The Public in Public Service Media

The next RIPE Book, ‘The Public in Public Service Media’ has just come out. This is one of a series of books from Nordicom, the Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research. RIPE is a bi-annual conference which draws together academics who are interested in public service media, from across the world. In September (8-11) 2010 the conference will be held at the University of Westminster.

The 2010 RIPE book  looks at how creative and active publics are beginning to affect public service media. I wrote one chapter for the book, ‘Facilitating Participatory Audiences: Sociable Media and PSM’. The chapter compares how the BBC in the UK and National Public Radio in the USA have been faring with the juxtaposing of the broadcast and network models. Although the BBC began experimenting with social media in 1998 and NPR in 2008, both organisations show the idea of opening out to audiences is problematic.

The reasons for this are  mainly due to the fact that broadcasting is a one to many model, hierarchical, controlled environment which includes the public largely through the agreement of the producers. Networks (which enable social media and the uploading of content and comment) is a less hierarchical, many to many environment where the public have much more ownership of the space.

The two paradigms (the broadcast model and the network model) simply don’t work together well. At best public content can look like ‘dressing’ for producer-led content, at worst it can be a cacophenous mess. Sometimes…it can work, but we are a long way off finding solutions. Channel 4iP, who are trying to re-invent public service media in a form which is more compatible with a networked age, are going down the tools route: commission tools which enable the creation of public service content by the public and by producers.

Connection Factory

I am involved with an EPSRC funded research project, working with Prof David Gauntlett and Dr Anna Piela at the University of Westminster. The mentor group also includes Dr Adrian Woolard (BBC North) and Rowena Goldman (BBC Future Media and Technology). Connection Factory launched last month with an event which discussed the future of public service media. Rowena has blogged about the project on the BBC R and D blog.

The idea of Connection Factory is to draw together academics and producers of public service media for innovation. There are already over 200 members of the network, and from the beginning, it was obvious that it would attract international interest. Dr Alice Bell has written a piece about the event ‘Public Service Media in the Digital Age’ as well.

3DTV

3D tv seems to be moving on apace, with reporters at this year’s Gadget Show Live  noting that 3D players are everywhere. I wonder whether the term ‘player’ might become more of a household reference term than ‘television’ in the future.  The last example of a 3D tv programme I saw from BBC R and D centered around a waterwheel which I was able to walk around.

This brings up the question of what kind of  content lends itself to 3D? Programmes like ‘Restoration’ and ‘Grand Designs’ are obvious contenders. I’m working with just over 30 third year BA students at the moment and we are ‘inventing’ new broadcast channels (the terms ‘broadcast’ and ‘channel’ are used loosely as some of their ideas are designed for the Web). It was -predictably - only a matter of time before the request to design a 3D porn channel came up *sigh*.

Transitioning

The BBC is about to begin recruiting for their new production centre in Salford. Last week they launched a new website to collect CVs in order to fill ‘hundreds’ of jobs.  This looks as if it’s going to be a radically different kind of BBC than previously i.e. the emphasis will be on integration with local HE and the creative industries as well as the local community.

In addition a new business model will be trialled which aims to remove the dependency on having a permanent desk. This sounds trivial, but the idea is the lack of a base may encourage collaboration between departments. The same thing is going to be trialled at Ravensbourne’s new building at North Greenwich. There is tremendous resistance to this idea (me included!) as human beings love having a habitus.  It’s going to be a difficult transition probably.

Research Project – progress

As I have said (previous post) The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have given Professor David Gauntlett and Dr Pete Goodwin (University of Westminster, School of Media, Arts and Design) and myself (Faculty of Communication Media, Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication) a grant of £47,670 to build a knowledge exchange network between producers of public service media and academics. The project is titled: Building Collaboration and Engagement for Media Professionals and Academic Researchers.

The project will be mentored by Rowena Goldman and Adrian Woolard from BBC Future Media and Technology, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Adrian is an interesting guy who has done much research on augmented reality. See this presentation on the BBC’s thoughts about mixing the real and virtual to create new kinds of experiences. Augmented Reality is likely to grow in usage over the next few years. James Uren, one of the academics at Ravensbourne is putting in for a grant from the HEA (Higher Education Academy) to do an experiment in the use of AR with smartphones. This could be really interesting.

 

Creating a knowledge network for producers and academics

Good news from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) that they will fund a six-month feasibility study exploring how to create an online/offline knowledge network between producers of public service media and academics.  The network will be mentored by the BBC’s Innovation teams in London and Manchester, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The research team are from the Communications and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster (Professor David Gauntlett and the Director of Resesearch, Peter Goodwin) and myself, from the Communications Faculty at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication.

