in golf already and nobody can take it away from him. And it would serve all those prurient, hypocriticial tosspots right.

Anyway, can we have a bit of a crowd sourcing poll – if every man and woman in Britain who’d been unfaithful rang their boss on Monday to announce their  indefinite break from work, how long do you reckon it would be before famine swept the land?

When his fellow panellists got into their stride, and with the protesters baying outside, the programme had the feel of a self congratulating feeding frenzy. And it didn’t feel good. Bizarrely, it didn’t seem like fair play.

Never mind that whenever those of Griffin’s ilk achieve power fair play is the first casualty, if it didn’t feel quite kosher to me, a black man, how did it play in the living rooms of those with something approaching regard for a man who stands up and voices taboos they partially share?

It also displayed the shallow nature of our politics – the silly ritual of  snarky soundbites and point scoring that in the end seem to trivialise everything .

Bonnie Greer tried to levitate above the spittle yet her thoughtfulness clearly left many half wondering what she was on about (answer: what they all should have been on about, a calm perceptive take, impelled not by the need to win but by a need to shine some light).

I think the heat without light was a missed opportunity. This was a chance, not so much to put Griffin to shame by proving he is a slippery fish with a hidden agenda, but to dismantle his foundations, to reveal the inhumanity his cause would unleash, because that is the truly shameful thing.

Some of his sympathisers might then have been persuaded to recoil from the horror he offers, rather than be tempted to see him as a put upon Englishman being told to get lost by some out-of-touch politicians – aka a scenario they readily identify with.

So to today. The Mail led the way back to familiar territory, spinning the episode into an attack on the BBC and quite slyly – but horribly – attempting to keep BNP supporters on side . Why? The Mail naturally doesn’t want to alienate its legion of readers who devour their stories about bloodsucking asylum seekers and boogeyman muslims with hooks. The kind of stories that a certain Nick Griffin likes to tell.

There was something comedic about two guys dressed up in China all  utterly confident that they know what’s what about journalism, telling regular people that they better back off from misappropriating ‘our’ content or else.

‘Our’ content.

Of course I get the point about how much Curley and Murdoch have to pay to allow their journalists to source news, and hence they want a return on the investment. I also understand copyright issues.

But news is like a genie you can’t put back in a bottle. Caning the so called aggregators and pirates feels a little like banning your staff from discussing the morning news at the water cooler on the premise that they don’t ‘own’ the news and therefore have no right to pass it on.

It’s a good topic, I brought it up in my online class just today, and I notice Jeff Jarvis responded with similar head shaking. It struck me that the text here was that, despite all they have learned and know about the new media world,  Murdoch and Curley still deep down believe that they do indeed own the news, and that yes, the news can be owned.

There was a time in England, before enclosure, when people must not have  conceived of a world where a man could no longer freely walk and work the grasslands. Then one day somebody, for an unfathomably useless reason, suddenly ‘owned’ that land. And their descendants sit in the House of Lords today on the strength of it.

Now the pattern is reversed. The landed gentry of ‘content’ cannot conceive of a world in which they don’t own the news, yet they are being relieved of that power of ownership even as they protest.

Murdoch once told the newspaper world to embrace the digital future. Now he is King Canute.

It’s fun and seriously fascinating, partly because Michael Wesch seems to be a genius at communicating ideas using social networking tools.

One way this lecture is useful to us is because it shows society’s developing confidence in its use of social media to express itself. It also makes us think about what is attractive about social media, its perhaps (once) surprisingly viral nature.

Thus it triggers ideas about opportunities for creating, distributing and interacting with social media content in very effective ways. Or in other words, getting messages across, perhaps millions of times over. That surely applies to journalism equally as much as any dance video craze or Charlie biting his brother’s finger.

Dubbed “the explainer” by Wired magazine*, Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the impact of writing in Papua New Guinea (yes, now), he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society.  His videos on culture, technology, education, and information have been viewed by millions, translated in over 15 languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.

*From here on in this bit of blurb is lifted from the New Media Consortium website.

You folks out there perhaps cook grouse all the time but I never had, it’s one of those mystical expensive sounding dishes, like lobster and truffles, that I’ve been too miserly to procure. My mistake. So much excitement. I was going to have to pluck and draw them – another thing I’d not done before.

Three days’ hanging later and I was in the kitchen blowing feathers off my Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. This is where the multimedia comes in. Whittingstall’s plucking instructions worked fine but it was a bit of a mess, and I wondered if YouTube could help. Now I know what I want for Christmas.

