Beyond Broadcast Highlights
Quote of the day: Prof. Charlie Nesson: "There is divinity in the net and the challenge is to be gentle to your enemies."
My favorite panel of the day was about online communities - moderated by my colleague Ethan Zuckerman. He has a great writeup of his intro to the panel. Andy Carvin has great notes from Brendan Greeley's descripton of Radio Open Source and Tom Kriese about Omidyar.net. A lot of great blogging from conference participants is aggregated here.
A lot of the discussion all day focused around a question near and dear to me: how media - whether it's professional or citizen-produced - can better serve and facilitate an informed public discourse, which I believe is essential to healthy democracy. At one point during a morning panel on public media, Terry Heaton of Corante claimed that the Internet is the "new public." Several of us challenged the panel that a lot of people are excluded from this online discourse due to economic and social reasons. I asked whether American public media organizations are going to do anything to work directly on digital divide issues so that everybody in the U.S. can have easy access to high speed internet, which is essential to full participation in online discourse. Also I asked whether they are going to do education and outreach so that people throughout society are aware of the tools that are available to them. As it turns out, unfortunately, not all public broadcasters think that should be their role. Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network blogged in detail about the exchange and his reaction.
Sociologist Eszter Hargittai had a great presentation about what young people really do online (thanks Andy again for the great detailed blogging). Her research indicates that giving people internet access may not be enough if you want to encourage widespread public involvement in media creation and discourse. There needs to be more education about what tools are out there and what can be done with them - and that there's a lot more to the web than chatting, shopping, and dating. She concludes: "Differences in skill, not just access, may contribute to digital inequality...Skill differences may result in differential web use suggesting different opportunities." Addendum: Lynne Johnson has an interesting reaction to Eszter's talk here.
There was a panel about business models that was as usual inconclusive. Mark Cooper: We need a different business model than charity or advertising. The problem is not distribution; the problem is attention. I thought Mark made another important point about basically 2 kinds of journalism that are worth preserving and nurturing, and which we need to figure out how to support:
1. Professional insight journalism: High quality, expensive investigative journalism that needs to be monetized and supported financially in order to be done well.
2. Networked individualism: non-monetized work motivated by passion or duty.
UPDATE: I was going to explore the relationship between these two kinds of journalism further on day two in a workshop with Dan Gillmor, but unfortunately I have come down with a bad chest cold and went home to bed. Fortunately, there are session notes on the conference wiki here.
Comments