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 “The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)

It’s easy to mock judges for being out of touch with society, and it is true that they live in a cocooned world and don’t tend to mix with much of society. But when a judge tells us that “modern technology is totally out of control” it’s clear that there’s more going on than the bench needing to be advised that the Rolling Stones are, m’lud, a modern beat combo. The assault on Twitter and its users by the appropriately named Lord Judge – Britain’s lord chief justice – is about the contract that we make as citizens with the law.

So let’s back up a bit. This is about the super-injunction: the fabulous British injunction, or gagging order, that prevents people repeating an allegation, from naming those who are the subject of the allegation, and from stating that the injunction exists. They came to fame in 2009 when the trading company Trafigura used them as a device to prevent public inquiry into its dumping of toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. The Guardian eventually succeeded in having this lifted, as being contrary to the public interest.

A rolling cast known by their jobs

Since then, there has been a string of cases in which “celebrities” and others in the public eye have been granted super-injunctions, which apply in England and Wales, to protect their privacy. I can mention some of these because they have been lifted: Andrew Marr chose to relax an injunction which covered an affair that he had had; the banker Fred Goodwin’s – about an affair he had with a senior colleague as the Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed around them – was partly lifted after he was named in the both the Commons and the Lords under Parliamentary privilege on the basis that it was in the public interest.

The rest of the rolling cast of the super-injunction story is known only by a set of random initials and their jobs: the professional footballer, the actor, the broadcaster, and so on. Lord Judge is cross because many of them may, or may not, have been named on Twitter – based in California – sometimes by people who do not live in England or Wales and may, or may not, be beyond the reach of English civil law. And this became news this week because lawyers acting for the footballer prepared a lawsuit against “Twitter Inc. and persons unknown”. The judge’s view is clear:

Are you really going to say that someone who has a true claim for protection perfectly well made has to be at the mercy of modern technology?

The social contract

The trouble is that this makes the issue seem as if it is about technology, when it’s actually about the social contract which the law represents. It may be clear from a lawyer’s perspective what constitutes “a true claim for protection”, it’s less clear, from a social perspective, why or when they should be granted or who has the ability to make such a claim. Even when the law is not an ass, lawyers can be. The law is a set of agreements made, formally and informally, over time, between parliamentary representatives, judges, and the people.

The tension over the super-injunctions isn’t just about – as Lord Judge may imagine – a prurient interest in celebrity. They’re also about wealth and power. You need to be rich to finance a super-injunction. One of the drivers of them has been the increasing importance of privacy as a human right, but another is increasing economic inequality (the High Pay Commission pointed out the scale of this earlier this week). For some reason, the words of Anatole France come to mind: that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”

Blind to history

It’s also relevant that the ground rules between parliament, judges, the press and the people have been fought for over centuries. The judges’ response to the naming of Fred Goodwin by the MP John Hemming, and the possible naming of super-injuncters on Twitter, is blind to a lot of history. When another judge, the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, pops up to say that statements made in Parliament which breach injunctions might not be protected by parliamentary privilege, this blindness to history becomes intense.

Parliamentary privilege does two things. It gives parliamentarians immunity from prosecution for things said in the proceedings of parliament, and it allows journalists to report those things in a current – “contemporaneous” – news report. The right of immunity of Parliamentarians within Parliament was one of the principles for which Parliament fought in the English Revolution during the 17th century, and was enshrined in law in the Bill of Rights in 1689. The principle that the press is free to report Parliament goes hand in hand with this. As the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Goldsmith, said in 2006,

The purpose of Parliament having privilege is so that there can be free debate in Parliament. There is no point in free debate in Parliament if the free debate is then kept secret by the media.

Social media does represent a challenge to legal process. When I did jury service recently we were reminded at the start of trials that looking up details of a case online would be contempt of court. Courts now have processes to make sure that the jury decides the case privately, without external influence; our mobile devices were removed from us by the ushers as we left to deliberate, and returned after we had given a verdict. And this is as it should be. But when judges start comparing the police response to tweeting about super-injunctions – essentially a public and political argument about the limits of freedom of speech – with the way they respond to child pornography, as Lord Judge did this this week, you can sense a looming crisis of representation and legitimacy.

