RConversation

WeMedia, WhereMedia?

It has been an exhausting day - I moderated two panels, one on the evolving media landscape in China/East Asia, the next on media trends in India/SouthAsia. I couldn't take notes because I was moderating but fortunately Jeff Jarvis has blogged the whole day in detail, and there's a long writeup here on the WeMedia blog. Neha and Kamla did fabulously on the South Asia panel. Rachel's Africa panel was brilliant, showing a vibrant and growing African media scene, with a growing community of bloggers. Ory Okolloh via satellite from Kenya charmed the room. People from all over the world joined the live chat and watched the webcast, adding ideas and insights that we wouldn't have benefitted from otherwise.

As the Media Center's Bill Weiss said, "it's not about new media or old media, it's just media." How do we get beyond the arguments about who is more trustworthy than whom, and start working together to create a better, more inclusive, more informed public discourse? And what are the business models to sustain and support these efforts?

The Media Center has issued a call to action: "we propose a worldwide We Media Global Initiative to invest in bottom-up media." They say they're open to suggestions from everybody on how this kind of initiative should work.

WeMedia Day 2: more listening & dialogue, less lecturing?

As my colleague Rachel R. notes, there have been some technical problems with the webcast (video only, tsk tsk) and online chat today.  The tone of some of the panel discussions has left some bloggers, including my colleague Neha V., feeling a bit frustrated and defensive.

Tomorrow should be more relevant and accessible to the international blogosphere. Rachel and I will be moderating several panels in which we are hoping to reflect the views of people from around the Global Voices community. So I hope you'll follow the webcast and join the live chat via this page as we explore the citizens media revolutions in East and South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. (As my colleague Georgia Popplewell laments, Latin America is most unfortunately not represented. A massive oversight!!)  We hope that the perspectives not represented in the room will be voiced online. Rachel and I will do our best to represent these views back into the room.

UPDATE: MY Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman has a great post, observing the conference from afar. He makes an excellent point:

...while global news organizations seem obsessed with the bloggers/journalists “dichotomy”, local media seems more open to this idea. I gave a lecture at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts a few weeks ago as part of a class taught by Bill Densmore, who has edited several Berkshire County newspapers. Bill observed that local newspaper editors generally understand the value of journalists cooperating with bloggers because local papers don’t get produced without the help of lots of amateurs. That baseball story, town meeting summary or theatre review might have been produced by a seasoned, experienced journalist… and just as likely was produced by an intern, an amateur trying to get some experience, or someone in the community who was passionate that an event get covered.

Maybe these conversations aren’t best yelled held between bloggers and journalists from highly professional, structured, hierarchical news organizations - maybe community papers could help provide an ideological bridge between camps?

WeMedia: the real question

There has been way too much re-hashing today at the We Media Global Forum of the old and tired debate: "bloggers vs journalists, who is better" blah blah.

The question we really ought to be focusing on is: how can citizens and professional journalists work together to create a better and more well-informed public discourse?

We Media, Whose Media?

Day 1 of the We Media Global Forum has started here in London. Click here for the live chat and live webcast. Click here for a feed of Global Voices commentary and Reuters coverage.

I have a feeling that I'm going to be banging my usual drum - the issue of inclusiveness which several people brought up at the last WeMedia conference and the conference before that too.

There's a concern here in the room that online participatory media could be creating an echo chamber of connected elites which will be less inclined to hear voices of people who don't spend time online.

Of course it's necessary for media to stop delivering a one-way lecture to audiences, and build a multi-directional conversation. But with whom? The advent of internet-driven participatory media and citizens' media alone won't make the media more inclusive of minority, disenfranchised and hitherto ignored voices. Media will only become more democratic if concerted efforts are made to bridge digital divides, build communities of conversation in places not heavily covered by the media, and then amplify the new voices.

Many of these efforts are unlikely to be financially profitable, at least in the short term, for commercial media companies. But it such efforts are needed to build a more informed and democratic public discourse.

We Media: Activism & Democracy

Thanks to Andy Carvin for his detailed blogging of the Activism & Democracy session I moderated this afternoon.  (I'm so braindead right now I'll be lazy and just let you read his account.)
...but WAIT! THERE'S MORE! He also posted a full podcast.

Also check out Andy's post about Craig Newmark's views on trust.

We Media tidbits: "Respect my intelligence"

Craig Forman of Yahoo! says the key for the future is how media companies will respond to the demand from the public: "respect my intelligence". This is especially the case in gaining the trust of younger people.

Andrew Heyward of CBS uses an interesting phrase: "early adopters of authenticity."  The public will need to be weaned away from the current media model to a more complicated, authentic model.

We Media

We Media: From Talk to Action

This afternoon I'll be moderating a panel called "Activism & Democracy." The point will be to look at how online and mobile wireless media are impacting the way in which citizens not only inform themselves and communicate, but organize and act. We've got a great group of people participating.

