A good day for the launch of the Triennial, and I’m happy to say that two of the three pieces I did get to see – Strange Cargo’s People’s Guidebook and the Palomo Varge Weisz sculpture in the old maritime station are both rich and rewarding efforts (look on my Flickr page for some illustrative images – http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulbrasington/ There were lots of people around and a great buzz in the air. This doesn’t make me want to qualify anything I said in the last entry. If anything it makes me angrier about the elitism of the visual art world, because good work does come through, but in the meantime we are supposed to endure such dreck. It’s interesting that one of the most common terms in the way artists are encouraged to speak of themselves is “investigate”. It’s a curious appropriation of an inappropriate concept. I can’t think that any art I’ve respected investigated anything. Researchers and detectives investigate things; investigations are designed to find answers to questions, but what’s that got to do with art? I say this is interesting because it aligns art firmly with a narrowed and ideologically materialist science. as if art had to prove itself in those terms. We’re back then with the left brain, and its inability to see beyond whatever sits immediately in front of it, indeed its propensity to believe that nothing exists beyond its self-consciousness. It seems to me that in this we’re having to deal with a specific historic anxiety and we need to leave it behind.

Art doesn’t investigate anything. Art takes the experience we already have, and through the expressive and connective power of whatever medium, takes us from that experience to a different place.

It’s regrettable all the same that Cornelia Parker’s mermaid should have been vandalised on its first night out (all the other pieces from three years ago have survived unscathed in the town). It might just have been some bored local youth, but the fact that it was done with a pot of paint suggests unusual premeditation. It could have been some mad religious group objecting to the nudity, or maybe it was an anger at something that’s been presented as a symbol of elitist art. There’s an irony here because on the face of it the mermaid is insistently representational, and so apparently accessible. Indeed my complaint is that it spills its content all too easily. It’s likely then that the vandalism is a more general expression of disaffection, which though understandable can’t be laid at the feet of the Triennial or indeed the Creative Foundation.

As for the piece itself, it remains a disappointment, a lazy execution of what might have been an interesting idea (at least as a starting point). I can’t see why it’s any better than a Sunday afternoon painter’s watercolour of a yacht at sea or mermaid on the shore) – indeed beyond its simply physical presence I’m not sure it even has that much going for it.

“I’m not sure”. I suppose it’s a good thing that we should question our initial reactions to a new work of art: gut feel is by no means a sure guide to anything. But I also think that enough is enough. In any medium there will always be a creative vanguard whose work is unlikely to be understood by most, but this doesn’t mean we need to take a self-proclaimed artist on his or her terms, and we seem to have created a clique of people whose pretensions are laughable to all but themselves, and who see the scorn of the wider world as some kind of validation. But, as I noted in my previous entry, this is not because everyone else is missing the point. It’s precisely because they do get the point, and can compare it with whatever art has offered in the past, and feel they are being sold short. The question is not whether what is in front of me is art: that’s not an easy question to answer, and for the most part it’s not a necessary question either. The first question must be, is this worth my time and attention? It’s this intuitive question (and its negative answer) that sits behind the general bafflement at the development of visual art, and the art establishment it seems is incapable of maintaining the critical vocabulary it needs to distinguish exciting innovation from what the Italians would call saghe mentali (mental masturbation – thanks for that Mark).

Overt self-consciousness has touched every art form in the last 100 years, but in every other form practitioners have played with its implications and moved on. Only in visual art has there been such a craven loss of faith in its natural media, and with it ironically an abdication of ambition, as if the advent of photography really could have been the end of something, rather than the opening up of a whole new world of possibility.

Last night I went to the official preview of the Triennial, a welcome attempt to involve the local population, though it has to be said it was the local creative population and the chasm revealed between the presentations and the expectations of ordinary people is something I want to reflect on.

From what I can see so far (I have yet to look at the actual work, and I’m assuming that not all of it will be available before the official opening tomorrow) there’s a predictable mix of interesting and depressing things. What’s worrying is that from her performance yesterday Andrea Schlieker as curator of the Triennial isn’t capable of telling the difference, reflecting the myopia of the art establishment. There was a telling moment as she described Martin Creed’s “composition” for the Leas Lift – a simple falling or rising scale played by the Sacconi Quartet … which Schlieker described as “almost banal” and I couldn’t help thinking she just needed to ditch the first word and we’d be getting at the Emperor’s naked truth. I suspect the ordinary people of Folkestone are quite capable of seeing immediately the banality of what’s being presented for our contemplation, and right to do so. The problem isn’t that the people are somehow missing the point. They “get” all too readily what’s being offered, and can be excused for thinking it’s not worth having.