A particular form of preferment

One of the issues about the super-injunctions and Twitter is about a particular form of preferment: the complainants are able to afford the best legal process that money can buy, while the judges insist that this process must be honoured by the rest of us. Of course, one of the basic building blocks of the lawful state is that no citizen is above the law. But the law can maintain its integrity only if all of us can turn to it for our protection. If privacy matters, the legal protection that ensures it should not be the preserve of the rich. Imogen Thomas is now universally known to have had the affair with the professional footballer, and her reputation smeared from the bench, even while his name is protected by the courts. The tweets about the super-injunctions, I think, are at least partly a way of the citizens reminding the judges of the context in which the law must operate if it is to maintain respect and credibility.

When I first saw an apparent list of super-injunctions on Twitter, I wasn’t sure if they were accurate or not – and still have no idea. At least one seemed to be wrong, since Jemima Khan instantly denied having had an affair with Jeremy Clarkson (and who can blame her?). As to the rest, I have no information, and it would be hard to demonstrate that most of the Tweeters – even those in England and Wales – were knowingly in breach of an injunction. Or what you make of those who noted that #ryangiggs was trending on Twitter at the end of last week. Twitter, of course, unusually for a social media organisation, also has some spine, as it demonstrated by its response to the Wikileaks investigations.

As it happens, Lord Neuberger’s report on super-injunctions and anonymised injunctions, published at the end of last week, emphasised the importance of “open justice”, and said they should be granted only in limited circumstances and for short periods of time. In other words, although his Lordship didn’t put it exactly like this, that their widespread use and lazy granting last year had made the law look a bit of an ass. Maybe it wasn’t “modern technology” that was “totally out of control”.

The photograph of the Royal Courts of Justice is by Nick Weall, and published at the e-architecta site. It is used with thanks.

Alternatively, of course, you can follow the tweets at @nextwavefutures.

And while doing some blog tidying, I’ve also added a provision that lets you sign up to receive an email version of new posts.

The contribution on television and sport is written by Richard Williams, maybe the most thoughtful sportswriter in Britain. He sets up the strawman that no-one will watch live, quoting Ray Jones at Loughborough University:

“We could have scenarios in the future where no one goes to watch sport live, preferring instead to watch it on television.” With 3D promising to enhance the immediacy of the pictures – this year the World Cup will be filmed in 3D, and Sky will launch the first 3D channel – coupled with the possibility of controls that allow the viewer to zoom in and out, or to change his or her viewpoint – watching from home will offer the fan an experience they can’t get in the stadium.

Well, that’s true, but ‘live’ has a visceral quality, in the age of experience, which watching at home can’t match. People still go to fan parks to watch World Cup games rather than staying at home – or to Henman Hill, despite the poor quality of the visual experience.

But technology, as Williams observes, will change the quality of the live experience, and sometimes in unexpected ways (beyond arranging events to match peak viewing times). Certainly, live spectators will have better access to the digital experience – whether built-in replay monitors  or access to match stats. In Munich, the Allianz Arena changes colour depending on who is playing at home. Williams concludes:

The logic is inevitable: the greater the extent to which videogames take their inspiration from sport, the faster the rate at which sport will need to advance in order to keep pace with the digital world in all its ever-multiplying dimensions. … And the response of those who are either priced out, or simply yearn for the kind of ambience already vanishing from the superstadiums, will ensure plenty of support for all levels of sport.

The argument about talent running teams is less compelling. Paul Hayward starts, effectively, from the position that talent has more scope than it used to, even in cricket, and projects this forwards:

Imagine this, in football: the world’s top 20 players form their own club, build a stadium (easy) and bring so much financial and celebrity clout that Uefa can’t force them to start in the Ryman League. Remember the dread of Ronaldo (not Portugal, but Ronaldo) failing to make it to this summer’s World Cup? Talent is the new tyranny.

The argument about this is quite complex, but it rests in media economics. John Kay wrote a celebrated piece some years ago about the way in which, in competitive markets, media industries fall into three parts – talent, production, and distribution. As sport becomes an adjunct of media it follows the same pattern. The three have different skills, and in lucrative markets such as professional sport talent can cream off a rich share without the inconvenience of having to take responsibility for anything. The producers here, I think, are the leagues and other promoters (sometimes intermediaries provide glue for the parts), but also the clubs, who have the long-term relationship with supporters. Talent is the most ephemeral of these three. And even in tennis – the sport which seems most controlled by its talent – the ATP wields disproportionate power.

