Existentialism

Existentialism is not a religion, but more like a creed. It is an organised ideology that takes lot from Friedrich Nietzsche and has no rational or reasonable restraint on expression. It is very relevant to journalists because writing is the act of freedom and the fact that we can write what we want means that we are free.

'The Outsider' by Alfred Camus

In this novel, the main character Meursault has many qualities that an existentialist would admire. He murders a man he has never met before for no reason, just because he felt like it. This is ultimate liberation. He was of the opinion that life is pointless and you're going to die anyway so why do anything? This is known as an existential void. No morals have any point or logic to them so why should Meursault adhere to them? He goes on trial for killing an algerian man in a french colony in Algeria. The jury are all French and raciest and so try to get him off. His mother died a few days before he committed the murder and if he would have said that he was upset about that then he would have been let off. However Meursault said that he didn't care about his mother dying and he doesn't care about anything! This is the main reason that he is sentenced to death, because he didn't show any emotion at his mothers death. He is also offerend to turn to God by a chaplain but says that God is a waste of his time. This is extremely existentialist.

"Existence Perceives Essence" - John Paul Satre

Existentialists would say that the past is fantasy and the future hasn't happened yet so it might not happen, everyone could just disappear at any moment. Existence is a fact and is pretty much the only fact. A criticism of existentialism is that is it just marxism but without technology and that women, homosexuals, and black people are the proletariat. In the book 'The Second Sex' by the french existentialist Simone de Beauvoir she states that one is not born a woman but one becomes a woman. However existentialism is not class based and it is often the difference between those who are determined by others and those who are free to determine others. In existentialism it is also a sin to stereotype as they believe that everybody is capable of doing anything at any time. Andy Warhol was a very existentialist film maker, for example his film 'Sleep' which only showed his friend John Giorno sleeping for five hours and 20 minutes. Warhol was bored of everything and wanted to show timeless pointless time. This is also like jazz star John Coltrane, who was a heroin addict and would just improvise for hours and hours on a saxophone. In fashion existentialism is just black, black, black; clothes that don't signify anything.

On the upside of existentialism is personal liberation. It also questions the westen philosophy phrase of 'I think therefore I am' because it proves that it is impossible that you exist because it is impossible 'that I am' therefore I am impossible. This questions existence itself, is just a mistake or a joke? You can rewrite your own story.


This is the 'Duck-Rabbit' image and it shows that we can have a certain amount of voluntary control how we see certain images, this control is linked to how we understand things around us without making decisions. But we can decide what we see in that image and we can decide how to understand the things around us, this is very existential idea.

Good faith / Bad faith

The existentialist dilemma is weather to collaborate with bad faith. If you even do this just a bit it is still very bad. You should do everything in good faith , you know why you're doing it, you've negotiated with other people and you're happy that you're doing it. Existentialist set themselves goals and then achieve them. They also do not let people down, if they have made a commitment to someone then they have to do it. They also don't treat people as means to an end, rather they treat everyone as separate end and treat all people as bundles of possibility, not fixed.

Existentialists often talk about the 'burden of being' and they are thinking all the time about if there could be a pure existence and constantly trying to free themselves. Another trademark of existentialism is being passionately committed to something, weather that be a football team or a religion etc. If you are passiately commnited to something then that means that you have point to your life and you have determined yourself, for example going to every football game of the team you support, this would be a path to liberation and having a life.

We find out who we are by how we act act

Existentialist do not sit and worry but actually go and do something. They are of the opinion that we are practically thrown here and we don;t know why or how the world came to be and we can;t chose when we were born or who our parents are, it's all just random. Existentialists believe that you are what you are because of that personal choices that you make and you can change all of this! This is the existentialist dilemma, what are you going to do? Existentialist only do something because thy think it is getting them somewhere, if it's not, what is the point of doing it? This links to the existentialism angst that you're going to die and you're not going to exist again so you better get on with it!

Cool Communication / Hot Communication

This is where the origin of the word 'cool' came from. Cool communication is where the meaning is determined by the viewer which means that people see you and determine for themselves what they think you are communicating. Hot communication is where the meaning is determined by the producer, for example when someone is wearing a train driver's uniform the viewer would identify them as a train driver. So next time you want to look 'cool' make sure you have no determined meaning in your clothing before you go out!

WINOL - Week 3 Diary

The traffic for week 2 was almost the same as week 1 at 90. This week I planned to increase the production of the WINOL leaflets that I had developed last week and get them out to a lot more houses to see if this would increase the traffic.