This meshes interestingly with the ideas put forward in the second half of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary, which I happen to have been reading recently. His thesis reaches in two directions, first to fellow neuroscientists, asking them for a little more philosophical rigour in the claims they may make about brains and mind, but then into aesthetics. It’s a fascinating book in many ways, but the single most powerful thing he draws from his observations about the respective capabilities of our left and right brain hemispheres is a humane and generous insistence on the possible richness of our experience, a richness only fully delivered when both hemispheres are working together (he gives plenty of evidence to justify his characterisation of typical activity from each hemisphere). He argues then that from the 20^th century our political, economic, philosophical and aesthetic culture has been driven by unbalanced left brain thinking about the world – a way of thinking that is deliberately narrow, over-simplistic, authoritarian, utilitarian and ignorantly materialist. He emphasises that it’s not a question of right brain = good, left = bad, nor some reactionary opposition of traditional and contemporary art. He accepts that left brain analysis can advance our thinking in many ways, but argues that once done the analysis has to be reintegrated with the right hemisphere’s capacity to make richer connections, to deal fully in metaphor and higher values than banal utility. He acknowledges that this synthesis continues to be evident in the hands of modernism’s great artists, their greatness marked by their ability to transcend the limits of contemporary thought and practice.

In contrast I think it fair to say that the mainstream of contemporary art has become bogged down in a facile self-consciousness, then a limiting cynicism, a limited view of human possibility, which McGilchrist would say is vividly characteristic of unbalanced left-brain thinking.

Stepping back from the neuroscience, I think we can say the result is an art that offers less than ordinary experience, in doing so begging the question of why we should bother (which in essence is the populist, “uneducated” response to much contemporary and particularly conceptual art). At the Triennial launch Schlieker patiently explained to us the significance of Cornelia Parker’s mermaid, a life cast from a local woman. The point we were told, is to show us that real bodies are different from idealised traditional representation, but equally worthy of celebration. That’s fair enough, but since I’ve already “got” that point, what more am I going to get from looking at the cast on the beach? Because it’s a lifecast Parker has removed her own consciousness from the piece. Similarly we are told that Ruth Ewan’s ten hour clocks are an “intervention” designed to make us think about the French Revolution, about time and the presence of history in our reality, for which I’m duly grateful, but I can do that sitting at home. What is it about my encounter with the clock object that’s going to qualify or enrich this thought? What is there in the object that’s not immediately obvious?

What seems to be going on, in terms McGilchrist himself adopts from other writers, is that I’m being invited to stare at the “art object”, as a starting point for reflection, but all the object itself, reified and insistently itself, will yield is a further enclosure for me in the self of my own thoughts, through my sense of the impenetrable distance between myself and the object (that’s what reification too easily can do). Without the sense of the artist’s consciousness (visible in some intervening and shaping hand) in the work there’s nothing to draw me out of myself, to draw me forward to an experience which is different from me sitting on my own staring at the fireplace, or a cup of tea (which whatever else it might be, is certainly not “art”). And if the art establishment wants to say that this hopeless self-consciousness is honesty, a reflection of how the world really is, and that we are doomed to an atomistic flit from birth to death, I want to say that this is a dreary and easily falsified insight. If that’s what you believe you need to get out more.

Why does this need saying? It’s because that same art critical establishment, unlike everyone else, doesn’t seem to understand what’s wrong with the terms it’s using. The grimmest joke of all is that if we go back to the beginnings of conceptual art, to Duchamp’s “ready made” urinal, the gesture was intended as a sardonic reproach to the idiocies of the art establishment. Perhaps Duchamp would have laughed till he cried to see that the same establishment has turned this gesture against itself, adopted it and made it its own, a mantra for practice, or indeed non-practice. This is bad faith born out of a historically-specific despair. Life and art are both richer than this collapse into self-consciousness allows, and one of the reasons why we have always valued art is its ability to lead us out of that limited self-consciousness. Ironically an art which only takes us back to self-consciousness has lost sight of its own possibilities.

As if to bring this home, walking out last night from the preview into a sudden shower Folkestone was arced by an astonishing double rainbow, the colours of the full parabola rich against a glowering grey sky and a golden sunlight on the wet brickwork of the town’s towering viaduct.

Here was the wonder of direct experience, and art can bring a further dimension to that wonder, a dimension which draws us forward through the possibility of a shared consciousness. It’s hard to see that an art which offers the opposite offers anything worth having at all.

