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"Keepers of the Public Domain
in Electronic Media: Keep It Up!"
Annual convention of Alliance for Community
Media,
the member organization of cable access stations nationwide
July 10, 1999, Cincinnati, Ohio
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today to some
of the people I take as my personal heroes, people who are carving
out real opportunities for real people every single day, even when
none of the hardware will cooperate.
The reason I think of you as the heroes of everyday life is that
you have decided, for whatever demented reason of your own, to assume
the challenge of helping to inhabit the frontier region of television:
noncommercial space. You have looked at one of the most powerful
engines of capitalist accumulation in history and said, Oh thanks,
I'd rather do the local cricket match. And I'll take the zoning
commission. Oh, yeah, and the guy with the hygiene problem too.
Just thought I would let you know that I'm not totally romanticizing
the task here. But really: it's an important and guaranteed-to-be-unappreciated
thing to create noncommercial television. Most of us think we know
what "television"is: it's commercial TV, and it's so predictable,
in its general outlines, that at least in my house, I'd like the
last click of the clicker to be a little recorded announcement that
says, "Honey, why are we subscribing to cable?" It would
save me having to say it every time.
But the fact is that more people than ever before are subscribing
to cable. And they are about to find out that they don't really
know what "television" is anymore, because the paradigm
that we've all been waiting to change for so long finally is changing.
You are a big part of our hope that, as we stand on the so-called
cyberfrontier, and everybody's doing land grabs, there will be electronic,
imaginative public domains out there. That there will be creatively
cultivated public places in media. That people are given the chance
to be respected, and to use the new possibilities, not just be used
by them.
If there are open spaces, public domains, public conversations,
it won't be thanks to any of the major players. As you know, the
period of great uncertainty, of confusion and disorder, of dueling
paradigms and old media vs. new media, all that stuff, is coming
to an end. The Telecom Act for better and for worse created enough
of a regulatory structure for us to see dimly into the near future.
That future will be, and here's a big surprise, controlled by a
few major corporate actors, and you will not be astonished to hear
me mention the cable company and the phone company. It will be a
communications universe that is much more about networking, at least
in its infrastructure, than about mass media. But it will look and
feel much more like mass media than it needs do.
The biggest actors will be doing their best to take advantage, for
their purposes, of the power of networking—especially to harvest
as much data as they can from all of us—at the same time as
they do their best to minimize the advantage to us of the same power.
Why? Because they're not stupid. They understand the power of networking
and they don't want other people to have it. They love the benefits
of old media—the gatekeeping, the collection points, the old
way of aggregating audiences for advertisers, of limiting consumer
choice, of creating enough monopoly power to allow them to relax
into their profits.
Still, even if the big players succeed in narrowing our options,
they are facing the challenge of playing the game a little differently.
With interactive TV, with Internet-based communication, with linked
technologies, people have more opportunities to select, or deselect,
to discover or to exclude, to confront or to escape, even to develop
alternative communications networks, than they ever have had. So
now, the game is cultivating and grooming and shaping and creating
something that the old guys call audience, and that you call community.
I have a brilliant friend, Neil Seiling, who produces avant-garde
TV, and who was talking to me about the problems of programming
now. He said that in the emerging media universe, the one basic
rule will be simple: "Whoever gets the audience, wins."
This is much harder for them than before, when the big actors in
media just divided the captive audience, and when the providers
of plain-vanilla, POTS type phone service rented everybody the same
black box. Getting an audience: that'll be the challenge. They're
still not quite sure how they're going to do that, but they know
that it takes a lot more than recycling programming and blasting
it out into the void. They're going to try on at least two fronts:
keeping you on their farm, no matter what they will eventually grow
there; and making you the milk cows. About the farm part: They talk
earnestly about "branding"—establishing a presence
that people trust and turn to, a Disney presence, a Microsoft presence,
an NBC presence, and so on. They're serious about using every new
communications resource to shore up the existing mental real estate
they've got, and they want and need to colonize more.
They are also very serious about building databases. And that's
the milk cow part. I was amused to read in last week's Advertising
Age that marketers are designing cute little icons that people with
state of the art computers and Internet access can click on to get
trivia games and mini-shows. Virgin Atlantic has an Austin Powers
icon that you toggle on to play a trivia game. "At the end
of the day, it's all about data collection," the marketing
manager for Virgin Atlantic said. To sign up for the cute little
mini-shows, you have to fill out a form giving them some information
on your travel habits.
The other day another friend of mine, Kathryn Montgomery from Center
for Media Education, attended a meeting that included Disney folks.
When she asked how they were using the information they collect
from the little kids who access their website, the rep said something
like, "Oh we aren't using that data, we're just storing it."
Storing it. Great. So the idea is to build lifelong profiles, to
be used differently as people grow up and business strategies change.
