Media Re:public

Should we want Apple (or any other large corporation) to be our conduit for paying for non-commercial media? What about for charitable giving generally?

Two completely separate references to the possibility of using Itunes for non-profit donating caught my eye in the last few days. The ever creative and effective Jake Shapiro blogged recently about how it might work if ITunesU allowed folks to make voluntary donations/contributions to support the makers of free content, whether public media, individuals, nonprofits, universities or whatever.

And then in today’s inbox, the folks organizing the Hollywood Hill’s conference the New Hi-Tech Robin Hoods broadened the question: “In a world where millions pay 99¢ to download media from iTunes, why can’t we do the same to end poverty or stop global warming?”

It sounds so tempting that I feel sure there is a catch, but I’m not sure what it is. We might think we’d like our noncommercial media providers to remain pure and free, unconnected to any large commercial corporations, but how many of us make a point of making our charitable donations by check to avoid having upwards of 2% of our contribution go to the credit card companies? American Express’ Giving Express program doesn’t even feel the need to pretend that its service results in more of the money donated going to the organization: “A 2.25% transaction fee is deducted from donations to cover processing costs. This expense is similar to the cost your organization would incur for processing direct credit card donations.”

Curious to hear reactions from the VRM folks, who’ve been thinking for a long time about these problems, especially about a better way to fund public service media. In my understanding, they want commerce (and non-commerce, i.e., nonprofits) to be customer-centric, and customers rather than vendors to own their data and control their relationships, but it’s hard to imagine there won’t still be a role for intermediary corporations to facilitate those relationships.

I’m guessing that Doc will say that we instead need a free and open system that everyone can use as they wish. So organizations like universities and public broadcasters, who are already set up to take donations could have it on their own sites as well as make it available through the ITunes store and other distributors. Individual artists or small non-commercial media makers would have a non-profit clearinghouse (hello, PRX? in your copious spare time?) for donations that would collect money and send them a check. Then this powerful coalition would launch a lobbying effort to force credit card companies at least slash their rates to non-profits down to a half a percent or so, if not zero them out entirely. And what a beautiful world it will be.

The crowd around me is happily singing along with a German video about “the dangers of the Internet.” Who says young people have no common experiences? What they (or at least the ones directly behind me) lack is any sense of their own volume.

I’m gratefully escaping the infamous LOLcats panel while listening to Jason Scott’s presentation called “Before the LOL.” He’s an actual grownup human, with a site called textfiles.com though as he points out he also does documentaries, i.e., “I actually get out of the house.”

Jason seems to be representing mid-generation baby boomer geekdom here at ROFLCon, which means he’s my age or so. Hooray. He’s showing us some history: Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone and then this mysterious slide:

OLL KORRECT (LOLcats of the 1840s) became O.K.
GONE TO TEXAS (peaced out)
OUR FINE MEN (politicians and so on)
NUFF SAID

The fashion of misspelling came before, so is this just historians being happy that we’re not so new? Now we’re on the telegraph and its codes from 1859. 73 = Best regards 30 = no more (end). There’s nothing new under the sun. Ham radio as the original social media. He also shows slow-scan TV, which no one in the room, including me, has heard of - hacking video or at least pictures onto ham radio. The man who did this is Copthorn Macdonald.

Jason Scott is a master of early 21st century ADHD presentation style - 80% entertainment, 20% content. Perhaps standup comedy the only thing that compete with our online lives?

Now we’re transitioning from photocopiers to faxes to the very earliest BBSes. I’m not sure where we’re going here.

“K-RAD is short for ‘OK, Rad.’ Originally making fun of somone’s ”K bye’ signoff, then added “radical.” The efficiency of LOLcat language.

Ah, the overall message! We’re all just part of the great flow of history, YouTube is in fact the descendant of the telegraph. Jason Scott and the Web not-so-difference. I think one could do a similar history focused on the news media.

Tags: ROFLcon2008

Someone from the audience (you go, girl) finally mentions that there are 6 young white guys moderated by one older white guy. The responses include:
“girls have better things to do”
“girls are smarter”
“girls are not allowed to be funny”
“there will soon be lots more girls on the Internet”
“girls are weaned on Barbie, girls are weaned on GI Joe, and encouraged to take computers and go”
“I guess we’ll have to keep talking about this until we don’t have to anymore”

And now the last question from the audience, a young black man “first things first black people do use the Internet”
The Tron guy says something about “young ladies.” The Tron guy mystifies me.