Production Editor Chanin managed to get a link to Winchester News Online on the BBC website, listing us an other local news provider in the Hampshire area, this is a very good because this website has a page rank of 3 and is now linking to us. To see the link, click here. Together we also did a bit of a clean up on the site week. As the bulletin is the main focus of Winchester News Online the website often gets forgotten about and the fact that the news reporters do not submit text versions of their stories doesn't help. As we continue to improve the bulletin the site stays the same but I am hoping when the bulletin is a good as we can make it we can focus more on the site. Essentially we are going to be doing this until the summer so we do have enough time, just not really enough people.

Due to the lack of people in the production team I was asked to do sound for the bulletin this week, I had never done this before but was told it was easy. Essentially all you have to do is turn up the presenters when they are speaking and turn up the VT's when a package is playing. It is easy but if you get it wrong then it will ruin the bulletin so it is a very tense job. However I think I did a pretty good and didn't have any major problems but there is a slight sound issue with the title sequence at the beginning as I wasn't sure Stu was going to come in as early as he did.

I spent Tuesday printing off, cutting out and delivering more leaflets, I delivered about 100 in the Stanmore area. Due to doing the sound for the bulletin on Wednesday I didn't have time to deliver many more leaflets and had a lot left over about about 5pm and no-one else wanted to post them which is fair enough since it is my job, however Stu did take a few to post and I posted the rest.

Due to the time consuming (and paper consuming) constraints of the leaflets and the fact that people that received them have no reason to go to the website I then remembered my fantastic competition, 'Date with Fate' that I ran last year to get traffic to the site. People went to the site because they were in with a chance of winning Bop tickets (Bop is a student night out in Winchester). I then made the executive decision to bring back Date with Fate next week in an effort to boost traffic to the site in a more efficient way. I would only have to hand out tickets to people around the University campus not to houses all around Winchester.

Due to me wanting to take more a of director role in 'Date with Fate' I decided to give the first years a chance to present by posting a message on the message board advertising the chance for them to present and therefore improve their in front of camera skills. I was thinking of doing a different presenter each week and had the first one lined up as my friend in the first year Laura Dickson.

The bulletin is getting better and better week after week. I think now we also seem to have out own style, which I think is very hard thing to achieve for University students like ourselves.

Here is the Winchester News Online bulletin - 24/02/10

2001: A Space Odyssey, the theory of evolution, HAL 9000 & GLaDOS

When analysing Stanley Kubrik's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas and theories it appears to be a clear representation of these and other german idealist philosophies.

The film essentially has no real narrative which is very Nietzche. The first scene, entitled 'The Dawn of Man' starts with the dawn of time and explores the darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection. Apes were apes for millions of years and only became homoerectus (standing on two feet) 3.5 millions years ago and then became homosapiens (humans as we know them now) 30 thousand years ago. If you were wondering why this beginning scenes with the apes went on so long it is because it was timed in elapse of the film, the then split second shift to 2001 is relative to rest of the film. It took 10 millions years for apes to become homoerertus but only 30 thousand years for the homoertus to becomes homosapiens and the timing in the film is a representation of this. Since then our evolution time has decreased, for example technology took about 30 years from when electricity was invented for the phone to be invented, about 10 years form when the phone was invented for mobile phones to be invented then about 2 years from when mobile phones were invented for 3G to be invented.

The film then shows the origin of the state and language with apes. Language was made to intimidate and this is show by the apes grunting and screaming and the other apes to intimidate each other. It also shows Moonwatcher making a weapon from the bones of a dead animal and then realising that he can now kill other animals and eat them, red meat contains a lot of protein and though eating lots of this it will make his brain grow, enabling him to evolve. Essentially this makes him a super-ape as he can now kill other apes. This super-ape would then become the first human being. The same thing could possibly happen with human beings where a super-human will emerge, there could already have been a few, like Jesus Christ, Alexnder the Great, Napoleon and possibly William Shakespeare. There could also be many super-humans among us now like many artists as ordinary people do not understand modernist art or modernist music because they don't have the heightened sensibility that the artist super-human has.

The obilisk is first seen by the apes and they are unable to work out what it is. This links to Immanuel Kant's theory of 'what is the nature of the perceivable object?' This philosophy is a phenomenology. This is questioning that when you perceive something it has nature but when you dont perceive it it's just there. This can be linked to the commonly used example of if a tree falls down in the middle of a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a noise?