This is not an argument for a return to more traditional representational art. It’s a plea for artists to reintegrate the insights of abstraction in a fuller vision of human possibility. All the same I suspect that in the process the concept of the “ready made” needs to be consigned to the dustbin of art-history: for art to take us beyond the dreary limits of self-consciousness my intuition is that a little more making needs to be visible.

For all I know at this point, some of the reintegration I describe may be going on in the work on display at the Triennial, but if so it will be in spite of the curatorial decisions rather than because of them. Fortunately too, this year the Folkestone Creative Foundation has encouraged a vibrant festival fringe, so there’s a lot to look at, and certainly there’s a buzz in the town. Once again the quality is going to be very mixed, but that’s always going to be the case. Ironically it’s only the essentially elitist proponents of conceptual art who seem to think that art can be easy.

Watch Inception for the fun of it, for some imaginative spectacle, and its disturbing mood. With its puzzle-like structure and even the way it’s visualised it feels like playing a computer game, except that you’re not in control. Among Nolan’s films it’s most like The Prestige, keeping you in a place where you’re never quite sure what’s going on, and that’s absorbing and mostly gratifying.

It’s a film overtly about dream states, playing with ideas about consciousness and reality. Apparently there are some formal philosophical underpinnings for all this. I don’t think you need that knowledge to have a good sense of what’s at issue, and how it plays out.

There is however an insuperable problem with films which challenge your sense of reality by taking you a place where you don’t know whether what you’re watching is supposed to be real, or a figment of the hero’s imagination: you know it’s not your imagination because all this is being delivered by a picture within a frame in front of you, and all the while you may have a cup of coffee or glass of wine in your hands.

We’re not really confused about reality when we let ourselves be drawn into a story. All we’ve done is allow the willing suspension of disbelief. Films like Point Blank and Total Recall are good or bad-humoured enough to demand that you accept their premise and then just enjoy what unfolds. Films like Inception which end in studied ambiguity risk bad faith with that willing suspension of disbelief: we watch or read stories because unlike real life they can be brought to some resolution. Inception offers the show of resolution but undermines it with the deliberate suggestion that it could be a dream the hero has sunk into in order to be at peace with his past.

At times the film’s unfolding seemed to trace the contours of a pyscho-therapeutic journey. The DiCaprio character is haunted by the memory of his dead wife. The narrative is on one level about his attempt to explore his memories through the film’s dream control technology, and in that process halt the havoc those memories are playing with his subconscious. I found myself thinking again of the way in therapy we must revisit the stories we have always given ourselves about our past, the stories we believe make us what we are, and recast them.

I’ve had cause recently, listening to a friend talk of her therapeutic journey, to wonder how much it matters if those recast stories are themselves fictional (or at least as partial as the ones they replace). Inception’s final ambiguity allows the possibility that the DiCaprio character has found this comfort in a self-willed reality/dream. I wonder if a therapist had a client who developed an alternative but still distorted sense of his own story, which enabled that client to cope better with his life, whether that would be an acceptable outcome, an improvement. I suppose the worry would be that this settlement was unstable, that it could be contradicted too easily, and then would crumble.

I’m not sure. Though that risk seems obvious, if you consider that we’re talking about the nuances in our self-regard, it might not be so hard to hang on to the illusions that help you keep the rest of the world in order. Away from the therapist’s couch, do people who repeatedly do bad things like to think of themselves as good? I’m not talking about hardened, acknowledged criminals: I’m talking about politicians who commit their countries to avoidable conflicts, knowing that the innocent will be killed as a direct result of their decisions, or business managers who recklessly pursue short term goals to line their own or their shareholders’ pockets, but in doing so damage the long term viability of the company, and the people whose lives depend on it. I’m sure the people who do this would argue that their actions are necessary, not bad, or at least reflect the real and compromised world in which we have to live. But that’s the whole point. This is the story they are telling themselves, but it’s not the whole story.

Generally though, and probably on the therapist’s couch, we tend to believe that truths are available, and even that there’s an ethical imperative to seek the truth and live in its light – and this is what it is to be a whole and fulfilled moral actor. Indeed this is one of the foundation stories we tell ourselves, one of the basic plots (crossing all genres) in which the hero goes on a journey to uncover a truth, which once uncovered will restore harmony where there was discord, peace where there was conflict.

The young Tennyson caught this idea in the Lady of Shalott, who “half sick of shadows” breaks the mirror she has always used to look at the world and promptly dies: better not to live at all than live in illusion.

To those inclined to see brain states and consciousness as synonymous this probably seems like romantic twaddle. To the rest of us it underlines the importance of keeping the two apart.