As to declining sports, the threat to Formula One and skiing come from environmental concerns – in Formula One’s case, its sponsors become increasingly exposed to taunts of environmental inconsistency. The threat to snooker appears to be boredom. “After 80 years of proud professionalism, the game is unlikely to exist in its current form for much longer. By 2020, it could be an amateur sport again”, writes Barney Ronay. Perhaps this is not a trend – after all, some sports will always be worse managed than others. But it raises the interesting question of whether, after a generation or more in which the trend has been towards more, and better paid, professionalism in sport, perhaps we’ve reached saturation point.

The trends touch on issues such as technology, embraced by tennis and rugby, and now by cricket, but resisted by football, a trend that seems certain to extend over the decade. It misses one of the looming threats to hardcore contact sports such as rugby and American football, which is that injury levels may cripple the sport, at a professional level, literally, as athletes become stronger and fitter, and also at youth level, as parents discourage their children from the risks involved.

With news of the attack on the Togo team still fresh, and that in Pakistan on the Sri Lankan cricket team recent, the other missing trend is darker; anything with money and media coverage is a potential target. The more sport succeeds, the more vulnerable it becomes.

Haigh, an Australian who’s one of the best cricket writers in the world, is interested in this because of the career of Donald Bradman, a batting phenomenon whose prowess was identified young. Bradman, notes Haigh, ‘took England by storm’ in the Ashes Tour of 1930, when he was 21. He’d already signed up with an agent to write a book, and when extracts appeared in the British papers during the tour (in breach of Bradman’s touring contract) he was censured by the Australian Cricket Board.

During that tour, the Australians found themselves staying in the same hotel as the aviator Amy Johnson. At the time she was “perhaps the only non-royal person more famous in the Empire than Bradman after her 19-day flight from London to Darwin four months earlier”. Johnson had sold her story to the Daily Mail, and was in the middle of an exhausting publicity tour organised by the paper.

Identity as nightmare

As Haigh writes, “her identity as ‘Amy Johnson’, she complained privately, had become ‘a nightmare and an abomination’. Shortly afterwards, apparently on the edge of a nervous breakdown, she checked into a Harley Street clinic.

The American aviator Charles Lindbergh fared even more badly. After his successful solo flight in 1927 across the Atlantic, he could not cash or send a cheque, or send shirts to the laundry, as neither would be returned. Matrons in St Louis fought over a corn cob he’d chewed (shades of Justin Timberlake). He had to marry in secret, leaving the ceremony hunched in the back of a friend’s car, while a decoy led the press to a false destination. Honeymooning on a yacht a week later, he and his bride were buzzed by a seaplane with a photographer dangling out of the window. Later, of course, he reached the dark heart of celebrity when his son was abducted and murdered.

Avoiding celebrity

Haigh’s question, I think, is why none of this happened to Bradman. The reason seems to be that he  maintained an old-fashioned lifestyle and philosophy in modern times. As a player, he was always fairly formal – sometimes to the point of prickliness – in his dealings with the Australian Cricket Board and others. During his career he moved to Adelaide, out of the mainstream, and lived there in the same house for the rest of his life. He married once, and stayed married. And although he remained involved in cricket, his work was outside of it, as a sports goods dealer and a stockbroker.

Haigh quotes the work of the economist Tyler Cowen, who calculated that, contrary to expectations, the famous are likely to die younger than rest of us. They are more likely to die from heart disease, kidney failure, addiction, or alcoholism. “Fame”, says Cowen, “tends to be bad for the famous”. Bradman’s lifestyle had its own rewards, He lived to the age of 92.

Obviously such considerations are opened up by Murdoch’s recent remarks that he plans to exclude his newspaper content from the Google search engine. The broad sweep of strategy had some detail added to it by his “chief digital officer”, the other, less famous, Jonathan Miller, who explained that Google didn’t provide very high value consumers:

The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often thannot read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable oftraffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google]is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”

The Ad Lab blog at MIT tries to dig into this case, and in a way that looks for some rationale for News Corp, but the story they tell doesn’t match the data they’ve dug up; on the News Corp financial services, Google is second or third largest search traffic provider, on news services it’s usually top.