The main ape in the film, Moonwatcher, as he is called in the book, then makes the scientific discovery that he can now kill animals with a bone that he has picked up, after he makes this discovery, it is then shown he can stand up as apes are now much more clever and they have been eating a lot of red meat which contains protein and helps the brain grow. This was also the time when the apes learnt war, so they are evolving very quickly now, considering at this point that they had been around for 10 million years.

2001: A Space Odyssey represents Neitzsche's idea that mankind must be overcome, however we don't know what the future will be like and how we will over mankind similar to how apes wouldn't have been able to imagine spaceships. The film excessively emphasises the inability of mankind to survive in space and this in effect shows that we are trapped on earth and that we are not evolved enough to exist outside of earth. To survive in space we need to rely on an incredible amount of technology and this technology is just too difficult. With that being said that means that the species of mankind is doomed because eventually the earth will collide with the sun and there is no way mankind can escape the earth.

It can be speculated as to what HAL 9000 represents in the film. However, it could be the human conscience and that's why it tries to kill all the spaceman on board the spaceship and does succeed for all but one. This shows that humans are at their weakest when they are space and they need to be on earth and that is possibly why HAL kills them.

HAL won't let Dave, the last spaceman alive, evolve and to evolve Dave must kill HAL. Dave could be compared to Zarathustra. He will not naturally evolve and has to overcome humanity. Dave eventually manages to kill HAL but only by deconstructing human logic, which is what we base our life around. When he does kill HAL he is the last man and there is no human logic left in the world. Dave as the last man is incapable of biological life. At this point in the film there is no logic left so the film doesn't make sense and is very abstract. Before Dave dies and the human race is extinct he is living just in the mind. The end of the film shows a fetus in space which doesn't breathe, indicting this is next evolution of mankind. This race is named the ubermench.

Throughout the whole film there is no theatrical explanation of the obelisk and before the film even begins the viewer is subjected to almost five minites of a black screen which is in fact the obelisk personally addressing the viewer as they are seeing it and, like the apes, do not know what to make of it. It is geometrically perfect so it could not have been made by the apes, it is a perfect logical object, which could only exist in the mind and could not exist in nature. The obelisk is an artistic representation of the Kantian idea of the 'noumenal world', it exists, but from another realm. It is beyond understanding, from a world with a higher consciousness that the apes nor us, can understand.

In the video game Portal, the main antagonist GLaDOS is very reminiscent of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. However in 2001: A Space Odyssey the book it is said that HAL is not self aware and driven to his actions in an attempt to rationalise two conflicting orders which are concealing the true mission objective and to never hide anything from the crew. Because GLaDOS became self-aware, and developed a sinister personality, I would assume that she is more alive, and more antagonistic, than HAL 9000. The video below shows the final fight with GLaDOS where she constantly tries to disuade you (the main character) from killing her similar to how HAL tries to disuade Dave from killing him.

WINOL - Week 2 Diary

The traffic on the website for the first week wasn't very good at 88, so I knew had to increase the traffic this week. I started this by developing a leaflet to post through doors in the Winchester area.

On Tuesday, Glenn (news planning) had agreed to drive Stu (chief news reporter) to a location to film his story but Glenn's exhaust fell off and as I was the only other person with a car I was asked ifIi would go and pick up Stu and take him to his location to film his story. HIs story was about the road closures in Stanmore, it had started off as more a case study on a single student and his journey to the University which was good but I wanted to make it better. I remembered that when St. Cross road first closed there was a story about it on 'South Today' and they spoke to someone at the pub and the fish and chips shop on the closed road. with this knowledge in hand I suggested to Stu that we phone the pub now and ask if they would do and interview, they agreed and instantly the story was a lot stronger. Unfortunately there was no one at the fish and chips shop but Stu did get some good shots of it to show when the lady from the pub talks about it. This then became the top story in the bulletin and I was very proud to have been a part of it.

On Wednesday, I finished the leaflet that I was developing and after what seemed like an endless struggle against technology, managed to fit two of them on to one A4 page. I printed off about 30 pages (60 leaflets) then cut them all down to size and set off to the surrounding roads of the University and delivered them. See below for a picture of the finished leaflets. 60 leaflets covered about a road and half. I knew if i wanted to seriously increase the viewing figures that I needed to increase the amount of leaflets that I was producing and delivering and that is what i plan to do next week.


The bulletin was lot better this week. Especially editorially. I think it helped a lot that we were just generally more prepared and everyone had taken their roles in the studio a lot more seriously this week.