I don't think any of the big players knows what they'll do with
the information they're archiving. But they're planning ahead.
I think that you guys have a solid institutional base of experience
that gives us much better models than an Austin Powers travel toggle-show
or a Disney marketing database for what you can do with sophisticated,
interactive communications. And this conference has been full of
inspiring ways in which ACM folks are and have been doing just that.
I look at Davis, California, where the access cable people and the
community computing people joined forces to shape interactive electoral
coverage, so that Davis citizens asked the questions they needed
answers to and got substantial news coverage too--even on the ultimate
horse-race night, the election itself. And where an enterprising
multicultural group of young people learned to talk to each other
as they made a video that framed cross-cultural issues for a community.
I look at CAN TV in Chicago, which has nurtured and sheltered a
growing public space for labor issues. Labor Beat now a national
and even sometimes international show; unions that might not have
thought of using media before becoming users of the access space;
labor-oriented public affairs provides viewers with another, too
infrequently heard, perspective, with international ties being made
to other labor organizations. The success story, for me, is as much
about nurturing relationships that permit competing unions to talk
to one another, that encourage union members to perceive media as
an important resource, that permit international labor organizations
to find out more about U.S.-based labor, as it is about getting
labor perspectives into the wider Chicago community.
I look at Covington, Kentucky, where the Media Working Group helped
teach artists from throughout the region how to use new technologies.
Just as interesting, MWG is creating a virtual gallery opening that
creates another open, public electronic space, and is fearlessly
tinkering with it to see what works and what doesn't.
Elections, labor issues, grassroots arts--that's not just what commercial
TV doesn't do well, but the kind of television that only exists
as a feature of living community. Because throughout the ACM community,
you've figured out what many terrified people in commercial TV are
just beginning to grasp: it's about facilitating human relationships,
not about the technology. The difference between you, of course,
is about what kinds of human relationships you want to facilitate,
vs. what kinds of human relationships are fostered by marketing
folks.
I know that on an average day, when the equipment is down or downright
defunct, it may seem that, in fact, it is about the technology.
But take a moment to imagine our near future. You may not always
be get-me-the-duct-tape tech wizards. I do believe that it's never
been easier to use the various technologies--phone, Internet, wireless,
cable TV, computers—and that it's getting easier day by day.
Even today we need to know much, much less about how our complex
equipment works than we did a decade ago. I also think that there's
never been so much space to fill, so many places to go today, as
Bill Gates puts it. And many of them really are entertaining, and
some of them show a huge amount of creativity poured into commercial
entertainment.
The coming challenge will be creatively shaping uses, building links,
helping to cultivate imaginations that have been stunted by years
of learning, from all of commercial TV, never to dream of alternatives.
Now, I'd like to just spend a couple of minutes on that notion of
stunted imagination, because what I mean is stunted is the ability
to imagine a range of uses, styles, levels of production sophistication.
I don't mean that people aren't being offered captivating, well-produced
entertainment by our commercial culture. Rather, I would say it's
the most astonishing concentration of human creativity ever in the
history of the world, often done in teams where ideas cook together.
To do what you can do well, you don't have to learn to reject the
awesome, amazing, incredibly fecund popular culture that has given
us classic movies like The Wizard of Oz and Steven Speilberg's neglected
classic The Empire of the Sun and great TV like The Sopranos (anyone
here get HBO?) and musicians like Ry Cooder and—well, I'm
using my list. Everybody will have their own list but nobody, not
even here, wants to throw away their VCR and junk their CD collection
and I know that many of you, when you go home from an access center,
are watching a favorite show that's a product of this extremely
vigorous marketplace.
But shouldn't people be able to imagine, and want something
besides that? Communications is after all the vehicle by which we
understand what's important in the world and for ourselves. God
help us if it's all about the little Budweiser frogs, cute as they
are and good as they are for the Anheuser-Busch family and stockholders.
What you're good at, and what we need more of, is encouraging people
to be able to imagine communications not just as a fount of entertainment,
good or bad, but as a tool for community in its most democratic
aspect. And I mean community not as a smug haven from heartless
consumerism, a cozy little pre-color Pleasantville, a chunk of consensus
behind a picket fence. I mean community as the shared space where
differences are negotiated and common problems are solved. I mean
community in the sense that our great philosopher John Dewey used
the word "public," the part of our lives that we share
by force of circumstances and that we inhabit best when it's maintained,
in part with the tools of communication. I mean the unglamourous
but absolutely necessary business of a civilized democracy.
In many ways, the Internet has been a tremendous gift to us in that
endeavor, not just because of what the technology permits, but because
the way it grew up, so many useful civic and community services
were among the pioneering applications. It was a rare example of
communications that had a highly visible early life as a noncommercial,
open-to-everybody kind of thing.