Squeeze points

The evidence for the clash of business models comes from a look at News Corp’s preferred businesses, and they’re typically in sectors where a squeeze point in the value chain offers some control over the market and creates barriers to entry. In the newspaper business, that’s the sheer cost of printing presses and the complexity of distribution networks. In the pay-television business it’s the encryption technology (where News Corp also owns businesses which do the encryption) and the rights deals with sports bodies and studios. Both are backed up by some of the best competition lawyers that money can buy.

The competition between such business models and the internet is like the battle between water and stone; water will win, but it will take time. This is the best explanation for Murdoch’s positioning; he gets the internet perfectly well, and understands its long term impact on his businesses, and is looking to squeeze out value in the meantime through whatever delaying tactics are to hand.

Cory Doctorow points out that the MySpace acquisition – certainly overpriced – was offset by a sale of the search rights, and  that Google competitors out there might – just – pay for exclusive rights to search News Corp’s online properties. Using the ‘Boston Box‘ model, this suggests that Rupert knows the game’s up for the papers, at least in the medium term, and that he will milk his cash cows (high market share, low market growth) for what he can get.

Playing the lobbying game

And maybe there’s a lobbying game going on here as well. The old joke about the definition of chutzpah is of the boy who who kills his mother and father and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan. As a well-practised monopolist/oligopolist, Murdoch knows one when he sees one, so drawing attention to Google, particularly, makes sense. I think we’ll see more of this from News Corp in its public pronouncements in the future. (Indeed, James Murdoch may even now be regretting wasting his Edinburgh platform on attacking the BBC and Ofcom).

And we’ll see more positioning along the lines of ‘ickle-lickle newspapers being beaten up in the playground by big ugly internet monsters’. The other part of Jonathan Miller’s remarks at the Monaco Media event, in which he also acknowledged that News Corp wouldn’t go it alone, is likely the shape of kite-flying to come:

“We will lead. There is a pent up need for this. There has to be a resolutionfor the free versus pay debate otherwise we cannot afford to pay for thingslike news bureaus in Kabul.”

I’d like to believe Cory Doctorow’s account of Murdoch as, Kane-like, “an out-of-touch moustache-twirler who’s set his sights on remaking the web as a toll booth”, and Doctorow seems alarmed – rightly – by Murdoch’s attack on the notion of “fair use“, which is one of the deep underpinnings of independent and academic research, and of free speech. These things are dangerous fall-out from people trying to hold onto an empire as it starts to totter. Murdoch’s position here is designed to cause ambivalence, as News Corp so often does. I’m supposed to believe in the value of the freedom of speech and information created by news bureaux ‘in Kabul’, (and of course News talks about Kabul and not about Gaza). But I also know, over and over, the way in which that news is distorted in the Sun and the New York Post. This isn’t about protecting independent news media; it’s about welcoming the decline and fall of a media monopoly.

Update, 15th November: John Naughton notes in his Observer column (available here via his blog) that people rarely pay the full value of content in print media either – and usually, it’s not even close.

Update, 16th November: Emily Bell argues that this is about politicking by News Group:

The Murdoch threats to block the search engine, take away his highly original content and build a big paywall are a signal to politicians with a grasp of digital markets that he would like something done about this. For all his public dislike of big government, Murdoch’s most audacious business gains have always come from playing a brilliant political game.

Live music is becoming more popular – both in clubs and at festivals:

Unable to make a living from record sales, more and more bands are playing live. That experience can’t be put onto a memory card—and people are willing to pay for it, and to pay quite a lot. Concert attendances are at an all-time high: recordings are increasingly ads for live shows, and live shows have become once again the real thing, the unduplicable.

At the same time, the recorded artefact seems to be changing (if more slowly I’d say) to reconstruct the value that lies inside, at least for those who wish to collect:

The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable—so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. Of course they’ll still want to sell their music, but now they’ll embed that relatively valueless product within a matrix of hard-to-copy (and therefore valuable) artwork….That suggests to me the possibility of a refreshingly democratic art market: a new way for visual artists, designers, animators and film-makers to make a living.