Here is the Winchester News Online bulletin - 17/02/10

Friedrich Nietzsch, triangles and fetuses on toast

In 'The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music' (1872) by Freiedrick Nietzsche he reference Immanuel Kant believing that all people were equal and that we all have a moral compass in the sense that we all can tell right from wrong, and that even though we may do a bad thing, we are fully aware that it is bad at the time of doing it. Kant also believed that the 10 commandments are eternally true (Thou shall not kill etc)Nietzsche rejects this idea as he believes that some people have a much stronger sense of right and wrong. He also believed that there are very few 'super people' in the world and that the world should be run by these people. One of these people was Napoleon and Nietzsche said that it would be worth killing the whole population of France for one napoleon. He also said that William Shakespeare was a 'super person from the future'. These people aren't 'super human' is a biological way though. Nietzsche believed that in a noumenal world normal people have a moral compass but the 'super people' do not because they make their own rules.

Nietzsche also discussed Arthur Schopenhauerr, who said that the cause of pain is desire and if you can suppress all desire then you will be calm. Futhermore Neitzsche wrote about the greeks believing that what we believe to be silence is actually the music of the spheres. He also wrote about music being the most abstract of all the arts and that no-one really knows what music is or how it affects us. Nietzsche also raised the idea of music being a portal to the noumenal world. He also references to Pythagoreanism. This was a religion circa 300 B.C. in Greece where believers worshipped triangles and never ate beans because they believed them to be fetuses! (fetuses on toast, pictured left) They also belived that you should never leave your impression in the bed as this would mean that you would be cursed. The fact that they worshipped triangles is interesting as the amount of things that are organised as three is amazing, for example, a degree, gold, silver & bronze, the rule of thirds, subject - verb - object, the holy trinity and countless other things. You would think that perhaps most things would be organised as two and we as humans are generally symmetrical but it's not. The Pythagorean's could have been on to something with their worship of the three sided shape.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) Nietzsche wrote about Zarathustra. He was the founder of Zoroastrianism, this was a religion where fire was worshipped. This was because they believed that fire cleanses and they also believed that fire is love and vice versa. Leonard Cohen was the most famous advocate of this religion.

Nietzsche's sister was a Nazi and after his death she tried to breed 'super people' inspired by her brother in South America.

Nietzsche took a lot of schopenhauerr's system, especially the importasnce of will in self-creation but rejected Schopenhauerr's pessimism that life is only misery. He sees the only ways out of this as madness, suicide and intoxication. I would say that this is relevant in today's society because people who left school and didn't go to college or university to study further and went straight in to a full-time dead-end job become slaves to the system. This makes them very miserable and they often (in my experience, with reference to my school friends) go out and get drunk, or intoxicated if you will, every weekend to forget about their pain of existence. However none of my old school friends have committed suicide of gone mad however (yet!)

WINOL Re-Launch - Week 1 Diary

As another term begins so does another season, if you like, of Winchester News Online (WINOL). This term my role is Managing Editor, which essentially means I have to oversee everything. My other main role is marketing the bulletin and promoting it as much as possible.

When I was the User Generated Content Editor last term I set up a Winchester News Online Facebook group and Twitter page to promote the bulletin and these two mediums have proved very useful also in my role as Managing Editor. Using social networking sites is a very 21st century way of promoting things but also a technique that many advertisers are looking more and more in to.

In reference to ratings our best bulletin was our first ever live bulletin on 18th November last year which had over 500 unique users visiting the site on that bulletin day, however as the term went on the unique visitor sessions showed a decreasing trend. This may be because for the first bulletin everyone on the team was so excited and proud to put it out that they told everyone about and all did their part to promote it. As the bulletins went on they became more and more of a formality and I was the only person promoting the bulletins through the Facebook group, Twitter page and the competitions that I was running. We also lost a lot of viewers on weeks where the bulletin did not go live at 5 because of technical issues. My aim for this term is to beat the record ratings of our first live bulletin, it wont happen straight away but i'm hoping to raise awareness of the bulletin and generate an ever increasing core audience for the bulletin each week.

