Seth Keen

Presentation at Melbourne University on New Media and Journalism by BBC World’s Anchor, Nik Gowing, BBC World. About:

BBC World is the BBC’s commercially funded international 24-hour news and information channel broadcasting around the world from its base at BBC Television Centre in London.

Nik Gowing is a major news anchor, presenter and works for BBC World a continuous news channel. The presentation titled ‘Community in Crisis New Media & New Real Time Tensions’. A excerpt from the brief for the talk sent out by email:

In the new, fast-changing information environment the traditional media are no longer alone in being witnesses of acute real-time crises. With the advent of camera phones, PDAs, broadband and ‘blog’ technologies, a new breed of ‘information doers’ have emerged. Illustrated by video examples, Nic will highlight the increasingly unresolved tensions in newsrooms, governments, military commands and corporate organisations.

Opening image for the presentation poster, a television with the cord pulled floating on an angle. Context given for the talk by Nik – political science, securities and new media. Title on his powerpoint, ‘Real Time Crisis – New Real Time Tensions’ These following notes are my own interpretation of what was presented and in some cases are direct quotes or my own short hand.

Tyranny of real time – previous paper online; other paper ‘War and Accountability – Media in conflict: the new reality not yet understood.’ The battle between rumours and news. News wants to deal with hard facts. How reliable are images from mobile uploads for example? The potential for a digital camera or mobile phone to challenge government policy. A “creditability crunch”. The issues centre around “immediacy”. His immediate example video taken of people arriving to the presentation dropped into his powerpoint.

Transparency, the connected networked nature of the world. Level of denial. What do I mean about real-time? Governments believe that they will be able to control real-time events. Example given of President Bush receiving news on television while he was on-air, of major events he was not aware had taken place. Governments, officials trying to shut down public and personal media coverage when events take place. The issue of perceptions sticking when news breaks (often based on personal media coverage) which may not be accurate.

Much of the points around immediacy in relation to video reminded me of the theorists Paul Virilio’s (Open Sky. London: Verso, 1997) comments on real-time video technologies and their effect on perception. Another theorist Jean Balludriard and his ideas on Simulacra and Simulation.

Back to Nik. The battle that goes on to secure the air waves (media) during and after a crisis. The acute difficulty of getting accurate real-time facts in a crisis situation. Transparency, the ability to transfer into the airwaves instantly from isolated high security locations through broadband, the Internet. A live feed in Lebanon is being streamed in real-time from a mobile phone from the Syria border. In detail in this example the video is delayed (called Store and forward video held on a laptop). The audio is real-time (when it was received – broadcast to the on-air TV news desk).

Transformation of the media by personal media producers. What is the status of personal media content? – the ability for anyone to record and upload. Serial deceivers. A real issue with accuracy. “A proliferation of attempts to confuse and mislead.” “Insurgents as media producers.” Stressing the trend of validation, working out what is accurate. Validation, trying to work out the source proves to be more and more difficult and a paramount issue. Also, concerns that journalists are being targeted, camera people recording events.

Digital divide – journalism – personal media making governments accountable. “Creditability Crunch” – the openness is leading to “law-fare rather than warfare”. The military needs to be aware due to “omni media” that they have to be accountable for everything.

Conclusion – We need to get smarter in regards to the battles emerging in the contemporary media sphere. “Asymmetric power”. The new empowerment creates ad-hoc groupings in a time of crisis. In the final example he showed mobile phone video recordings of the explosions underground in the London bombings. The way people are prepared to record events in a time of crisis in very insecure environments. From a news perspective there is working with what he calls a “user centered hub” at BBC world. During and after the bombings, they where barraged with personal media content (“1000 images, 20 video clips, 20,000 emails, 3000 text messages”). Dilemma for the news room, who do you run with the government who is behind what is actually going on, or the material coming from people at the scene? But, eyewitnesses also exaggerate or misinterpret and some are eager to get their faces in the media. How do you check what they are claiming? Where will it all lead? Next development will be live broadcasts streamed live on the Internet.