After so much absence I want to take this blog in a slightly different direction, though the generic title is still relevant.

I have been silent because I have been dealing with depression, and dealing with it partly through psychotherapy. My established ways of coping had failed me, and I have been trying to change some of those ways.

I’ve always wondered about analysis, about how enabling us to retell our own stories in a different way could seem to make so much difference. The Freudian psychiatrist Adam Phillips has written about this, about the unique nature of a conversation which should be as uninhibited as talking to yourself, but where there is another person present, drawing out this conversation with yourself.

So I was thinking about the potency of these stories, how they help us make sense of our lives, and the risks that can carry (that the stories might be too partial). Several other things have come together to help me develop this line of thought. I’ve started reading Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots, which I thought would be useful for the craft of writing, but quickly realised that it was as much interested in why stories matter to us, noting how they pervade our lives. I’m looking forward to wherever this may lead.

I’ve been wondering too about the similarities between puritanism and psychotherapeutic ambition. There’s a difference, in that the latter tries to solve evident problems, while the former only tries to solve a problem of its own making. But both involve constructing defences against a dark view of human nature (I am thinking about Freud’s idea of our hopeless Oedipal sexuality), defences which require a practical narrowing of our vision.

The comparison was prompted by Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, which threads together stories of grim repression by the Catholic church during the Irish civil war, and a modern narrative of a psychiatrist whose marriage has been ruined by a sexual betrayal. In a crucial passage the psychiatrist argues for a more compassionate and tolerant acceptance of human nature: he says “We like to characterise humanity as savage, lustful, and basic, but that is to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer.” This is an insight which takes him beyond the bounds of professional judgement.

There’s an irony here because one of the possible gifts of therapy is to enable you to forgive yourself for ordinary failings, to help you understand their ordinariness. The parallel with puritanism however lies in the potentially reductive nature of the therapeutic story. The therapy may work by helping you to see your behaviour in a different light, to see it as driven by unmet and unarticulated needs, but in finding this underlying “meaning” we need to be careful to ensure that we don’t lose sight of the original reality. I suspect any good therapist would agree, but all the same it takes imagination to maintain this broader vision. It is tempting in contrast to seek and hang on to the simplified story, because simplicity gives us the comfort of illusory control (hence the comparison with puritanism, which sees our nature as fallen and demands strict curbs to hold that nature in check).

This brings me to another strand. The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist recently talked at the RSA about neuroscience and the divided brain (drawing on his book The Master and his Emissary). McGilchrist expresses a refined version of the left/right brain dichotomy, observing that the left brain seems essentially task-focused, working to strip problems down to their essence, in which state they can be more easily managed. The right brain on the other hand deals with less precision, is open to new and disruptive possibilities. It is the place where imagination works more fully, and enjoys complexity. McGilchrist is careful to insist on the value of both hemispheres and stresses the importance of their working together. In his RSA talk he begins to argue that reductive left-brain thinking has come to dominate Western culture, but leaves us with that interesting thought in an undeveloped state (I imagine the book pursues it).

I will be thinking aloud here about these things, and about the reductive political, economic and ethical stories we are currently being told, or telling ourselves. At a time too when Julian Assange’s Wikileaks threaten to undermine the centuries-old assumptions of state diplomacy (a very good thing) there may be scope to consider how the internet could be forcing a useful distinction between telling stories and telling lies. This forced transparency is already changing business. It’s about time it changed politics too, but I wonder what its effects will be on our sense of ourselves and our private lives.

This week Amazon in the US announced that its sales of ebooks had overtaken hardbacks (and hardback sales were also up). In a parallel universe Japanese manufacturer Sharp jumped on the iPad bandwagon announcing its intention to launch a colour tablet of its own.

What kind of turning point is this? The success of the iPad raises questions about how many electronic devices people are prepared to carry, and the problem for established ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle is that they only really do one thing. Amazon’s recent success with ebooks probably reflects the fact that the firm has slashed Kindle prices. This might suggest that if the price is right perhaps people will be happy to have a separate device for more extended reading, or it might just be that there’s a big enough niche for the Kindle to be profitable, without taking over the world. 

On the other hand the iPad seems to have shown that there’s much more of an appetite for a multifunction multimedia device which you can also use as kind of notebook. Laptop and phone manufacturers (like Sharp) are now queuing up to launch their own versions.

