F*ck Big Media

October 4, 2004 3:21 PM

F*ck Big Media, Rolling Your Own Network If a well-informed public is the necessary prerequisite to the democratic process, then we must frankly admit that any private ownership of public airwaves represents a potential threat to the free exchange of ideas. Now that private property has mostly collectivized the electromagnetic spectrum, and with little hope that this will soon change, we must look elsewhere to find a common ground for the public discourse. We are fortunate that such ground already exists.
posted by tranceformer (19 comments total)

I've thinking along related lines for a while. but I'd say this :

The technological methods for transmission of such a hypothetical network might actually represent a distraction : there are many possible methods.

But any and all methods - viable or hypothetical but promising - are nothing without an actual network of humans, cohesive, authoritative, professional.....who could generate the content of a new public interest media .

How to structure such an organization ? How to maintain quality of content ? There are endless questions.

But one insight is crucial - to bind together even a substantial fraction of the newly emerging energy of insight, commentary and investigative journalism now exploding onto the internet would create a notable conterforce/challenge to the current, deeply compromised Fourth Estate powers.

So where do we begin ?
posted by troutfishing at 4:14 PM on October 4, 2004

Ahh....Newswiki !

But, wiki-ism doesn't put reporters on the ground. That is a major obstacle.

So : does the wiki-news get determined merely by competing interest factiions, in the heat of battle, with the resultant mix repackaged and rebroadcast as "news" ?

Would it be better than the current status quo ? Worse ?

Just asking questions, that's all.
posted by troutfishing at 4:19 PM on October 4, 2004

But, wiki-ism doesn't put reporters on the ground. That is a major obstacle.

Why do we need reporters? To verify that we're seeing facts? They don't do that now; why should they do that in the future?
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:42 PM on October 4, 2004

There will be no organization. You can't maintain the quality any more than you can call the guy in charge of this whole weblog thing and complain about cat pictures. People will create videos and send them out, the good stuff will bubble up and your TiVo will grab the best stuff from del.icio.us/tag/divx
posted by revgeorge at 5:42 PM on October 4, 2004

(note: I'm the co-producer of Outfoxed & Uncovered)

Exactly, revgeorge.

I'm looking at this from a content producer standpoint, and am very excited about the pieces coming together. With Outfoxed & Uncovered, we've been pushing various angles on a rudimentary basis: House parties w/DVDs as a social organizing/distribution method, Creative Commons licensing of footage, bittorrent, etc.

Hopefully we can blow this out over the next few years and build a long-term sustainable non-profit media company dedicated to progressive ideas. Kinduva MoveOn.org for Hollywood.

If anybody's going to the digi foo camp at o'reilly, please gimme a holler, would love to sync up there.
posted by jgilliam at 5:55 PM on October 4, 2004

A really interesting article. I think one of the flaws with "liberate the spectrum" (a side note in the article) is that grade school kids can make a radio transceiver using parts that cost a few dollars (making one that broadcasts over a range of frequencies with quality is a bit more difficult.) A worry I have is that we could find ourselves just shifting control from whoever owns a segment of the spectrum, to whoever owns the codec.

Why do we need reporters? To verify that we're seeing facts? They don't do that now; why should they do that in the future?

I think one of the things he misses is that good-quality reporting or entertainment is WORK. About 20% of the work comes from what kind of medium you use. 80% comes from collecting, thinking, collecting, thinking, collecting, thinking, writing, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting and THEN publishing, (usually involving a few more rounds of editing before it gets to print.) Good reporting is hard work. It's not just a matter of being at the right place at the right time. It's a matter of showing up to all the public meetings, playing phone tag with all the key players on a weekly basis, having your fax number available so you can read all the self-serving press releases, reading reams and reams and reams of documentation that is booring as heck, having a network of subject matter experts for those times when a source is talking greek.

