WINOL Reflection

After finally coming to the end of our first semester alone on WINOL, it's come to that time again to look back and reflect on everything we ever did wrong and publish it. Like a who's who and a what's what of our past six weeks of stress, frustration and hair tearing.

To be honest, I feel our time on WINOL without the third years could have gone worse. At the end of the day we are producing a bulletin every week complete with news packages, sports and good graphics. We always seem to have people on production which we never did last year and minor hiccups have been taken on board and reprimanded within the day.

The News Team have now got it all down in terms of framing interviewees and general shots of whatever their story is. Voice overs are clear and things are now getting to the point where there is no fear in introducing a cheeky pun (Sam Homewoods package about Marching Mums). There are no things such as white balance issues and overall I think the news team has become very strong and trustworthy with people like Andrew Giddings and Keiran Brannigan who seem to have a natural flair for it.

Sports of course is excelling. SportsWeek has hundreds of loyal followers and fans who never fail to watch or comment. It's the strongest area of WINOL and can stand on its own without the bulletin. I think this is largely down to Will Cooper at the helm as they have promoted and made connections in all the right places. They often get their packages down early which means they can spend time on perfecting areas like the title sequence-adding gloss to an already superb area of WINOL (and for me to say that about sport is unheard of).

The only issue, small though it may be, would be in the gallery itself. Although we have an extremely strong production team, for the first few weeks there were issues with people coughing during VT's which was picked up on microphones which hadn't been muted. For some reason as well this semester there seemed to be an extreme lack of talkback between the gallery and the floor which meant camera people had to cue presenters. Though these are minor hiccups they are the only things which if we got on top of, we would have a near perfect bulletin.

When it came to deadlines, we met them, but at a push. In terms of things like the script, it should be down to one maybe two people to decide whether it is good to go as opposed to other people coming over and making changes. Breaking news and script changes cannot be helped but when the script is due it won't do to have people coming over and putting in their opinion about how headlines should be written/said/typed. When it comes to their turn to write the script, they can then alter it how they see fit, but until that point, the script should be down to whoever is presenting the bulletin that week.

Subbing was of course a nightmare this semester. When the term began there was major confusion over who was in charge of what and why. When this finally got cleared up there was frustration from reporters about how their stories had been altered beyond recognition by subs, and sometimes filled with mistakes. This was finally all sorted out by changing how the site is handled. Editors are now in charge of their teams articles and publishing them as opposed to being handed to a complete different party.

This is a change for the better, and although I can see where reporters were coming from, they made it even more difficult by handing in articles at either midnight or 1am in which case by the time the subs woke up, they had no time to sub-edit it properly and get it up on the site before the deadline. The whole thing was not properly organised and the deadline in itself was unreasonable in regards to lectures we had Thursday morning.

In terms of people within the class I think there is a lack of communication and understanding between team members. Everybody's job is just as important as the others and no one is better and/or should be undermined. As well as this people should listen to each other and talk properly as opposed to immediately ranting. At the end of the day this is a course, not a career. Although I myself went through a phase of needing to remind myself that I'm not actually getting paid to work for Winchester News Online.

With a few more weeks practice I have every faith in us that we can achieve Soccer Saturday. It would be an incredible coup for us in terms of future work and practice for live television. It would be difficult and a lot more stressful than our "worry Wednesday" but I think it can be achieved and it's something we need to be passionate and put our all into.

After all "WINOL in this together!"

The Outsider

Like James Joyces' Ulysses, The Outsider seemed to be written like a thought process.

The style was disjointed with short snappy sentences. With quotes like "With the 2 o' clock bus...should get there before nightfall" it's like the reader has entered the characters head, with all his reassurances, worries and random thoughts.

The theme of existentialism runs throughout the book with ideologies like time being completely irrelevant to the story. The characters can exist and react in a sort of suspended reality where there is little to no past guilt and no thought of future consequences. The present time is also non-existent. "Mother died today. Or, maybe yesterday".

In terms of the future, Meursault seems to not even have an inkling of it when he is faced with old people. Rather than understanding that they are people and a majority of us will face old age at some point, he regards them with interest as almost being separate entities.

They were "noiseless" and "grouped around the keeper". He can't decide whether "they were greeting me and trying to say something". He exists in the present and therefore old age is something non-existent in his world. Also the fact that he hasn't seen his mother for years implies that he probably didn't witness her aging either.

Later on Meursault agrees to marry Marie just for the sake of it with little care for the actual ceremony and sacrifices of marriage in regards to just answering the simple question of "will you marry me?".

His consistently living in the present means the things that occur to him right then and there he will become consumed with. When a woman cries at his mothers funeral he feels like "she will never stop", this is probably just because Meursault has no comprehension of a few minutes time when she no doubt will. In a restaurant Meursault becomes randomly interested in a woman who he coins "the little robot". She has funny movements and he follows her out of interest until he can no longer see her again at which point she is forgotten about.

In existentialism the past is pure guilt. To live a peaceful existence you need to have no recollection of the past and no thought for the future, which in itself is dread. Meursault epitomizes this after he has killed the Arab. It isn't until he is being interrogated that it suddenly dawns on him that he took a life. Even then it comes across as nothing more than a fleeting thought, a sort of half interested realization of what he has done. If it wasn't for the rules and regulations of society forcing that emotion in him, it wouldn't have phased him. It also can be assumed that as he is shooting the Arab he is not thinking about the impact that would have in the future in his own life.