It’s difficult to tell at this point whether the success of the iPad will habituate the market to reading books on screen, or whether it could actually slow the demise of print. The basic truth remains that the iPad and all prospective competitors use pretty much the same screen technology as a conventional laptop. Screen glare can make these devices tiring to read over time and completely illegible in bright sunlight. These are the disadvantages that drove the development of e-ink devices like the Kindle.

All the same it may be that the iPad offers a “good enough” reading experience, good enough that is to scupper the medium-term chances of e-ink. The irony is that for ordinary people undazzled by the geeky prowess of the iPad, this might well prolong the life of printed books (because they will still be better than reading on the screen).    

There’s another issue. It’s been said that dedicated ebook readers work because you can get lost in them in much the same way you can a book. With a multifunction device on the other hand there’s always the present distraction of other things just a finger gesture away. They become part of our fast food media culture, feeding our restlessness, impatience, and gratifying a state of permanent superficiality.

We’re told then to get excited about the prospect of multimedia texts, where the words can be augmented by moving images and sound. But this seems to me a solution looking for a problem. There’s nothing very new about putting words and sounds together (they’re called songs) or words and moving images (it’s called film, or even theatre).  I can see that mixing these things on a “page” could offer scope for new creative experiences, but they are likely to be less revolutionary than our technologists suggest.

Instead of the smoke clearing then, it’s just thickened. I don’t imagine the iPad hegemony will last long: in fact I’d bet that Steve Jobs’ new empire is about to go the same way as his old, with his insistence on a closed system opening the door for Android-based devices (just as Microsoft achieved world dominance with Windows while the Apple Mac became a niche product).  But in this brave new world of mostly-connected devices with limited functionality the fate of the dedicated ebook reader seems in the balance. Certainly I won’t be buying one in a hurry. I could be tempted by a better smartphone, probably running on Android, offering me calls, email, internet access and the chance to listen to music from time to time. I might even read short texts on it, and use it for note taking. I’ll carry on using my netbook or a laptop for proper work on the move. But for now, if I want to read a book, I’ll read a book, and wait for the technology to catch up (or go further).

At the beginning of Iron Man 2 billionaire charismatic engineering genius/businessman Tony Stark presents his latest ego with the glaring showbiz vulgarity Americans do so well. The early part of the plot turns on Stark’s refusal to share his suit with the military, in the belief that only he could be trusted to wield its power for the good of humanity. I couldn’t help wondering whether the writers had Steve Jobs in mind.

Now another company has joined the storm of patent infringement claims against Apple. Apple has been instrumental in whipping up that storm, so it’s hard not to feel a little Schadenfreude. At the same time the new suit (the legal one rather than Iron Man’s) – apparently defending a patent on the presentation of summarised information, says all we need to know about the grim state of US patent law.

On a parallel line the continuing spat between Apple and Adobe only demonstrates how commercial enterprises will ride the wave of openness in software when it suits them, and jump off as soon as they can. Openness certainly offers customer advantages, but it goes against the grain of normal business thinking: for all the platitudes about being customer focused, business is driven by the desire to create sustainable competitive advantage – aka a bulwark against consumer power and choice. That’s fair enough: it’s just the platitude that’s dishonest.

Why should software be open? Interoperability is often important, but that could be achieved through standards compliance. Openness is about code being freely available to copy and develop. On the face of it software has fair claims to be a product with genuine IP, and the corporations that develop it have a rightful desire to recoup and protect their investment. Why should software be open or free when books and music (which themselves are increasingly presented via software) are not? (I’ll come back to the possibility of free books in a moment). 

The trouble is that corporations have been allowed to patent ideas rather than inventions, and the notion that you can own an idea is a dangerous one. Inventiveness depends on the ability to pick up ideas and take them further.
Invention doesn’t reside at a basic code level (which presumably is why the EU has been reluctant to patent software) but in any case there is a wider principle at stake.
Advocates of genetically modified crops say the science is clear, and the products beneficial. The science may be clear (enough) but the contrary argument is political, not scientific. Do we really want to allow corporations to claim IP in something as fundamental as grain? Is this not ceding dangerous power to an unaccountable entity (the market is a poor substitute for democracy, and as long as corporations continue to argue that their first responsibility is to their shareholders they cannot be trusted with this kind of power). This issue has become all the more acute with Craig Venter’s recent breakthrough in creating synthetic life. Naturally Venter’s lab is applying for patents on its work, and though it seems right that this work should be properly accredited, should someone else who builds on it to create new therapies have to pay Venter for the privilege?

Software falls into the same space. Most obviously if the world’s documents are stored in a proprietary format we’re in trouble, which is no doubt why so many governments have been moving towards the ODF standard. It still needs work, but it’s better than the alternatives.