Many of the panelists do seem to sincerely mean that the fact that they got famous is “stupid” and that girls are less stupid. Not a bad point.

tags: ROFLCon2008

More of ROFLcon live blogging. We have moved from David Weinberger’s excellent keynote to a panel of 6 white males of indeterminately young age (one of them just said “I’m just said”). David is moderating, bravely doing his best to get these kids to think outside of their own little projects, which they seem to assume everyone knows well. Of course, I may easily be the only human in the room who hasn’t heard of most of these guys, except so far for Jib Jab and the red paperclip guy, whose best feature is his charming Canuck accent. He’s going to Manitoba to teach government officials to think “oot of the bawx.”

Thanks to the joy of online conference going, I can find out who these kids are while I watch them fidget.

David - “Learning by example is sometimes NOT the best way to learn, sometimes there many examples that fail and only one that works. So did you guys plan your success or was it a fluke?”

Red paperclip guy: “when I started it was pretty granola, it was pretty hack, and then I started saying I was trading it for a house and I got pretty stoked.” I have no idea what he means, but he seems very sincere.

I ask the IRC channel what he means, here’s the conversation:
dear younger
persons, can someone translate red paperclip guy’s comment that “it was granola”?
fonchik: homegrown, summer of love, hippy spirit, natural, etc
josh diaz has paperclips
thanks dantekgeek, further clarification - summer of love, etc has negative or positive connotations?
depends on who you are

Huge applause for David pointing out that Chuck Norris has his head up his ass for suing the Chuck Norris fact guy.

Rocketboom guy very perspicacious, also the only one (or the only one to admit it?) who says he planned his project to make it famous. He refers to the bad old days “only having a few channels” even though he surely was born into the age of 100+ cable channels.

Oops battery dying. Back after lunch/power break.

Tags: ROFLCon2008

David Weinberger’s keynote at ROFLcon. [warning virgin live blogger at work] Fame and greed go well together in the broadcast world of scarcity, he says. You can be famous and shoot someone in the face and no one will ever look into it. [Dick Cheney picture]

Fame as part of a network. Blogging is about taking off the makeup. It’s about exposing yourself as fallible, you don’t have time to send it to rewrite. We pre-emptively forgive bloggers, which creates intimacy. The crowd of people around me, nearly all oung enough to be my children, now hoot appreciatively for a picture of a cartoon character I don’t recognize at all. I’ll ask David.

Famous on the web = looks like it was made by human hands.

But not only. David talks about the “I kiss you” guy. 10 people clap that they remember him. Not I.

He’s a lot like Borat.

He plays ping pong. He lies on the beach in a too small bathing suit. He writes English badly.This is 1999, so his site becomes famous. We made him that way, getting our revenge against broadcast fame.

It’s an “odd sort of conversation” we’re having with ourselves, sharing silly jokes and videos. So now we get to “everyone will be famous to 15 people.”

David shows an entirely unscientific graph of fame on the web and the long tail.

The Obama girl appears, of course. This is the second time in less than 24 hours that someone at MIT has shown the Obama girl video in a presentation. Soon we’ll need a new definition. A subset of those who are famous on the Internet will also be famous to attendees of conferences about the Internet.

David says fame reflects us, thank you that’s the end. The crowd applauds him like a rock star. Not bad. What will I be doing at David’s age (I don’t think he’ll mind my pointing out that he is a few years older than I, though not by nearly as much as I’m older than these kids around me) that will get me this kind of adoration from people in their 20s? What will people in their 20s in the year 2020 laugh and applaud?
Tags: <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/roflcon2008″>ROFLCon2008</a>

How to improve the media in Eurasia? About 150 people from local and international media development NGOs working in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as funders and others interested in the region have gathered in Paris to talk about their common problems. It’s a regional subsection of the Global Forum for Media Development. We’re winding up now with a fun training on creativity.

There have been some lively discussions about whether or not to work with governments, how to convince donors that media is important, what we’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t, the perennialy painful question of how to evaluate the success of media development. Today several of us discussed new tools and how they might help this work.

I tried to encourage my former colleagues to consider the work that is being done with various forms of participatory media to enhance their own work and the work of the traditional media they support. I tried to encourage them to look at projects that offer platforms for both citizen and professional reporting from their region, like Global Voices, Transitions Online, and Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Also some of the sites where stories from around the world are discussed, such as allvoices, ground report and topix. And briefly touched on examples like Everyblock, Public Insight Journalism

New media is a hard sell in this group. The countries they work in don’t have very high Internet penetration, there is lots of work to do with traditional media, most of the people in the media in these countries and the media support organizations are not of the digital native generation. I’m not at all sure I convinced anybody, probably only confused them. But perhaps the confusion will lead them to look at new media again.