I think we know what happens when the cost of duplication of digital artefacts falls to zero, and the cost of distribution is too small to measure, and has few economies of scale. The answer isn’t that lawyers working for the companies which used to make money from that product get rich for a short while, although this happens to be true. The answer is that instead of being a medium of economic exchange, they become a form of social exchange – they move from the realm of the commercial to the realm of The Gift. The main economic value attaches instead around the social exchange represented by the digital artefact rather than the artefact itself.

Musicians have learnt this more quickly than record companies (but this is unsurprising), and the music business seems well on its way to reconfiguring itself. [Update 19 May 09: Indeed this was one of the stories which emerged from presentations at the Great Escape Convention in Brighton last weekend: Brian Message, the chair of the Music Managers’ Forum, told delegates that the declining power of labels and radio, and increased access to fans via the internet, was proving to be a source of innovation.

All over the world, a quiet revolution is taking place. Young artists – technology- and net-savvy – are doing it for themselves because they have little choice; the investment isn’t there like it used to be.”]

But perhaps the more interesting question at the moment  is whether there are lessons from the music business for news and journalism (it’s worth looking at Frank Rich’s recent New York Times article on this): what is the social exchange here, and how might economic value attach to it?

Pointer via The Edge.

The role of Associated Newspapers and the Mail in creating – constructing – the story is well documented in an article in the Guardian. Given the ten day gap between the programme’s broadcast and its emergence as “news”, this is clearly not innocuous. The article claims that Brand’s response to the initial coverage – which was to remind listeners of the Mail’s record on Hitler – had the effect of inflaming editor-in-chief Paul Dacre.

I’m not a fan of Brand, and I think his phone messages were unfunny (I’ll come back to this), but he was right to point out that the Mail has form here – and in fact the form was worse than Brand described it. (And not just on Hitler, come to that).

The original two complaints (elsewhere stated as five, in an article by Ian Jack that mentions Thomas Hobbes and Henri Bergson) sound about right to me; I spent a year in the late ’80s producing the viewer response programme Right to Reply in the late 80s, and used to have to study broadcast duty logs. The internet has made complaining easier since then, but the profusion of channels means that channels are better at attracting their intended audience, and also better at screening out people who won’t enjoy the content.

But even the fury of the British tabloid press and their owners in pursuit of an anti-BBC story does not transform a handful of complaints into more than 30,000 – not even when compounded by the Corporation’s zen-like approach to crisis management.

There’s something else going on here, and I think it is this: that one of the outcomes of the credit crunch is that the sight of the rich and famous kicking the rest of us has become more repugnant. We had a clue of this change in the public mood in that 24 hours around the bank bail-out when it seemed that Fred Goodwin, having dragged the RBS to the edge of bankruptcy through his reckless management, was still thinking of holding out for his bonus even as the bank was nationalised. (LloydsTSB’s present plans to pay its bonuses may yet also spark the same public ire, though not with the same enthusiastic support of the Mail or the Sun.)

It is the misfortune of Brand and Ross to get their timing dead wrong. By any objective standards, the bankers have done more harm and been more lavishly rewarded, but it was their misfortune to be standing in plain light when the financiers who should be getting this public wrath had retreated to their villas. And, of course, it’s Ross’ £6m annual salary that joins this together: a totemic rag to media owners who would like to dismantle the BBC, but also a visible reminder to us that the rich are different from the rest of us, and not just because they earn more money. (One of the problems of salaries this large is that they’re easy to mock and difficult to comprehend: but if Ross earned in a year the £120,000 or so he earns every week he would still be in the top 1% band of UK income).

There’s one other story in here as well, about the purpose of comedy. You don’t have to be a fan of Trevor Griffiths’ fine (if neglected) play The Comedians to believe that comedy is not just about making people laugh. It should also tell us a truth – about ourselves, about our society, even sometimes (gasp!) tell truth to power.

Ricky Gervais’ television series have done this well – making viewers uncomfortable at the same time as making them laugh; so has The Thick of It. There was a moment of truth on The News Quiz last week when Sandi Toksvig made a sharp comment involving a memory pill and Peter Mandelson.

When people worry about whether the BBC Trustees will now impose guidelines on comedy which prevent performers and writers from taking risks, this is what they mean: will it be allowed to tell us things about ourselves and our rulers which are uncomfortable? This is where, say, media-inflamed rows about the work of Chris Morris differ sharply, since Morris inflames because he uses comedy to show us the way things work. In comparison, let’s face it: bragging about shagging to an answerphone doesn’t really cut it.