The interactive era is also a terrific boon to those of us who care
about creating civic culture because, let's face it, television
as a mass medium is not the most natural, the most user-friendly
medium for grassroots communication and community building. It has
great advantages, but terrible disadvantages too. It is a technologically
intense, resource hog of a medium. There are big technical hurdles
to overcome, and they don't go away, they just get worse with obsolescence.
And there are huge cultural hurdles to overcome, most particularly
the stunted-imagination problem. Put another way, this is the fact
that every new trainee "knows" what television is when
they walk in the door.
As the TV set starts to look and act less like a traditional, top-down
TV set and more like a computer screen or a video conference call,
it's going to be that much easier to free up imaginations to use
the technologies that are becoming easier to use for noncommercial,
civic and community purposes.
And you are the people who've got the experience in how to do that.
You have the names and numbers of the nonprofit community groups.
You know how to drive the cable company and the city council crazy
until they do what they should. You have the beginnings of the social
imagination to inhabit electronic public domains .
I don't think you'll be surprised to discover how many people around
you don't have a clue about what they would like to do with their
new opportunities. That's an old problem for anyone who's worked
on democratic communications issues. It's an old problem, we're
not confused about why we have it, and it's not going to be any
cheaper than it ever was to address it, just because we have new
technological opportunities. Because however expensive telecom technologies
are, the most expensive thing in this whole equation is the cultivation
of human creativity and connection. That's not just about training,
although that's a part of it. It's about community organizing in
the most basic sense. And it's about investing in people over the
course of a life cycle.
One of the things that makes me maddest in the whole access
story is how easy it has been for conservatives to argue that culture
doesn't need subsidy. It's the way they've gotten many decent taxpayers
to dismiss a core part of a civilized society--as if they expected
anything else in their social lives to run well if there were no
investment in it. They don't expect the sewers to be maintained
out of sheer love of common plumbing, or the highway signs to be
crafted by a volunteer committee of sign lovers. Community TV, community
networking, grassroots arts, community communication takes not just
skill and work and love, but sustained resources, so that institutional
memories can be built up, political relationships can be groomed,
leaders can find each other, people can learn from their mistakes.
And that all takes money. We've lived through a terrible transition.
Access started in an era of generous but careless social welfare
liberalism. Remember the CETA program, which we in the arts used
to call the "ceremonial CETA" because it helped to start
so many arts programs for people who were living in voluntary poverty?
As that era declined, access weathered a brutal period of vulgar
and also sophisticated assaults on anything that would impede the
"greed is good" philosophy.
We are now, post-Telecom Act, all living in a more sober era, in
which very big and powerful companies are taking on challenging
new business arrangements and offering untested services, such as
widespread broadband access. Those companies have been permitted
to get very big so that they can take very big risks. As they do
so, they need to be made to invest in the future of the society
that will need their services. And sometimes they have.
Look at what happened in California, when Pacific Telesis and SBC
merged. Thanks to more than a hundred community groups working together,
the California Public Utilities Commission required that the new
merged company invest in shrinking the digital divide. In Ohio,
the Public Utilities Commission also succeeded in extracting funds
from merged companies Ameritech and SBC for community initiatives.
Those are great examples, because they show what can happen when
community-based organizations work on and with government agencies
to harness the energy of the new era in telecom.
They are also chastening examples, because the dollar figures are
only in the millions, and there are several decimal points more
of investing to do in community networking.
The feds have also earmarked teensy tiny packets of money—$10
million from the Department of Education, $17 million from the Department
of Commerce's TOP program.
And of course, there are many, many small, do-good demonstration
projects by large communications companies looking both for good
publicity and some smart new ideas on how to design the new networked
universe. The Open Studio arts project for instance, was funded
by Microsoft and AT&T among others.
These are promising precedents, and it's still so little for such
a vast, rich country. It's far too little. We are in terrible trouble
in this country if we think that small demonstration projects can
make up for systematic deprivation.
So let me recap my main points here:
•The networked environment offers more potential
than ever before to actually do what we say access can do: make
communications a tool of democratic community.
• The megacorporations that were the winners after the Telecom
Act are ferociously working to shape that environment in their favor.
• You have unique tools and experience, at this moment, to
help shape civic and public domains.
• But there is no free lunch. We need to challenge our legislators
and regulators at every level to see subsidies for culture and noncommercial
communication as a critical investment in a civilized, democratic
future. We need to show them that we have approaches, we have answers,
we have resources that are all the more worth investing in because
they address needs that will never ever be answered efficiently,
effectively, or appropriately in the marketplace. And when I say
we, I don't mean just the good people of the Alliance for Community
Media. People in organizations in every community need to make these
arguments for the funds to cultivate a truly civil society.
You need to stop being my unsung heroes. It's too damn hard. Let's
go for being pioneers of the newest public domains, with the citizenry
as social investors in this adventure. Thank you.
© Copyright 1999 Pat Aufderheide
paufder@american.edu
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