There will be no organization. You can't maintain the quality any more than you can call the guy in charge of this whole weblog thing and complain about cat pictures. People will create videos and send them out, the good stuff will bubble up and your TiVo will grab the best stuff from del.icio.us/tag/divx

And I'll put in any ammount of money that 90% of the best stuff will come from professionals who get paid to research the topic of that story. The remainding 10% will come from highly-dedicated pro-ams.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:05 PM on October 4, 2004

The reason why we need reporters is because 98% of the time, the stuff that really needs to be reported on is booring as shit. City council meetings, planning council meetings, press conferences, stump speeches, sessions of congress. These critical activities produce reams and reams of documentation that are written in an obscure formal dialect of English that must be read. 98% of the people that you need to talk to become dim and self-serving in their professional capacity as civil servants, and 98% of what they say to you will be a complete waste of time.

The reason why we need reporters is because someone has to sit through that 98% of tedious, booring, routine crap in order to find that 2% that we need to know. To sit through it week after week because the 2% from this month might be related to the 2% from last October. And once they have that interesting 2%, they still have to do the extremely hard work of explaining it to an audience with a 5th grade reading level and short 5 minute attention span.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:29 PM on October 4, 2004

Well said, KirkJobSluder.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:52 PM on October 4, 2004

KirkJobSluder, meet Dave Sim.
posted by dhartung at 10:10 PM on October 4, 2004

So Dave Sims are seeded, everywhere, with 99% probability ?
posted by troutfishing at 10:29 PM on October 4, 2004

This is it kiddies - the real deal. The task described in the FPP link, and underlined by troutfishing, is one that simply must be completed successfully before the incipient global empire fully consolidates its hold on inter-communications. If you think the bullshit is piling on thick now, just wait, 1984 will seem positively utopian... It's not an accident that ICANN has closed a thick curtain around its activities, or that limits to media consolidation have been reduced or eliminated; it's no accident that MS Longhorn is going to feature DRM-to-the-metal; it's no accident that the Patriot Act gives spooks and creepy-crawlies access to information that should be private, or that the DMCA denies the rest of us access to information that should be public.

These are all crucial elements in what may well be the most perfect control matrix ever conceived let alone implemented and unleashed on an unsuspecting cowlike humanity... Once these pieces are in place, another "pearl harbour-style event" will be all that will be required to massively and suddenly flip the internet from a default "route everything, let the end points figure out what it means" to a default "filter everything via central authoritative nodes, only transmit approved messages".

True, this sounds extremely paranoid, but lately it feels like its nowhere near paranoid enough. Launching a pre-emptive war on fraudulent grounds that is destabilizing *the entire world* is not something one would have expected from the us.gov, what with all the "checks and balances" in place - but guess, what - the check bounced and the balance has a big fat thumb on the scale - the fix is definitely in. They got away with it by *lying to us* - by saying "Saddam's gonna nuke is if we don't take him out!!!" ("If you knew what we know..." etc.)

The only way to ensure this doesn't keep happening is to get all hands pulling in the opposite direction, towards much greater openness and accountability - the "mainstream media" are owned by the same folks who own everything else, and can no longer be trusted to say anything contrary to their interests. What is the point of being allowed to vote for the candidate of your choice if that candidate can simply lie about what they intend to do, and what they have already done. How democratic is that?

Democracy needs access to real information - it can't function otherwise. A decentralized network that is collaboratively filtered blog-style is the only possible architecture on the horizon that can get us there quickly enough to make a difference, and as several comments above note, all the bits and pieces are out there, but we need to figure out how to plug them together, and fast. BitTorrent; RSS/Atom; FOAF and social software; Creative Commons and the GPL; Camcorder Nation; etc etc.

KJS - yes, it's a lot of work, and that's why it needs to be well paid - special attention needs to be given to how to encourage people to *give it up* for the folks out there doing the legwork, getting the story. Al Giordano has managed to pull together a pretty impressive team for the NarcoNews "Authentic Journalism" network, supported by large and small donations from individuals and groups who value their service enough to pay for it, even though they can get it for free.
posted by dinsdale at 11:03 PM on October 4, 2004

Whenever, someone brings up some sort of anarcho-democratic experiment, I can't help but remember one of the stumbling blocks of the last 300 years of anarcho-democratic experiments. Everyone wants to be the teachers, potters and printers and not enough want to dig ditches and empty the outhouses.