His detached emotions are summed up right at the beginning of the book when his mothers hearse casually reminds him of nothing more than the pen trays in his office at work. Things are very mundane to him and no object or item is more significant than the other. He also displays emotional detachment when it comes to Salamano abusing his dog and Raymond beating his girlfriend. Although it is noted at one point that when Salamano loses his dog and begins to cry, Meursault thinks of his mother. Though he himself makes no connection. He also comments at one point "one can't help feeling a little guilty I suppose", like emotions are things to be embarrassed about.

According to existentialism; guilt, fear and worry are all things that come from others. "Hell is other people" is a quote that epitomizes the existentialism view. Meursault has a few examples of his own although some of the time, the judgement from others is in his head. When the old people appear at his mothers wake he notes that "they came to sit in judgement of me". When he asks for time off of work he "had an idea that he looked annoyed and I said 'sorry sir'". When he reaches the old people's home he comments about the warden: "I had a feeling he was blaming me for something". Even after his mother's funeral he leaves the grounds to go for a walk and thinks to himself "what an agreeable walk I could have had if it hadn't been for mother". Although the premise is that he is still feeling grief and therefore can't enjoy himself, the phrasing and wording of it sounds accusatory, as if it was selfish of her to die at that point in time when he could have enjoyed a walk.

In the world of the outsider, there is no affection; merely getting "used" to each other. There is nothing remarkable in the world of Meursault. As Edmund Husserl, a phenomonolgist once remarked: when objects are paid attention to is when they become a problem. If you just breeze through life and pay no attention to the world around you, the past, the future, or even the present that much, you will be the perfect manifesto of existentialism.

The New Industrial State

John Kenneth Galbraith was born on October 15th 1908 in America. He was an economist and a Keynesian.

Keynes (Galbraiths influence), opposed the original ideologies of Laissez-Faire Capitalism which believed that the market would achieve balance by itself. He instead believed the Government should step in to increase spending whenever and wherever the case may be.

In Galbraiths book The New Industrial State, written in 1967, he talks of a large firm called the Techno-Structure. This Techno-Structure should supposedly be something like a human entity, being fairly self-sufficient. These changes in the industry, from manpower to a technology led market were brought to the forefront after World War II when changes to the economic life were far greater than anything that had come before it. However, Galbraith argues that this modern technology reduces the reliability of the market, since so much more needs to be managed, monitored, and avoided. One tiny fluctuation in the system could bring the Techno-Structure to a grinding halt. Also the whole system is much more inflexible as situations need to be known far in advance and not changed.

Before this technology was introduced, products were far less abundant, but far more necessary. Products such as loaves of bread or medicine were in short supply but there was no question of them being constantly needed as they were everyday objects that maximised the consumer’s satisfaction levels. But with nowadays industry being able to produce products at a high rate, items such as beauty products or games need an element of persuasion if they are to be brought. Although they may maximise one persons satisfaction level, it may not apply to everyone and in order to shift the levels of product the structure has produced, elements like advertising come into play. Since in recent times, people were becoming less and less poverty stricken, those with low levels of literacy were joining the classes of people with excess money to spend. Therefore television and radio advertising were key to reaching these specific individuals.

The regulation of Aggregate Demand became a recognised policy during the 1930’s and was advocated by John Maynard Keynes. It was put into effect by the Roosevelt Administration and was thought to be a move on behalf of the Labour Party, and was immediately opposed. The reasons being that during the 1930’s most industry was led by Entrepreneurial Corporations who did not have a need for it. This was down to the fact that they were using simple technology with little to no planning involved. They could simply lay off workers if demand was to fall and they had a much smaller Techno-Structure. Of course the more Mature Corporations were desperately in need for the regulation as that sort of planning would offer them security and safe planning. They were vulnerable to a fall in earnings which would curtail the whole business and one mistake could “disintegrate the very brain of the enterprise”. Of course the more Mature Corporations won out in the end and technology continued to expand.

Aggregate Demand needs to be regulated as correct production (not going into un-necessary excess) creates large amounts of savings. These savings are then stored and used to fund further production. If these profits and savings are not made then they cannot meet the need of Aggregate Demand, therefore monitoring is imperative as the whole system depends upon one another. This sort of monitoring prevents unpredictable fluctuations in demand, sales and production in which case planning would be impaired, technology would have to be used more cautiously and the whole Techno-Structure would be far less secure.



The Techno-Structure is essentially just one big well oiled machine in theory. Men who work for these large organizations agree to lose all individuality for it and even rival firms within the structure avoid competition because situations like price-cutting would threaten its survival.

“Mutually destructive behaviour is banned”

Whether this infinite structure is actually in control or not is another question. Most people will argue that there is such a thing as Consumer Sovereignty, where the consumer governs the uni-directional flow from purchasing an item from the market, where this information will then reach up to the industry. Meaning the Techno-Structure can monitor what people are buying and respond to the customer’s choices. This is called The Accepted Sequence, and it sustains the idea of industries trying to understand what produces the most customer satisfaction.

However, The Accepted Sequence may be becoming less and less so as the producing firms reach out to control the markets, manage behaviour and shape the social attitude of the consumer. Mainly with aspects like advertising and heavy persuasion as to what is good for them to purchase.

In terms of consumers buying products, not only is it important for them to do so, it is equally as important that they have the money to spend in the first place. Spending is a physical need, even within the techno-structure itself. When it comes to situations like increased incomes or maybe a slight depression; the Techno-Structure uses taxes to keep demand under control. When income increases, so do taxes. This prevents people from spending ridiculous amounts and spiralling demand out of control. Likewise, when incomes decrease, so do taxes. Freeing up more money for people to spend and therefore keeping demand high. Taxes must be large in regards to income to have any sort of effect and Taxes are purely there so as to direct consumer spending.