We need to question what the media is today. “Media ?” The technical definition of media. The ability to reveal. YouTube, Flickr, Crikey ..they are all becoming significant broadcast platforms.

Another video download from Beyond Broadcast 2006 Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture. The panel session ‘The future of digital community.’ The first speaker Brendan Greeley talking about radio open source.… about:

Open Source is a conversation, four times a week on the radio and any time you like on the blog. We designed the show to invert the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a public radio show with a web community, we’re a web community that produces a daily hour of radio.

Orginally kicked off with a message board in the 90s the show has moved to a blog. The blog comes first in the process of bringing people to the radio show. The presentation questions how you filter or make sense of the scale of information available on the Internet and make that applicable to a public radio platform. They chose a blog and suggest that blogs are a version of “talk radio.” They favoured the structure of a blog because they could guide the discussion and include participants contributions in that process. The show is therefore structured like a blog. To promote traffic; conversation; interaction; community with people (i.e. getting others linking to their blog) they follow a process where they examine a person’s blog carefully then email them questions asking them for opinions and ideas on specific topics. I found this interesting in terms of promoting more substantial types of content in the broader blogosphere. The approach involves time, focus and analysis with the content on a specific blog. Overall the radio open source system relies on open access for the listeners to engage. As they describe:

we rely on our listeners and readers…“the people formerly known as your audience” to help us produce the show. At its most basic, we look for this production help in the comment threads of this website. Every time we have an idea for an hour of radio we post it to the site. That show may not go on the radio for another month, but we immediately start reading comments — suggestions for guests, questions for guests, suggestions for ways to frame the show or reading material — and following up on them.

Beyond Broadcast 2006‘Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture’. The panel session ‘The future of digital community.’ Speaker Tom Geraco gather.com How do you work with user created content in public media on the Internet? He states that the issue in the blogosphere is that “good content is hard to find because it is lost in a sea of mediocrity” and a blog generally is still a “one-way form of media”. On the gather.com site the “users gather the content, edit the content through raters and evaluation…our users recruit their own readers…to expand their own audience…”, and create topics of interest. The presentation seemed too much like a hard sell for their own web site but there is some useful information in terms of developing frameworks for public participatory media.

Beyond Broadcast 2006 ‘Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture’. The panel session ‘The future of digital community.’ Rhea Mokand Director ‘listen up’

Listen Up! is a youth media network that connects young video producers and their allies to resources, support, and projects in order to develop the field and achieve an authentic youth voice in the mass media.

Rhea focuses on video production. Initially their objective was to bring together a cohesive collaborative space for youth media. They also identified a need to integrate youth media organisations within their own known networks. They have formed a partnership with the Internet archive as a means to get server space. Over time listen up has become the largest collection of youth video on the Internet. The content is made and curated by youth. Each participant has their own space on the web site to meet and discuss with others including production issues for example. The only censorship the organisers do is keep an eye on unacceptable comments. The intiative now attracts particpation from schools and community media organisations globally. The listen up site is an example of an “exclusive” online social media community.

ipods are great for research – I watched and listened to on the train a video download from the conference Beyond Broadcast 2006 Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. I checked out the talk by Peter Armstrong from OneWorld.net as part of the ‘Panel II: What the emerging participatory web media services are doing’. He focused on video online in his talk referring to the following sources:

Some of his points. With interactivity the podcast mode cuts this off i.e democracynow video. Interactivity for Armstrong is about liveness where the audience has the chance to email, phone-in be actively involved. A key part of his talk was the question for video databases – Make your own work and host it; or tag other work across the Internet (like google video for example); or just aggregate other work. Also, Armstrong believes ‘freedom’ is the significant objective for media producers, where they are not tied to or beholden to media organisations or governments.

Anna also put me onto film forge a drupal supported system.

FilmForge is a version of the content management system Drupal, tailored to the needs of videomaking communities. FilmForge makes it simple to install and run your own video sharing site.

