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.

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.

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*.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.