August 21, 2019
I have long wanted to produce something like a magazine – a daily, diverse drumbeat – that is also easy and fast to curate and edit.
Because… I’ve been grappling with this:
The world is to rich and diverse: Why are mainstream media so predictable/boring, narrowly focused, uniform – I mean, buy your country’s five largest newspapers one morning and see how similar their foreign affairs pages are.
And why are they so politically correct in the sense of promoting a US/Western bias and offering so little, if anything, of the enormous and interesting “different” stuff produced outside the mainstream and outside the West itself?
And why are they, willingly or not, more pro-war than pro-peace?
And can “another” media be produced on-the-go and without any money?
Quite a tall order and I understand if you think – No it can’t, what an unrealistic idea!
But now it is here – The Transnational Peace Affairs. After having been tested for more than a year.
Its neither going to compete with The Transnational – the homepage of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF) – nor with my personal blog (this one).
It’s going to be different.
My TFF friends and I see and read a lot every day – articles, videos, reports, backgrounders, news – of many and different kinds and from all over the world. However, only a fraction of it that can enter our site or blog since it takes quite some time to process an article from one medium out there to one’s blogs – pasting text, making links, formatting, find a featured photo, editing, etc.
Flipboard is a wonderful option and promising enough to make the experiment.
When I read an article on the Internet – desktop or mobile – and think it is good and want to help people be better informed about the world – all I do is to press a so-called bookmarklet in my browser and – fliiiip…! – it is featured on the magazine in a minimalist, elegant and aesthetically pleasing layout.
That is “Transnational Peace Affairs” on the platform called Flipboard with millions of magazines and 145 million users. More statistics here.
Essentially it is…
… carefully curated for concerned citizens – at your fingertips, in one place and free: More diverse, critical, global, educational and trustworthy than your daily and prime time television…
It sounds incredible, doesn’t it? Too good to be true…
But modern technology opens up new possibilities – and we should use them, we who operate on a shoestring budget, we who are truly free and independent and … we who have something to say.
And what we say is this: Peace shall be – can be – created by peaceful means. Every kind of violence – and there are many – threatens the future of humankind.
And we say, that there are many ways of seeing and understanding the world – just not the one and only you got in school or are served by those mainstream media. So:
See Transnational Peace Affairs! Follow it! Tell a friend, lover, colleague or someone you really think should know better about it.
Oh, one more thing: Download the Flipboard app to your mobile phone and/or iPad. Try it there – try the fun global “flipping” – a completely new way of learning about the world. You may even start a magazine yourself with some theme you care about – like we care about peace.
We call this public education in increasingly anti-literate times. If you do not read, see and reflect about the world, somebody will try – and succeed – in fooling you.
Do not let them!
