April 2005 Archives

There's quite an interesting piece from the editor of the BBC News website about the practice and style guide of captioning images. I've seen some awful work over the years that ideologically loads many of the images they show, such as this one.

There's mention of revisions being made to the style guide, but I thought i'd include the guide extract here to hopefully encourage some debate, if not with them then with yourself about the practices involved.

BBC News Website style guide extract CAPTIONS (FOR PICTURES*) (REVISED 4/03) LENGTH OF CAPTION: Picture captions can be one or two lines long, ideally one. Never three, except rarely in picture galleries.

WORDING OF CAPTION: The wording should follow the geography of a picture, from left to right (eg if Blair is on the left, and Mandelson on the right, the caption should NOT say " Mandelson and Blair"). But captions should not be literal descriptions of the picture's contents - so "Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson", though an improvement, is still poor. Better to say, eg Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson: Longtime friends

NAMES IN CAPTIONS: In News, you should ideally use both first and second names of anyone pictured - though there will often not be enough room for this, especially if two or more people have to be identified. Sport can follow the sporting convention of surnames only (eg Giggs is confident of another title ) - though take care that first names are given where necessary (eg Neville wants the England captaincy leaves us wondering, "Gary or Phil?").

PUNCTUATION OF CAPTIONS: If you are including a direct quote, use a colon and double quotation marks (eg Homer Simpson: "D'oh!"). Any colon in a caption - whether or not introducing a quote - must be followed by a capital letter (eg Lisa Simpson: Genius at work ).
If you need to focus in a caption on one individual among several, use brackets and NOT commas eg a picture of a group of children might be captioned Bart Simpson (centre) was never his teacher's pet rather than "Bart Simpson, centre, was never...". If space is very short, you can abbreviate such labels to their initial letter only. But since (left) looks strange if rendered as (l) - because it looks like a number one - then we should capitalise all three, for consistency's sake ie (C) (L) (R).
There is NO full stop at the end of a caption, other than in picture galleries.

NB: a caption is often not necessary with a map or a generic graphic.

Mark McGowan drags a TV by his ear to protest
Berlusconi's control of the political media

Mark McGowan is predominantly a performance artist who tackles some interesting issues in his art: drug addiction, civil liberties, politics and media, and his new work is exploring ownership.

There's been some interesting media stats released in the last few days, a Boing Boing reader discovered that MGM had a gap in their website security (since closed) that revealed a whole mess of data and sales stats they would probably prefer didn't leak. The above image merely confirms what we already know: Digital media is far cheaper to replicate and distribute than the analog (and i'm obviously including VHS here) counterparts of the past. Sony knows this too. Sony has just completed acquiring MGM and now has a full catalog of 4200 of MGM's past glories, which i fully expect to see utilised in the next 6-12 months if Sony can repackage and distribute quickly enough for consumers. Time Warner had been interested in capitalising on the catalogue too, but somehow decided that the $3 billion Sony finally moneyed up with was too much. To me 3 billion sounds a bit cheap. If they hold the rights in perpetuity the only real cost is distribution.

In its day MGM was a phenomenal studio that was as well known for its lavish productions and stars, almost as well known as Michael Bay is known for directing awful films.

MGM was responsible for a number of american classics in its time, for most, as the owner of The Wizard of Oz; but one thing that hasn't been mentioned at all is that Sony is part of a consortium of owners who have purchased MGM, the notable investor in all of this is Comcast and it's pretty easy to see why.

Ted Turner took the United Artists or UA out of MGM/UA in 1986 so he could broadcast the catalogue via his cable channel, and colourise films that should never be colourised (No Ted, The Maltese Falcon is supposed to be that dark). Although, fortunately, that phase seems to have passed from history, it's pretty easy to see why Comcast would want access to the catalogue $ 3 billion is pretty cheap when you can devote an entire channel to MGM catalogue greats, not to mention the obvious next step: Video-on-demand and the potential of digitally cleaning up the catalogue for cinema re-release and the consequent DVD re-releases that will inevitably follow.

Cory Doctorow has an excellent meditation on what a friend of his has called "cognitive liberty".

"...the freedom to choose your state of mind. The cognitive liberty cause encompasses the movements to legalize "recreational" drugs and to limit the power of the state to subject "mentally ill" people to involuntary pharmaceutical therapy (and, when it is still practiced, involuntary physical therapies such as lobotomies and electroshock).

Cognitive liberty resonates strongly for me. Like other forms of personal liberty, it is not without its perils -- when friends of mine were involuntarily medicated during acute incidents of schizophrenia, mania or depression, the interventions seemed like a good trade-off at the time (rampaging, irrational, out of control friends who are treated with meds that make them capable of reasoning with those around them are good poster children for "cognitive coercion"), and friends who've fallen down the well of addiction and ended up with ruined lives or even lives cut short are a strong warning against unbridled cognitive liberty.

But then there are friends whose touch of madness sends them on flights of brilliance, friends whose casual glass of wine, joint or hallucinogen use have made them happier, better adjusted, and more creative and fulfilled. What's more, my friends who've ODed, been committed, or who live with addiction haven't been helped by prohibition -- far from it. Some are in jail, some are medicated insensible, some are living lives of dangerous poverty.

The idea of cognitive liberty is very tempting, but I have an instinct that there's an approach to it that is grounded not in libertarianism, but in Canadian/European-style social democracy. "

Having had friends who have been addicted to various substances for the majority of their adult lives has made me feel almost exactly the same way, with the possible exception that the problems they have had with their addictions are in direct proportion with the legal status of those drugs and/or education about how drugs should be used or administered. A friend who died in the last couple of years had used drugs off and on for several years. In the 1960's she had been at art school in the UK and did what most people in their 20's who attended a European Art School in the 1960's did: go to a lot of gigs, party with your friends and experiment. She managed to unfortunately contract Hepatitis, which of course created all kinds of pathogenic hell. The effects of this on her liver was what finally killed her.

Or one of my old flatmates who is now in his late 40's and has been addicted for 30 years. The self-described 'Man with a Golden Arm' still manages to have something approximating what most would call a normal daytime existence, but might be swallowing 30mg of Diazepam to stave off withdrawal and get him through it. I once saw him pay $400 dollars for 40mls of Methadone from a friend because his withdrawal was so bad he was almost at the point where he was ready to punch his fist through a window. On that day, if someone had said drinking a litre of anti-freeze will stop the withdrawal, he would have.

The fact is that the economies of purchasing drugs would never remain the same after decriminalisation. Or the very obvious dangers of buying drugs off complete strangers on the street would in all likelihood be ameliorated if support and access were replaced with the current ignorance. It would be stupid and illogical of me to say that everyone should be trying X, Y and Z, but I would say exactly the same thing about anything that alters state of mind. I know many, many people who should never drink alcohol again, but culturally where I live it is so socially ingrained that to not drink is still on a par of substandard social behaviour as vegetarianism or not enjoying the national sport.

The question of Cognitive Liberty in my mind is similar to abortion rights, or even assisted suicide: Who owns your body, you or the state? It's a question that needs to be asked more. I'm being a little facetious, but for years now i've been trying to teach my students that you are what you eat: If that means you're rearing yourself on a steady diet of Baywatch, _insert_latest_blockbuster_here, 50 Cent etc, and you have an aversion to text or ideas - well, quite frankly, you're more dangerous than you thought.