Yesterday I met somebody who I wish could be joing us: Tom Steinberg of Pledgebank.com.  His site has created a way for people to easily mobilize people to act, connecting online organization and mobilization with offline activity. Anybody can do this by creating a "pledge" and inviting others to join. As the site explains:

Pledgebank is free and easy to use. Once you've thought of something you'd like to do, just create a pledge which says "I'll do this, but only if 5 other people will do the same".

Check it out.   Pledgebank is built by Tom's non-profit UK organization MySociety.org. The even cooler thing about it is that the tool is completely open, so anybody can duplicate this system, in any language on their own server. I can see great uses for this by activist and dissident organizations in a number of countries.

We Media

Al Gore on America's public discourse

Audio of Al Gore's speech is now available in full on PaidContent.

UPDATE: transcript is here.

A few notes from what he said:
* It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. Something has gone badly wrong in the way america's fabled marketplace of ideas is now functioning. "Serial obsessions"  take over our airwaves for weeks at a time.

*If the rich-poor gap is widening why is our apathy as citizens also widening?

* The Senate was silent on the eve of war with Iraq because what people say on the Senate floor no longer counts - all were out fundraising to pay for tv commercials

* KEY POINT: The marketplace of ideas effectively no longer exists in this country. It is the destruction of the marketplace of ideas that accounts for the strangeness of america's present public discourse.

* SELF-GOVERNMENT: requres rule of reason undergirded and strengthened the rule of law. The American people need to be able to exercise reasoned collective judgments. Our current media universe no longer enables that. The absence of 2-way conversation means theres absence of marketplace of ideas.

* He cites a media study in which the U.S. was found to have the 27th freest press in the world.

*The subjugation of news by entertaiment seriously harms democracy. When people are not informed they cannot hold government accountable.

* As long as the only means of engaging in serious political dialogue is through the purchase of tv advertising, most Americans will be excluded from the conversation. The pervasive advertising environment has warped our democracy.

*Current TV: (Al Gore's new venture): is reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create programming. The purpose is more and better informing of the american public: "Viewer created content."

*As exciting as the internet is, it still lacks the most basic component to be a truly successful mass medium. The internet still does not support the realtime mass distribution of full-motion video. Full-motion video is what makes TV such a powerful medium.

(That's true. When I worked for CNN, it was always the images that people remembered. They rarely remembered what I actually said.)

CONCLUSION: We must ensure that the internet will be open and accessible to all people without any limitation. We cannot take this future for granted. Some of the same forces of consolidation and control who consolidated the television market place are trying to do the same thing with internet access.

We Media

"We Media" - not yet "Everybody's Media"

I'm sitting next to Dan Gillmor, Craig Newmark, and Marcus Xiang, who runs a Chinese mobile blogging service. We're listening to the opening session of the We Media conference.

One of the conference organizers, Andrew Nachison, is talking about the incredible diversity of voices increasingly available online through blogs, wikis and other forms of online participatory media.

Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network is talking about citizens' media surrounding the Katrina disaster. Last night he wrote a blog post summarizing a talk he gave about an issue that has concerned me for a while: the danger that unless more members of the citizenry have easy access to technology and the ability to use it, "We Media" is in danger of becoming "Elite Media." Andy writes:

I spoke for about an hour about the the digital divide and its relationship with participatory media, or "We Media" as it's sometimes known. I made the argument that the participatory media phenomenon will remain skewed to well-off, well-educated populations as long as disenfranchised groups, such as low-income populations, people of color and people with disabilities, don't have equal access or the skills to participate. Unless we do more to bridge the digital divide, particularly in terms of 21st century skills and media literacy, marginalized groups will find it harder and harder to engage in civic participation effectively.

This is a serious problem. Until a lot more is done to address this problem, we are never going to hear the true spectrum of Global Voices, let alone American Voices.

UPDATE: Farai Chideya is pointing out that a lot of the biggest news stories happen among populations who are "at the caboose of the digital train". This means that media companies wanting to collaborate with citizens and facilitate real conversations about what's happening on the ground have real incentive to help bridge the digital divide.

During Q&A for the first "We News" panel, Watts Wacker pointed out that the panelists were from the BBC, CBS, AP, and NPR. He asks, are you the wrong people to be talking about this subject?

I asked whether U.S. media companies are doing anything to help bridge the digital divide in this country. It was pretty clear from the answers that AP and CBS are definitely not. NPR appears to be doing more to try and bring people into the conversation from communities that haven't been online before.

technorati tag: We Media

WeMedia backchannel

Globalvoices is hosting an IRC backchannel for WeMedia participants, the GlobalVoices community, and anybody else who feels like joining the conversation. Please join us at:

irc://irc.freenode.net/#globalvoices

People are starting to blog the conference, and the posts are starting to show up on Technorati. The conference also has a blog.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a problem accessing Freenode on the AP wireless network (the conference is being held at the AP offices). Maybe somebody can do something about that???