Getting our mojo back

The GMF 2017 was the German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle’s 10th and its best thus far, according to those who have been to the event many times. While the most modern ideas projected to media representatives added the most value, their slick presentation made the event memorable.

A bio ethical hacker named Hannes Sjoblad from Sweden pointed to trends emerging in the field in a revealing presentation. With a chip implanted in his hand, he showed the various objects he was eliminating from his trouser pockets like keys to his house and car, visiting cards — since he can simply have his hand scanned to leave his contact details on your smartphone — and all those various little things like mini notebooks that cause clutter.

A philosopher named Thomas Matzinger took us on a journey down ethics as he narrated the amazing advances that are coming about in applied genetic research, gene editing, genomics and robotics, and which will pose intriguing questions of law in the future. If a robot in France, controlled by the mind of a scientist undergoing a brain scan in Israel, kills a person, is the scientist guilty of murder or culpable homicide, or is only the runaway robot to blame?

A MoJo (mobile journalism) expert named Yusuf Omar from CNN demonstrates in a workshop on how best to present news in the new medium. He shows us the most effective means of video reporting and editing on site and sending from the field in what he says is “Jeans Journalism” because all the tools of communication that he needs can go into his jeans pockets like the smartphone and its accessories.

Other experts lament the loss of privacy in people’s inevitable online footpath. One of them says it has become possible to predict with 90 per cent accuracy a person’s sexual orientation from his/her image of video surveillance. It must also come as a shock to old timers that 50 per cent of people in the first world are now getting their news from the social media and at least a quarter of young people in the 18-26 age group are getting their news exclusively from social media.

Innovate or become irrelevant is the message from media space experts who also reassure us print journalists that “Great journalism can be profitable”. A Puerto Rican living in Manhattan and working for Hollywood speaks on the incredible tools of the digital age that make worthwhile experiences possible even as he recounts his journey to educate aboriginal youth in a Perth university Down Under.

Remember we are in the city of Bonn! We are never far away from the great classical traditions of Western music. The show began with music and there were plenty of interludes on three days, including one by a countertenor with a gifted voice. But nothing quite gave us as much enjoyment as a joint musical session with a musicologist who roped in all those present in the plenary hall on the concluding day to join and create music of sorts.

Computer keyboards had been placed on all the tables and we had to use them to bang our hands on or strum our fingers across the keys or simply clap our hands to create noise. But with the master dictating the tempo of it all by “conducting” us, it came out like great music does with the keyboarder and the violinist lending it enchanting notes. The session took us back several years to our youth as we threw ourselves into this personal musical experience with gusto.