See. That’s what makes America great. Daring to dream.

I was also up to my knuckles in innards (It has never ceased to amaze me just how copious innards can be), and as you might be reading this at breakfast time I’m not embedding any video of that.

It was all worth it. They weren’t young birds, so they were pot roasted slowly in port, orange juice and grated rind, sultanas and chicken stock. A proper red. Joy and wonder. The gamekeeper’s wife is coming back with a boxful soon, I’ll try roasting a couple. And it’s inspired me to look out the air rifle. A rabbit and a couple of those pigeons that settle on our front lawn will look good in a game pie.

I’m reminded of the old but apparently not yet cold discussion about the conservatism of journalism students and what Martin Stabe termed students’ occasional ‘bah, humbug attitude to such crazy trends as blogging, podcasting and … the uncredentialed “citizen journalist”’.

And what I try to get across is not only that the more they write the  (potentially) better they get, but also that to blog is to join a conversation, to communicate. If a student aspires to become some kind of communication professional, it all makes sense.

Some of the more astute say, OK, but who’s listening? Who’s going to read my blog? A good question, because the answer is ‘the audience you make’. University students have a ready made, almost captive audience on hand if they want to reach them – their peers, right on campus. The trick is to have useful things to say, and to inform, entertain and challenge.

A blog I’ve begun recommending to students is by the shameless Penelope Trunk. She delivers a juicy treatise on how to make your blog work, and just as  importantly  she walks the walk – if you’re not too squeamish about matters highly personal and female, check out what she’s been up to these past few days. The reaction is immediate and heavyweight, and I’ll bet that PT by now has a raft of new subscribers joining her particular conversation.

OK, she’s not for everyone, but the principles are there. Post. Link. Be bright.  Be informative. Be involved and be you.

You can definitely have too much of a good thing. I listened to Obama trying to win the Olympics for Chicago and couldn’t escape feeling that putting on a torrent of high flown verbiage everytime you have an audience can get very old very quickly.

This time it sounded well out of place, a little demeaning even. Going all the way to Copenhagen to say I’m the president, give my hometown the Games. It felt like he was heading for a fall and he was.

I’m glad Rio won, but I wish Obama had stayed out of it. Things are tricky enough for the guy at home without making himself a hostage to fortune in the carved up jungle that is IOC decision making.

Worse, the rapidly gathering campaign to Carterise the man gets another boost.  I may not share Obama’s gift of the gab, but we may have something in common: a need to know when to shut up.

I started to wonder, did a quick check and found a 2007  report that says in Britain 850,000 phones are dropped down the loo every year. It seems to be the most common way to stupidly lose your phone (between 1 and 2 million are stolen every year, but that doesn’t count because getting robbed isn’t necessarily stupid, more unlucky).

Then I got to thinking, if all those people have their phones out in the toilet, they’re likely to be using them in the toilet. Texting people, downloading something, playing chess, calling 999 for more loo roll – something.

And if 850,000 people actually drop them while they’re there, how many more are regularly using them there but managing to hold on tight.  Two million? Three million? Let’s say it’s two million. I’m here to tell you that if two million people spend 15 minutes extra a week in the toilet because they’re busy on the phone, that’s  57 years. Fifty seven years of productivity a week! In the kasi! We are a nation that is living its life in the toilet because we’ve got a mobile phone to look after!

Ingredients

USE the chorizo as your basis, frying fat slices of it quietly until the thin pool of olive oil in your paellera turns orange, then hurl some chicken in (usually I’ll have cooked that up a bit first unless it’s a refined version with chunks of breast). Then the rice – less than you think you need otherwise you’ll have to put gallons of water in later, swearing ruefully – and coat that up with a few minutes’ stirring. In goes some green beans and some strips of sweet red pepper from a jar, a few threads of saffron that I’ve had in a teacup with hot water. And some pepper. No salt – the fish stock will do the job.  Stir gently. Then fish stock, bit by bit at first, a little like doing a risotto, but when you get bored forget it and just dump the rest of the stock in. Finally some prawns, shell and all. Make sure there’s enough liquid for it all to bubble along while you open a non-threatening white wine and go to the living room to swear at Strictly Come Dancing. Keep popping back to the kitchen to check the paella hasn’t stuck to the bottom of the pan and swear at the morons on 606. After about 15-20 minutes dish it up with glee because the colours look so good on the plate, squeeze plenty of lemon juice on top (very important, don’t forget that). Graciously accept all the accolades, as in ‘de nada’.

*if you have to