I’m not being dogmatic about the evils of commercial software. I use word processing software all day every day, and I’ll confess that I use Microsoft Word, as I have for the last 18 years. I have OpenOffice on this machine and I wish I could make it my daily choice. I look at it fondly every time Microsoft does something to irritate me (again), but I always go back to Word.

I am arguing that the continuing existence of free and open software like OpenOffice (and indeed Linux) is important to democracy, and look forward to the point where they do everything I want to do, taking comfort in the reflection that if Microsoft really does irritate me beyond acceptable limits, they offer a viable alternative.

They are viable, and because they are available without cost, they reinforce consumer expectations that the internet is great place to get free stuff. That expectation has all sorts of consequences. Not least it has damaged the music business and it looks set to damage the business of publishing.

Publishing has taken on a dual role for writers. It’s a possible source of income, though increasingly a meagre one for all but a handful of names. It’s also a kind of public ratification, though not a reliable one. Publishing online potentially offers a vast audience, and equally an easier and more efficient way to get to the niche clusters of people who might appreciate your work. But right now we don’t really have a model for this selection or for making money out of it (see my earlier comments on "popular taste"). It may be that most writers have to accept that financial reward will no longer follow from the appearance of the their work in public, which if you think about it was pretty much how things were at least until the 18th century. Some things you just do because you have to. If this means fewer people are drawn to writing that would at least make the job of selection a little easier, but even this is probably not true: just look at the blogosphere.

I think writers can accept this. What’s galling is if other people then make money from your work. I suppose the holders of software patents would say they are defending the same principle, but if we push that analogy it would be more like a writer claiming intellectual property in the idea of sentences that start with a preposition.

Then again since writers have ended up with a tiny part of the cover price of their books, perhaps publishing has brought this woe upon itself. Music publishing has been damaged because in this new world the publishers weren’t contributing much value (who misses them?) but trying to take quite a lot of the available money.

Businesses love to talk about adding value. I hope what we’re seeing with the internet is an opening up of true value, an exposure of where it actually sits. That should encourage true creativity. In the meantime we can only hope that this kind of value judgement will eventually inform the principles of patent law.

I’ve held off from contributing to the iPad hype, because I wanted to let some of the dust settle, and because its real disappointment is that it doesn’t answer any of the unresolved questions about reading on digital devices, but I’m going to spend some time now thinking about those questions.

The publishing industry is braced for its iPod moment, the technology that will finally tip people over the edge from print to electronic formats. No one has any real doubt that it’s going to happen. It probably won’t obliterate print, but it will change fundamentally how most texts come before people. The Amazon Kindle and the Sony eReader offer one way forward, a discrete reading device designed to address the plain fact that ordinary computer screens are not as comfortable to read as paper. Monochrome e-ink gets around that problem, though neither device seems quite there yet.

I don’t want to give too much attention to the iPad, but the questions it raises are generally illustrative. The iPad presents itself not exactly as a computer, but a new kind of media platform, offering music, film and text reading (its credentials as an internet client are severely compromised by the absence of Flash). But I wonder if you can bring these things together? You need colour for film, and for the kind of sound-and-video-enhanced newspaper and magazine experience that media owners are speculating could offer a way to the future. But the kind of colour screen being used seems likely to have all the same drawbacks as ordinary laptops when it comes to reading continuous text like a book.

To put it another way, it’s hard to see what the iPad offers that you can’t already get for less money in a netbook, and nobody’s expecting netbooks to drive a coach and horses through the publishing industry. Steve Jobs seemed strangely blinkered about this, dismissing netbooks because they didn’t do anything better than anything else. You could argue reasonably that they do data entry better than an iPad or anything else without a keyboard, but they have sold by the bucketload for very simple reasons – they give you just-about-acceptable performance for most computer tasks with good battery life at a very low price. They have the all the characteristics of a disruptive technology so presciently described by Clay Christiansen back in the late 1990s: they recalibrate the balance of price and performance in computing, making it hard for those whose cost structures are built around selling high performance to compete.

The iPad doesn’t look like a disruptive device. Its success depends on the mass market (rather than the gadgerati) moving even more of their media consumption onto a new device. Right now I doubt that’s going to happen.

I’m puzzled by the format of the iPad, too large to be easily portable, but not functional enough to take the place of a laptop. The obvious justification for the size is the display of a digital version of the New York Times, and much of the comment around the device centred on whether the iPad could save the newspaper industry. Here I can’t help thinking that the problem is not with the device – just that newspapers as we know them are dead, and trying to replicate them online with a few multimedia bells and whistles is a doomed enterprise.