Tags: GFMD, Eurasia, Media Development

Very excited and crackly voicemail Monday from my Internews colleague Jeanne Bourgault, who was attending the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas. Something along the lines of “Oh my God Persephone [inaudible] just gave the most amazing speech, he said he wasn’t going to give the speech they were supposed to do Q&A but then he gave it, it was unbelievable. They turned off the cameras but I’m sure you can find the video somewhere, it was worth the whole trip. Call me.” I’ve been to the NAB show many times and I was busy talking about the future of public media and so I thought great I’m glad Jeanne’s having a good time, learning some stuff, I’ll find out what she was talking about later.

Well of course the inaudible name was Tim Robbins who brilliantly skewered the commercial broadcast media in his keynote Monday. It is a classic right up there with the Colbert Press Club speech, an absolute must-read. The full text is at the Huffington Post, full audio at Broadcasting & Cable, and cellphone video at ar-d.com.

My favorite parts are in the hilarious first half:

“But what is the state of broadcasting today? Some critics have noted that there is a dangerous lack of diversity and opinion. That may be true, but imagine the nightmare of having to rectify that situation.

I propose a much simpler solution, which I’ve separated into three prongs, or a Satan’s trident if you will.

First, erase all diversity. Thankfully the majority of what is broadcast over television and radio is of two opinions and that feels good. That’s simple. But unfortunately there is a tiny minority out here on the airwaves expressing a different view outside of the Democrats and Republicans nexus trying to confuse us all. Can we please shut them up? How expensive could it be to buy Pacifica Radio? These people are driving us apart.

Secondly, let’s stay focused on Sex Scandals. Stop with the in depth reporting that gets outside of the sound bite. More sex scandals! Surely with a little more prying, a little more effort we can find more sexual deviants. And trust me, sexual deviancy is something we can all agree on. It’s deliciously intoxicating to watch unfold. It’s titillating….

Third, find more racially divisive news and play that constantly. As long as we hate each other we will never be bothered with this gnawing lefty obsession with information. Let’s make the purpose of the media salacious entertainment, not information….”

Beautiful.

At the end, of course, he felt compelled to use his celebrity superpowers for good and exhorted the broadcasters to discover their inner altruist:

“…You have the power to turn this country away from cynicism. You have the power to turn this nation away from the hatred and the divisive dialogue that has rendered such a corrosive affect on our body politic. You can lift us up into a more enlightened age. Or you can hide behind that old adage; “I’m just a businessman, I provide what the audience wants.” Well, I’m here to tell you that we don’t need to look at the car crash. We don’t need to live off of the pain and humiliation of the unfortunate. We don’t need to celebrate our pornographic obsession with celebrity culture. We are better than that….”

Sorry, Tim, but even our pornographic obsession with YOU is unlikely to make that dream come true.

tags: Tim Robbins, NAB, Las Vegas, celebrity, media criticism

Larry Lessig might actually dare to delete your offensive personal attacks (unless they’re against him). Good for him, I say.

Having been twice thwarted by technology (I’m sure it’s my fault, it usually is) from leaving a comment directly on the blog in response
to his apparent request for us to bless his new policy, here’s what I wanted to say:

I find this policy so reasonable that it’s weird to me that you feel the need to get permission to initiate it. Perhaps this is the result of spending time with the European media and FoE (Freedom of Expression) crowd who would see it as a normal measure against hate speech. They have been known to refer (lovingly, of course) to their US counterparts as “First Amendment Nazis.” I suppose some of their tolerance of intolerance has rubbed off on me, but I say delete those nasty personal attacks without a second thought!

Tags: Lessig, Freedom_of_Expression, Free_Speech, Comments, Hate_Speech

Catching up on my Global Voices reading, got to this disturbing reminder of the international stories that go quickly back to being local after the crisis fades. A blogger called Buddhist Warrior

publishes a statement from the All Burma Monks’ Alliance and the 88 Generation Students under the unambiguous title “The United Nations is a Failure“. Naturally this plea to the UN Secretary General was picked up by mainstream media everywhere, (if everywhere is India, Thailand and Norway, and Burmese-focussed media is mainstream).

1, 2, 3, 4, … , 2217 (Bagan, Myanmar),
originally uploaded by jmhullot.

(but you knew that, right?)
Thanks to Christine Gorman and her Global Health Report for sharing the inspiring story of librarians on a couple of mailing lists breaking a great story about some over-zealous folks at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs (Mike Bloomberg, take back that donation!) had decided that US government funded Popline, the self-proclaimed “world’s largest database on reproductive health,” should not allow people to search on the term “abortion.” The story then got to blogosphere and from there to the traditional media (in this context more than ever not to be called the MSM for “mainstream media”)

The saddest thing is that this was classic self-censorship, the Popline folks decided on their own to do this, presumably in hopes of avoiding angering the administration that brought us the Global Gag Rule.

Naughty Librarians’ Convention 2008
Originally uploaded by cheesebikini