I started my marketing campaign by securing advertising on a website that I write for - www.dailyinformer.net

This is the advert that I designed for the site, I had designed a logo before (for the Facebook group and Twitter page last term) but this was pretty much a direct rip-off of the BBC logo. I think this advert is fresh and although it does not feature a trademark logo it does present the information that I wanted in the advert in a clear and visually appealing way. I was provided with the dimensions of the advert by the owner of the site and so did not have that much allocated space to work with and in the end chose to only the include our name, website and a quote about us. Instead of the quote i could have written about us but didn't want to give too much away so people would hopefully click on it to find out more. I also did not want to specify the bulletin day because it would be hard to say 'the bulletin is live at 5 every Wednesday but it does then loop for a week' in a 300 x 250 pixel space without over-complicating it or confusing the viewer. I think the simple layout works well and i very happy with it. If anyone else is able to gain advertising on any other websites then at least now there is have an advert to use.

As for the actual bulletin, it was a bit of a disaster to be honest. Firstly, we had to re-shoot the bulletin four times which is three more than we would ever get in the real world. Admittedly it was everyone's first time in their new roles but there should be no excuses, everyone should have learned their role accordingly so that the first bulletin of the semester went out without a hitch. I don't think everyone got back into the swing on WINOL right away and this was another problem that let to an unorganised, slightly rushed and weaker bulletin than we had been producing last term. There were many technical faults and black holes, some of which were repaired in post-production but some unfortunately had to be left in like the ver inconsistant sound levels. Obviously we have less people that are all less experienced than the team last term but we have to work through all these problems to make WINOL bigger and better than ever!

On the positive side of things we filmed the headlines before the main bulletin, this was a great idea as we often struggled with the timings of the headlines last term. We also filmed the bulletin at 3pm rather than 4pm to make sure the bulletin would make its 5 o' clock deadline when it goes out 'as live'. One notable error in the transmission of the bulletin was that there was a spelling mistake in a statement from Tesco in one of the stories, it was extremely bad to put this out but at the end of the day comes down to bad organisation because the package wasn't checked carefully enough before being given the go-ahead to go 'live'. There was also a bit of a debate in the studio when, on our first run through, the VT operator ran an OOV that was not scripted in the auto-cue, I suggested that we just add the text into the auto-cue because it was on the other script and the story was very relevant to our audience and very current, it had come out only that day! However the director (who should be in charge in the studio anyway) said that we were over 10 minutes so didn't have time to include it so we had to cut it. Our lecturers said that it was the wrong decision to cut the story but at the same time adding it in that late may have lead to technical problems, not to mention the bulletin exceeding the 10 minute time limit. At the end of the day it comes down to bad organisation because if it was scripted in to the auto-cue in the first place then there would have been no problem. Editorially the bulletin lacked any real angled hard news stories but then again this is Winchester...

Anyway, here is the re-lauch of the Winchester News Online bulletin - 10/02/10

My Top 10 Most Anticipated Games of 2010

Fallout: New Vegas

Even though nothing is known about this game yet and it might not even release this year, with Fallout 3 being my favourite game of all time, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to love this game!

BioShock 2

Not long to wait now until the return to rapture and I have no doubt that it’s going to just as good as the original. Playing as a Big Daddy using plasmids and guns at the same time looks incredibly fun. Multiplayer looks very interesting too.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

I love Prince of Persia games and since this game is going to be a sequel to the Sands of Time trilogy then I think it will be one of the most underrated games of 2010, we’ll see though!

Dead Rising 2

If this game, like all sequels should be, is bigger and better than its predecessor then Dead Rising 2 will be non-stop fun. A more interesting main character should also add more depth this time around.

Final Fantasy XIII

The first Final Fantasy game on Xbox 360 and on this generation of consoles should be definite eye candy for any gamer, I’m sure the stunning visuals and excellent Japanese RPG gameplay will put the Final Fantasy franchise firmly back on the map.

Mass Effect 2

I know it’s already come out and I’ve only just started the first one but this game is going to be huge. Bridging the gap between gaming and cinema in a wonderfully crafted sci-fi universe.

Alan Wake

The say good things come to those who wait, but I’ve been waiting five years for this since it was announced at E3 2005. This year finally sees its release and I just hope it’s not just all hype!

Heavy Rain

A game that potentially could set the standard for adult fiction in games, I’m not a PS3 owner as you can probably tell by my list of games, but this game looks the best exclusive that Sony has this year.

Brink

A first-person-shooter that looks to have a really good control system, with it’s Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain (SMART) movement system it has the potential to flow really well.

Call Of Duty 7

I have no doubt that the yearly Call of Duty game will hit shelves around Christmas 2010, and will sell another record-breaking amount of units. I don’t even know the first thing about this game but am I excited already? Yes.