Newspapers are dead? I don’t think that our appetite for news or analysis-based features is dead, but the way and places we expect to read are changing. Newspapers have survived disruptive change before, most obviously with the advent of TV news, not trying to compete with breaking stories but morphing into media that combine more reflective comment and entertainment.

It looks increasingly as if younger people in particular just don’t see the point. The BBC offers all the news they need, reported clearly and as far as possible without bias. Blogs in the meantime offer as much comment as most of us can stomach. Many blogs are as well written as anything you’ll find in a newspaper, and many are at least as well informed and intelligent as the outpourings of paid columnists. For niche interests and entertainment reviews the blogosphere is also becoming increasingly sufficient.

Blogs cannot replace good disinterested reporting or the critical role of journalism in holding administrations to account. Journalism as such remains important. We need a media model that will somehow allow these things to continue, without the dross that fills up so much of an average daily paper. I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps the Financial Times’ approach of offering free general coverage and then paid-for value-added services to its specialised audience could be replicated for other titles, but perhaps these specialised audiences will prove economically elusive. Meanwhile the general newspaper with an audience defined by class image and political allegiance may be on the skids (and would it really be such a loss?)

But if we don’t need to read large format publications electronically what’s the iPad for? Watching TV and film? Perhaps, but if the real allure is media mobility then smaller form factors may be a better and more compelling compromise.

The iPad may find a customer base among people who want its media richness, coupled with the ability to do occasional work tasks (in this it’s like an inverse mirror of a netbook, which is good for most work tasks and limited multimedia). What it doesn’t do is address the question of whether an electronic reader will replace the printed book. Its offering in this space is exactly the same as a laptop computer with a decent screen. Its only distinction is (perhaps) an iTunes-like buying model, but it does not have this field to itself (and you can be sure that Amazon will prove a fiercer competitor than the rabbit-in-the-headlights music companies).

As I write Amazon has just announced Kindle reading tools that will run on the iPad and other tablet devices. The company is wisely hedging its bets. In the next entry I’ll write some more about the Amazon/Kindle offering, and why I don’t think it will (yet) supplant the printed book.

It’s been a longer gap than I’d intended, and I promised to conclude these reflections on messages so will, but I’m aware of how  far I’ll only be touching the tip of an iceberg.

I’ll start by asking how this notion of a corporate story would differ from the usual vision and values stuff?

In the first place with a good story it should be more obvious what all this is for. That’s got to be a stark contrast to standard corporate “value” lists which in reality aren’t values at all: more often they are attributes, and if you’re going to be that slack with the language you use at this level then how can you expect people to think about what you might really mean? There’s also a ready tension between theoretical “corporate values” and the actual personal values by which we all live. Do we really have to take these corporate values on board personally, or are they really guides to desired behaviour? But if that’s what they are then why confuse people with an incorrect label? Why not just be direct in telling people what you’re doing and what you expect of them?  

The point of a corporate story is to create something which, without depending on any particular form of words, offers a reference point from which people can judge their own actions. When you try to frame the story you’re looking to find and tell a truth about the organisation, about what’s really good in it. I said in my last post that the story needs to be rooted in the historic narrative, and that’s important because the story is about identity, and how you can play to the true strengths you have.

You’ll be looking at all the different things that have made the organisation what it is and see how they fit together. Some things won’t fit, and that will be enlightening in itself. This effort is likely to involve some understanding of the history of the organisation and also how it’s changed. For instance, for HP the legend of its founding in a shed is important, but so too is a sense of how that legend was left behind when the business merged with Compaq (I’m deliberately using an example here of a company I know little about).

The story will need to be written down, in the first place because that’s going to be part of the process through which it’s developed, and because senior people need to understand and accept it: they need to be part of that development. But it’s unlikely to be published in that written form. It’s a story which needs to be told, and as it gets told the words will change and different parts of it will be pushed forward in different contexts. This needs to be done all the time, but because the words will change people should not feel the same old “message” is being pushed down their throats. 

And the story will need to evolve with the business. Sometimes you might even need to start a new chapter.

Why is all this important? Through stories we try to make sense of our experience, to give it coherence in the form of a beginning, a middle and a developing end. That seems to me a better tool for managing the evolution of an organisation than a dubiously imposed brand identity. It also allows people to see their place in the story without feeling their personal identities are involved.

It recasts the role of the professional communicator. That role is usually understood to mean something about crafting given messages for given audiences, but in this context it’s the communicator’s task to understand the disparate elements of the story, and see how (and if) they can be brought together, and then help people to spread the word. 

