Notes Reflections: Beyond Broadcasting Conference, May 12 and 13, 2006
Beyond Broadcasting was an open and interesting conference that engaged in a conversation that is extremely important for the times. And while it happened over a month ago, it has not gone away, in that a significant number of the presentations as well as blogs and other remnants of May 12 and 13 are easily accessed from the conference web site. They should be very useful resources to anyone interested in the participatory media and new media.
http://www.beyondbroadcast.net/blog/
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Organizers
This is a collaborative project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School along with Public Radio Exchange, the Center for Social Media at American University, New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the Project for Open Source Media, and the Center for Citizen Media.
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This was an important conference because of its ambitious goals and assumptions of strategic timeliness, important for what was said and shared, and important for what was excluded and not said. The key assumption behind the conference was stated by Jake Shapiro from Public Radio Exchange, “There is tremendous potential at the intersection of public and participatory media.” And surely in this moment of tectonic structural media shifts, this is a good assumption with which to start. Shapiro, defines public media as “the public broadcasting ecosystem”: local public radio and television, and “participatory media”, defined as, “this exploding world of technology and social software, and self distribution, accessible tools of creation and dissemination.”
It is annoying that public media was conceptualized as excluding media arts centers, cable access centers, community radio, community networks, all are forms of public media and practitioners of participatory media, but not directly connected to Public Television and Radio; and participatory media is defined as confined to the Internet and social software. Ignoring at least 25 years of participatory media development, the “new community media” world of the Internet has appropriated the social values, goals, hard fought ideological approaches and language of community media, while failing to acknowledge the continued existence of those movements and institutions as a source. This is a recurring theme in US communications policy and media development, new media, new times — always ignoring history — and Beyond Broadcasting’s participatory media practitioners are true to form.
Conference Goals
The goals of the conference were, according to the conference web site, [go look]:
• create an opportunity for interaction between active participants in traditional public media and new participatory web-based efforts;
• to showcase and discuss the latest projects and models emerging faster than anyone can keep track of;
• and to cultivate a shared understanding of the potential and meaning of a renewed public media role.
The conference certainly fulfilled all of its stated goals, and beyond in my mind. The gathering did, indeed, advance the understanding of the intersection of public media and participatory media, and it provided an excellent moment for networking among key leaders and practitioners. But I liked Jake Shapiro’s statement of the first goal better: “Pull together a really cool, unique mix of public broadcasters, social media makers, technology developers, and a whole bunch of you who were clearly beyond categorization, or, a, taxonomy.”
Jake’s statement reveals an underlying working assumption of the conference that is noteworthy — which goes something like this: Let’s get public broadcasting types together with the Open Source movement, who are building participatory Internet tools, on-line tools and media, and businesses — often, I suspect, with start up money from companies like Google and Yahoo. Let’s adopt an attitude of “really cool” — “really cool” things, and people that are comfortable with the “really cool” precociousness so prevalent in the new media world, and the arrogant “they just don’t get it” attitude of that world, so we can indulge in a sense of being on the cutting edge, of, well, just about everything.
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Precious Moment: Open Source, radio host, Chris Lydon, after some tortured discussion regarding the question, “Is the Internet the new public?” concludes that, well, indeed, the Internet is the new public. After a significant struggle to get recognized from the audience, Nolan Bowie, a telecom fellow at Harvard, points out that half the population of the planet has never made a telephone call. Later a woman commented from the audience that the Internet was not the new public but the “new voiced elite.”
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Panels — http://beyondbroadcast.net/wiki/index.php?title=Schedule
The panels covered the following topics; and the presenters were far more informative, interesting and wide ranging than the topics suggest.
• What the Broadcasters are doing
• What the emerging participatory web media services are doing
• Law and Policy
• What is the community dimension of media?
• Stayin’ Alive: Succeeding in the New World
Instructive Panel: Panel III, What is the Community Media Dimension, see Barbara Abrash’s blog notes on the panel.
http://www.beyondbroadcast.net/blog/?p=59
The “What is the Community Media Dimension” panelist all presented examples of the power of social networking software, and made a convincing case that these new participatory media formats have great potential to democratize media, have great commercial potential, and leave the question open if the commercial potential and the democratic potential can co-exist, and cross subsidize or synergize.
No one on the panel made any reference to geographic communities, and they failed to acknowledge the worldwide explosion of community-based media practice.
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Mark Cooper, on Panel IV: Surviving or Thriving: Beta Business Models in the New World:
How do we create participatory media business model that goes beyond advertising or charity? “Distribution is not the problem – attention is the problem.” We are LOOKING FOR A BASE IN CIVIL SOCIETY, and Mark proposes media cooperatives – citing the success of credit unions as “trust institutions.” How do we fill the need for news? Let the co-op members decide what to put on. “Can’t speak truth to power on power’s nickel — fund it in civil society.” Cooper feels, anytime government funds media production you are creating a content gatekeeper relationship.
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Wrap- up, Shapiro posed another important speculative question that pervaded most of the thinking of everyone at the conference, and I think serves as a summary of the conference: “Is this adding up to some kind of a new public media; a third zone of some sort, that’s not quite commercial or non-commercial; is it generating its own communities, a kind of a peer to peer civic engagement perhaps?”
