Thoughts on the press

YYesterday I attended TED X conference at Manchester BBC. I was very excited about the prospect of going to a conference on ideas for the future. I left three hours later, before the end, thoroughly frustrated and disappointed at the banal, self-congratulatory media-pushing, technobabble that was thrown at us under the guise of innovative ideas, futures and community.
For example, I don't 'twitter' but it seemed to me that there was an implicit assumption that to do so is generic and that it was an inherently good way to 'communicate'. Frankly if you had seen the inane tosh being 'twittered' then breathe a sigh of relief that these people are twittering to each other and therefore presumably too busy to 'communicate' with everyone else.
It got me thinking however, in the middle of the night, like you do, about Incredible-Edible and the potential danger of the media attention we have had for the last year or so. Quite clearly, news is new. What goes up, must come down in their world. And what we are trying to grow locally is a way of thinking about food which is a) not new - people grow stuff and b) is deliberately structured into the fabric of the thinking for the future community with all who encounter us. As such, our news, IET news is growing older, it is yesterdays news for those who see every aspect of human activity through the lens of commodity to pitch and sell.
We steer a tricky course between needing news and media to pass on the ideas to a wider audience, and falling foul to their desperate 'good life' and 'self-sufficient' portrayal of anything remotely 'alternative' to their hyped-up, techno savvy version of the future. We cannot be self-sufficient because we are interdependent, we need each other, in Tod, in the valley, in the region, and we need to help people build the links and plant the stuff to help others to see it too. This is not a run for the hills and grow your own, this is about stay where you are and dig deeper.
I am pretty sure that soon we will begin to see the backlash of the good news stories of projects like Incredible-Edible. And there is a reason why. As popularity in communities across the country grows for a version of reality that is quite clearly not in line with mainstream popular culture, fashioned and managed and manipulated by the in-crowds of the likes of the BBC and the big news managers, they will look for the weaknesses in our arguments, of which I'm sure there are many, but at least we have an argument to pitch. What they can't fit into their world view they will ridicule, and whilst I don't think in the end what they say really matters, I think we might need to consider how we will respond.