I dislike business fashions, and storytelling has been hovering on the edge of business fashion for a few years now. When I first came across it I had some pretty serious doubts, not least because the way it was being discussed made it difficult to see what it was actually for.

I still have some of that scepticism. All the same I’ve come to think there’s something here that could be useful.

I guess that one of the reasons why stories tend to be more memorable than messages is that we make them our own. If we like a story we’ll repeat it to others, in our own words of course, but trying to preserve the essence of the thing. We don’t confuse the story with our own lives, but if it makes sense to us, then that’s a sense we’ll pass on to others.

For organisations trying to understand their identities this immediately looks like a more promising tool than the ubiquitous and invariably bland vision and values. Visions and values are usually wish lists, which is why they usually look the same (and feel imposed), but to build a corporate story means thinking about where the business has really come from, trying to understand what makes it tick over, as well as what could make it accelerate forward.

This demands quite a subtle exercise. Understanding the story demands a degree of internal scrutiny, though I think here I’d differ from common business storytelling practice, which would typically get together groups of employees and encourage them to tell the corporate story as they saw it. Presumably this is partly to look for common elements in their different stories, but is partly too about securing commitment to the notion of a corporate story. I worry that this is putting the cart before the horse, because you are going to have to do quite a lot more work before you’re ready to start telling the corporate story. You’ll need to talk to representative stakeholders internally and externally, building a picture of the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, with an emphasis on where it has come from, on what makes it what it is for better or worse. You can do this much as you’d do standard brand development research.

Then you need to sit down and work out what story it is that you need to tell. This is very much about making sense of the business: you don’t have a free hand, because you need to attend to the history of the organisation and how it influences current perceptions. You need to consider how the story you might want to tell is rooted in the historic narrative. Storytelling is about weaving disparate elements into a coherent and compelling whole.

What such stories would look like, and how they could work, I will explore in a further instalment.

In recent years Folkestone where I live has been attempting an ambitious arts-led regeneration programme, enabled in the first instance by the generosity of our resident billionaire Roger de Haan. I was at a meeting last night called to let people air their views on what’s going wrong in the Creative Quarter, which is the focus of that regeneration.

A few directors of the Creative Foundation were present. The nub of the complaint from the floor was that after happy beginnings a gulf had opened up between the the Foundation and the community it was trying to serve.

I’m not going to go into all the local political arguments but in response to a complaint that no one from the Foundation appeared at private views or other Quarter events, one of the directors pleaded lack of time.

This was perhaps honest of him, but it wasn’t well judged. In PR terms it was certainly “off message” because what he communicated was not honesty, but the fact that he had more urgent priorities than the engagement of the local artists and retailers who are working in the Creative Quarter. It didn’t go down well. This set me thinking about PR and its traditional stock-in-trade – the message.

For some time in my professional work I’ve been advocating the importance of honesty and transparency in communication, particularly for internal communication when you are concerned to engage staff – though it’s also relevant to external communication where the relationship between organisation and customer is not simply transactional (ie where there are emotional ties around the notion of “brand” rather than a simply rational exchange of goods and money). I would argue against the old wisdom that effective communication meant deciding on your “message” and remorselessly hammering it home at every opportunity. I’d argue that this message-driven approach mostly alienates people, making them feel they are being “communicated at” rather than “with”.

I’d acknowledge that in the political sphere, the dumb filter of mass media has forced politicians to face every interview with a clear and simple message which they must stick to in the hope that it will get through the filter. It’s cheapened political discourse in the process, but that’s the reality politicians have to contend with.

Equally at the meeting last night it’s clear that the director’s honesty was misjudged. In other respects the directors had found an appropriate honesty: they acknowledged that mistakes had been made and said they would try to put them right in the future.

But even this honesty was not particularly satisfying. I’ve come to think that effective communication is all about stories, and the Creative Foundation’s problem is that it has in a sense “lost the plot”. The truth is that the Foundation is doing a great deal of good work, but has stopped telling itself the bigger story (so misjudgements are being made) and critically has stopped telling the wider community that story. Into the vacuum has slipped a mish mash of half truths and malicious gossip.

That bigger story is not a work of fiction. It’s about the reality of what you do, and that’s where the honesty really matters. I think when an organisation understands its own story then individuals can find their own words to tell it without being forced into crass message-speak. I suspect the whole vision/values thing so beloved of brand thinkers was a misguided way of getting at the same truth, and in the next instalment will say more about what this could mean for organisations trying to understand their identities and command the assent of their staff and their other stakeholders.