The project starts now and it’s already gaining momentum through the acceptance of a presentation on the topic at the next MeCCSA Conference at the LSE.  BBC Manchester are also going to run a Connect and Create conference which will aim to bring together a range of people in a crowdsourcing kind of way.  At that conference Professor David Gauntlett and I will run a workshop about the new network…Lego may be involved at some point is my guess (David favours Lego, I like Plasticine). It’s going to be an exciting project, and should yield a good return for all involved; that’s the aim. My personal aim within the project is to encourage an ‘empty seat’ policy i.e. if any members of the network are running events at their respective organisations, and there are empty seats, then they could be offered. We will also start something  online, probably on Ning. More later…

Literacy in Virtual Worlds

Attended a research seminar at Sheffield University on Children and Young People’s Digital Literacy in Virtual Online Spaces.

The day offered various insights including Sheila Webber’s work facilitating an online learning space in Second Life for students at Sheffield University (as the character Yoshikawa).  I sometimes have the great fortune to meet, or hear, people who might be given the label ‘Digital Native’ – they swim where many of us paddle.

Thinking about labels – we need new ones for the following:

• Audience (those who used to view or listen)
• User (too demeaning)
• Participant (not very specific but OK)
• Engager (too clumsy)

Ideas on a postcard please…as they used to say.

Public Service Media Governance

The Council of Europe ran a two-day consultation on 17-18 September in Strasbourg. The idea was to look at how public service media is changing, and will change, in a participatory, networked, world.  The first day explored good governance models for public services, ending with a debate about how participating publics  have more involvement with public service media, through user-generated content for example.

The second day broadened out the topic of governance to look at what might be needed in the future in order to ensure PSM remains vigorous and connected with the publics’ needs in a networked and semi-converged mediascape.  I felt it was important to foreground the idea of collaborative innovation between public service media firms across Europe.

Arie de Geus, who worked for Shell, wanted to find out what activities ensure a company’s survival. He wrote up his research in this book:

de Geus, A. (1999) The Living Company, Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business, Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

de Geus looked at organisations which had been in existence for many years, over 100 years in one or two cases. He found companies who tolerate and encourage open innovation (often done by those considered ‘outsiders’ by insiders) were more likely to discover new directions.  de Geus gives the example of two species of birds, Robins and Starlings, which used to both be commonly found in northern Europe.  These days Robins are in decline because they are solitary creatures, whereas Starlings are multiplying. The reason for that is Starlings are less territorial; they explore, they watch, they learn,  and they pass on innovation and new ways of doing things, to others.

Futurism and convergence

The exhibition on Futurism at Tate Modern is interesting for producers who are working towards convergence as it shows how the intellectual groundwork for has already been laid by several earlier art movements, the futurists and the Fluxus movement being two in particular.

Periodically shocking artists come along, often with manifestos (art is often a political act), to sweep away what has gone before, or certainly to show a new way forward. The futurists gloried in speed, “a roaring motorcar is more beautiful than the Nike of samothrace” said F.T. Marinetti. In the same way coders and developers seek faster internet speeds and compare ISPs and compression ratios. Faster broadband = more sounds, more visuals, more animation and so on.  Many developers and coders may become the artists of our future.

Developers and coders can be professionals, but they are often bedroom creators who later became entrepreneurs  (see Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and so on).  These individuals understand the atomic structure of the net, the basic noughts and ones.  We will all need to be transliterate to keep up with the languages of digital expression, whether we are producers or publics, as we are all becoming media makers.

Producers continue to experiment with convergence, and their experiments are often crude, mainly because it is sometimes necessary to try and link dynamic content which is being generated from different databases and/or on different platforms. The intellectual ideas around converged content are already here, the developers and coders are busy inventing new stuff, and the internet is getting fast enough to  deliver new forms of converged content.

What is holding things back is the middle ‘storage and retrieval’ layer – the database-driven content management production systems – which are often still in the digital stone age, lacking intelligence and the ability to  respond in a nuanced way.

Post PhD, pre-book chapter

I have been quiet for a while as my Viva was coming up. It was on the 19th June at 3pm and I passed, with no changes needing to be made – just great.  Post PhD = not v. quiet as five days later I finished the first draft of a book chapter on sociable media theories and creative audiences to be published in the next, 2009 edited collection on public service broadcasting  by Nordicom in December 09.  Once that was out of the way there was also a proposal to finish for the EPSRC  - a pitch to do a feasibility study for a knowledge exchange network between media producers and academics. I hope that will come through as the project would support some of  the aims of the Digital Britain Report. Said report has been criticised for not aiming to deliver fast enough broadband speeds therefore potentially limiting Briton’s individual access to what many feel is a basic tool, and also placing the UK behind such countries as the US, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Korea.

There are other things limiting participatory practices – my doctoral study showed how the BBC has been slow to engage with audiences. Producers are often holding on to established practices which used to work…but that was in a previous ’pure broadcast era’. A comparative study (NPR and the BBC) I have just undertaken for the book shows National Public Radio in the USA shows some similar reluctance to engage wholesale/bring audiences into the frame as media-making colleagues. There are however notable exceptions with particular presenters experimenting and finding ways to include audiences (e.g. Scott Simon). Times are tough for broadcasters but they need to find a new relationship model which will work with an active, participating, public.