Lawrence Lessig provides in the presentation ‘Free Culture: What we need from you’ an excellent insight into his concept of “free culture.” He argues that audio and video offer in the digital realm and within the Internet environment a new platform of “speech”: (21.00-22.00)

This is read-write culture. This is digital creativity. It’s the creativity these technologies beg for, creativity that of course it is not new when you think of film and television for the last 60 years, what is new is that this capacity has been democratised. Anyone with a 1500 dollar computer can take images and sounds from the culture around us and remix them in a way to express either political ideas or cultural criticism, in the most powerful way any of us know how to speak. Through video and music, these tools of creativity are now tools of speech producing a new potential to speak, a new potential to learn, this is the literacy of the 21st Century and its capacity is to revive this read-write culture.

‘Free Culture: What we need from you’, by Lawrence Lessig, Linux World, Recorded August 15, 2006

Authors: danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, Social Network Sites: Definition and Conception

In this special issue, we are using the term “social network sites” to refer to websites that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within the system and formally articulate their relationship to other users in a way that is visible to anyone who can access their profile. While we are using the term “social network site” to define this space, another common term that appears in public discourse is “social networking sites.” This term grew in popularity through press coverage of these sites after “social networking systems” and “social networks” failed to take hold. In public discourse, the term “social networking sites” been expanded to refer to any site that allows people to communicate with people that they don’t know: dating sites, chatrooms, community sites, bulletin boards, etc. What makes social network sites unique is not the ability to meet new people, but the ability to articulate one’s social network.

Trebor Scholz – What the MySpace generation should know about working for free, 16th April 2007

MySpace has a “time monopoly”- in the US people spend more time there than on any other single website thus substantially “capturing” sociality and knowledge [2] (1) . Instead of watching TV, kids formulate comments, tag, rank, forward, read, subscribe, re-post media, link, moderate, remix, share, collaborate, favorite, and write. They flirt, work, play, chat, gossip, discuss, and learn. People value each others’ contributions because they have urgency and flavor and now mobile content contribution on cell phones, anywhere, is easier than ever. Again, what kind of labor is this?

Other reference included in this quote – New rights, re-public

A video of a panel response on where the Internet is heading in the future. ‘The Web: 2012′.

A panel on the future of commerce, journalism, and community on the Internet, featuring Barry Diller, Arianna Huffington, and Craig Newmark. Moderated by Ken Auletta. From “2012: Stories from the Near Future,” the 2007 New Yorker Conference.

The speakers and moderator: Barry Diller; Arianna Huffington; Craig Newmark; Ken Auletta

In a closer look at this webcast it was interesting to see the differing perspectives of Barry Diller (fox/e-commerce) and Craig Newmark (social media/Craigslist). Diller argues that professional media practitioners will in the future be taking up a more significant role in the user-generated domain. A viewpoint that has some connections with Andrew Keen’s recent book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture’.

Panel Discussion:
Ken Auletta: …will user-generated content (like YouTube..) be as popular as produced content?

Barry Diller: “…the talent pool is finite there are only so many people that make programming that will resonate with a lot of people…these are very early days in video…as it evolves people who are trained and professional at it will get in the mix…”

In contrast Newmark envisions a extended use of social media as a means to provide a varied mix of viewpoints from all types of people.

“…I do see people who we would consider to be amateurs actually doing the heavy lifting in media and quality in media today…”

Arianna Huffington (news/The Huffington Post) sees a hybrid mix of the two types of content producers with citizen journalism playing a major role.

Arianna Huffington:
“…not just reporters but the wisdom of the crowd mechanism…users put together pieces…a hybrid future [mixing both print and online]”

Perhaps the hybrid approach is slightly more realistic in relation to user-generated content where these two types of content producers will develop separately and the distinguishing line will blur even more between the two. What is obvious is the nervousness of the traditional broadcasters who are working hard on ways to tap the user-generated pool.