This is a problem that has stung both open source development and formal peer review. In theory, "many eyes" should be able to catch the errors and gaffes burried under what appears to be the routine and tedious. In fact, the "many eyes" often have big blind spots, and having someone sift through the massive levels of routine tedium on a day to day basis is necessary for our society to work.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:47 AM on October 5, 2004

I'm curious about the revealed details of 'Flexible TV'. The BBC meets bittorrent. Anyone know more? Google comes up with nothing but tantalising clues.

It's all very appealing ... to everyone but my ISP. I would guess that the prospect of mass, legal, use of bittorrent would bring the existing DSL network to its knees. That you don't use the upload capacity offered to you is surely factored into the architecture and contention calculations. If suddenly everyone starts flooding the network with torrents, well, I don't know. Would it be a problem?
posted by grahamwell at 9:54 AM on October 5, 2004

".....Everyone wants to be the teachers, potters and printers and not enough want to dig ditches and empty the outhouses." - KirkJobSluder - I hate to say it, but my suspicion is that centralized control would be necessary to make such a venture fly.
posted by troutfishing at 10:22 AM on October 5, 2004

dinsdale - shame I can't email 'ya.


"Catalyzing alternative media : The buildable moment is now ( dated appr. 6/2004 )


Hypothesis : There may never again be a better time than now, the summer of 2004 leading towards the 2004 Presidential Election - for all who create alternative media, and those public watchdog groups seeking to restore impartiality to a now severely compromised mainstream media - to come together to fashion an institutional counterforce/s to the major media networks - higher profile, better funded ventures leveraged (as with the creation of CNN) by - initially - volunteer/intern/low-paid talent, aided by newly available internet tools and technologies, and guided by disaffected media industry insiders seeking to reform their compromised profession.


Why ?

Revelations concerning the Bush Administration's numerous deceptions in justifying the invasion of Iraq, damaging testimony from the September 11 Commission, the recent and upcoming release of numerous recent documentaries challenging the official accounts told by government and mainstream media....all of these have converged in a "perfect storm" aided by a grimly fought inside the beltway power struggle, of career insiders appalled by Bush Administration actions, to ensure that George W. Bush is not reelected in November 2004.

The winds of this storm are building, and it has already led to a measurable shift in American public perception. A July 1 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll published found that a majority of Americans now believe the war has increased the threat of terrorism, A New York Times/CBS News poll shows a near majority who feel this while only 13 percent believe the threat has decreased.

For those of us who have learned to distrust the objectivity of mainstream media, this shift in American views - on the US occupation of (now nominally sovereign) Iraq and the "War on Terror" - is gratifying, an apparent lifting of an American trance which had settled in long before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and which was colored afterwards also by a paralytic and inchoate fear. The trance, for a bit now, lifts. A little fresh air blows in.

It is a wonderful, hopeful thing.

But remember this :

This battle in the larger media wars, over which economic and political interests have most power to shape public perceptions of relativity, has been won only because of the current political extremity of the Bush White House and it's allies in the Republican dominated US Congress. It was this extremity, as expressed through the Invasion of Iraq, the USA PATRIOT Act, and other similar actions which led Washington insiders to begin their campaign of leaked memos and documents which, broadcast through mainstream media, relentlessly undermined the credibility of the Bush Administration.

The voices of the American alternative media of of newly politicized Americans - only slightly audible over the television empowered shrieks of the mainstream media din, were still essential, of course, and the new visual-media challenge to the dominance of Television, this season's blizzard of inspired and impassioned political documentaries, did energize civil libertarians and the American left's base, and even changed some minds among the great unwashed of the politically disengaged.

But, if George W. Bush is reelected in 2004, this coalition of forces may not hold together and if John Kerry is elected as the new US president, it certainly will not hold.

If Kerry wins, a sort of balance will have been restored - a "moderate" balance in an overall equation which will unlikely address any of the fundamental un-addressed trends which now characterize America and threaten the World overall : regardless of John Kerry's true agenda, mainstream media, expressly right-wing media, and the right wing constellation of Washington think tanks and other such forces will tie Kerry's ability to enact meaningful change - as during the Clinton Era.


