Towards a Strong Basis for Everyday Social Documentary

The last keynote at ATOM2006 is by Andrew Urban, editor of Urban Cinefile, and previously the creator and host of SBS's Front Up programme. He begins by noting the importance of media teachers for the future development of society; further, he also notes the increasing question of information accuracy in an ever more highly mediatised environment - in Jerry Bruckheimer's words, 'the media are a mile wide and an inch deep'.

Journalism is today still posited as a noble profession, standing for honesty, objectivity, and truth - and Andrew shows an excerpt from Edward R. Murrow's famous 1958 speech (as seen recently in Good Night, and Good Luck) accusing the television industry of its failings - deluding, amusing, and insulating us. Broadcasting - and the media more broadly - today are as crucial as then, but their basis has shifted, now taking in also a broad range of new participants, all the way through to individual produsers.

YouTube elevates the quotidian to something approaching everyday social documentary - not to be confused with reality TV -, and Andrew draws a connection between this phenomenon and his own project Front Up for SBS. Front Up broke, or perhaps rewrote, television's rules, enabled by Andrew's own lack of familiarity with the medium's rule and conventions. Media students today should be encouraged to use the mass of available media technologies as tools to create media, and perhaps even revolutionise media forms and formats - but that's the important aspect: they are tools, not ends in themselves. Responses to Front Up, for example, were focussed mostly on how Andrew managed to extract so much personal disclosure from his interview subjects, not on the production processes. The same focus should apply to today's emerging media formats, Andrew suggests.

From Front Up, Andrew has moved on to the online publication Urban Cinefile, now up to its 500th weekly edition, and he now discusses the changes to film and television as convergence continues: the Internet is fast becoming the single most diverse entertainment and information source, challenging television and changing the entertainment world forever. Today, we are our own programmers as well as our own producers, and once the Internet is streaming into the television set the current media revolution will seem like a walk in the park. Convergence redefines the concept of media: the traditional media establishment is no longer the only source of media and entertainment (Salam Pax had more viewers than CNN's entertainment reports). Today's content is no longer tomorrow's fish and chips wrapper - it remains available and becomes part of the global archive of content.

But to teach people to distinguish between show business and valuable information now becomes increasingly important - we need more Ed Murrows in the media. Young people contemplating a career in the media need to shape an ethical career in an environment overloaded with vanity and spin. The need for strong ethics should be promoted as a significant benefit for working in the media. Future generations must find the strength and imagination to turn truth, honesty, and integrity into desirable attributes in the media - with the help of media educators.

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