Edgar noted the other “factually-based” plays which had been critical successes at the Edinburgh Festival this year: Scamp Theatre’s Charlie Victor Romeo (edited from black box transcripts), and Motherland (based on the testimony of mothers, sisters and wives of British soldiers in Iraq). The dance company DV8 has a show at the National from the end of October based on 85 audio interviews about homophobia. They’re only the latest of what is now quite a substantial body of work (well-rehearsed in his article).

Although Edgar didn’t mention it (and I can’t find the link I’m looking for) the same phenomenon has also been noticed in the cinema, where documentaries such as Bowling for Columbine, Inconvenient Truth, The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Taking Liberties have had theatrical releases.

Why isn’t journalism still doing this? All sorts of reasons, from falling editorial budgets, to less regulation, to the demands of rolling television news (which elevates description over analysis, the ‘now’ over the ‘why’), to greater media concentration.

What’s interesting about Edgar’s piece is the historical comparison he makes with the ‘Theatre of Fact‘ movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “which built plays out of documents, particularly trial transcripts”.  The Theatre of Fact was associated with playwrights such as Peter Weiss (The Investigation, about the trial of Auschwitz guards), and Robert Hochhuth, who confronted their audiences with facts so they couldn’t retreat in fictional versions.

There seem to me to be similarities. The late ’50s and early ’60s in Germany were times when it was difficult to say certain things – the Nazi history was too close, and for many still too personal – and in recent years the dominance of neoliberal ideas in public and political discourse in the UK has pushed alternative versions to the margins.

The question is whether, in effect, confronting people with the texts – the official versions – has an impact or not. Edgar says it does:

In the 2003 play about railway privatisation, The Permanent Way, David Hare and his collaborators did the kind of in-depth, investigative, historically analytical job on a contemporary political story that conventional journalism rarely does any more, occupying space abandoned both by long-form print journalism and by traditional television documentary. In Deep Cut, reporter Brian Cathcart is quoted as saying that “journalism dropped the ball” after the internal inquiry into the four deaths, implying that theatre has now picked it up.

Steve Waters, a playwright who discussed this in an article four years ago, thinks not.

Today’s theatre of fact emerges in a time of ideological confusion where documents demand commentary. Yet there is no apparent political project beyond a commitment to confront actuality. Justifying War’s condensation of Hutton exemplifies this, the show reproducing the inquiry’s ambivalent brief, offering incidental vignettes of corruption gathered round the central absence of Dr Kelly.

This debate resonates with my own personal history. I spent the first years of my working life as a broadcast journalist, believing that better presentation of the “facts” was enough to enable people to make their choices. I think I’ve now come to the view that this isn’t enough: that understanding is a deeper process which requires interpretation and meaning. Even if you know what was said at the inquest, in the briefing room, it doesn’t have an effect without a perspective – one that even good investigative reporting can’t provide on its own. This is the case that Waters makes:

In the work of dramatising and fictionalising there is often a deeper act of interpretation at work that transcends reportage; for stories are not just a means of getting past the libel lawyers. … The theatre of fact offers a necessary challenge to writers to embrace contemporary life, and proves the stage is one of the few public places where complex stories may be told. However, the playwright’s imagination should be chastened, but not defeated, by actuality; in a world flooded with information, its task remains to reveal the facts behind the facts.

The documentary version is a slide show of Sao Paulo after the ban.

And the fictional version was made by Sky to support its current Sky Movies campaign (“because you like your movies without interruptions we’ve already taken out the ads”). Not enough time tonight to reflect on the potential difficulties associated with this for a broadcaster which is partially funded by advertising, and also spends heavily on advertising to support its marketing and promotion.

Obviously the Sky promotion has better production values (a director has been hard at work directing) and the music is more carefully chosen. And Sao Paulo is a little more untidy than Sky’s visualisation. But in terms of the streetscape, there’s not that much difference.

However, both these pictures seem incomplete; without the outdoor advertising, the streets are fairly drab. In the medium to long term, this seems unlikely. What’s more likely to happen is that the streets will regain colour – but with images which come from a public culture rather than from private desires.