Meanwhile, the US Right will regroup for the counterattack.


The current temporary lifting of the public trance was partly engineered. Remember that.


But, the public trance has lifted, and this moment is very, very special - for a public which feels that it has been, and is still being, lied to is a public which will begin to look elsewhere than mainstream for other sources of information. This is already happening.


So we are now in a "brandable" moment, a moment when elements of alternative media and media watchdog groups in the US - and looking ahead, the World overall - can come together to give birth to a new public interest media.

A simple concept : strength in numbers and in talent. The preliminary commitment of journalists and reporters, video documentarists and cameramen, students and professors, people of all walks who are media-savvy, businesspeople, editors... all intent on shaping a counterforce which can serve the public, in honesty : an organizing body, the participation of many existing alternative media groups and publications : disaffected members of the mainstream media with the experience to guide the process and the prominence to give it widespread recognition. Whether be expressed through newspapers, radio or Television - but something which.....


These are my preliminary, unfinished thoughts.
posted by troutfishing at 10:48 AM on October 5, 2004

grahamwell: It's all very appealing ... to everyone but my ISP. I would guess that the prospect of mass, legal, use of bittorrent would bring the existing DSL network to its knees. That you don't use the upload capacity offered to you is surely factored into the architecture and contention calculations. If suddenly everyone starts flooding the network with torrents, well, I don't know. Would it be a problem?

Well, hrm. On the other hand, ISPs might see it as an opportunity to drive more adoption, the killer app to explain why you need DSL. Bittorrent does nicely work if you throttle upload rate, and one way around the issue is to just expand the time frame by keeping bittorrent active for a few hours after the download is complete. Bittorrent works better with 10 small pipes than one big pipe.

troutfishing: I think that people overestimate the blogosphere's influence on this. I do think that newsbloggers and people who do commentary are good because we no longer have letters to the editor filtered through an editorial board, and limited to 300 words. However, for all the whoo-ha about the role of bloggers in popularizing key scandals such as the forged Bush memos and the Diebold security flaws, I don't see much in the way of primary source research.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:18 PM on October 5, 2004

Citizen media vs. centralized media is a false choice, you don't have to only have one. Right now the blogosphere is at its finest when it has a symbiotic relationship with the mainstream media - fact checking, analyzing and providing stories for them to report on. I don't see why that needs to end when the written word becomes video.
posted by revgeorge at 1:21 PM on October 5, 2004

revgeorge - as you describe it, mainstream media would has by far the upper hand right now, and the Blogosphere can fact check - sure - but the overall frames mainstream media lays out are absurdly skewed towards the prerogatives of wealth and power : and "Fact-Checking" is a losing game when media shovels out 24/7 a steady ceaseless torrent of crap.
posted by troutfishing at 4:33 PM on October 5, 2004

Buildable moment indeed. There's been a lot of talk among hackers over the last year or 2 about peer-to-peer streaming and decentralized media filters, but AFAIK nothing that is ready for "prime time". PeerCast and Torrentocracy are a couple of projects that seem to have produced usable applications, haven't tried either so I can't comment on how usable... On the filtering front, the whole generation of daypop/blogdex style link aggregators is showing the way; AudioScrobbler + LastFM are doing something similar for audio - not sure if there's anyone doing anything like this for video blogs.

Unfortunately many projects are apparently stillborn (or have moved underground?) - former Freeneteer Brandon Wiley's Alluvium, the next-gen Indymedia project Active2, as well as a number of false starts in the BitTorrent+RSS space...

Still, we are tantalisingly close to *something* even if no-one is quite sure what. "the solution is super-saturated, and something is bound to precipitate out." The mythical "plex" perhaps?

This is one area in which the infrastructure builders and the content creators need to try to dig towards one another. Hopefully the two ends of the bridge will line up.

jgilliam: you guys rock!!
posted by dinsdale at 10:06 PM on October 5, 2004