Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog    Feedburner

"Postmodernism is a change-or-be-changed world. The word is out: Reinvent
yourself for the 21st century or die! Some would rather die than change."
Leonard Sweet, cultural historian.

07/18/2005 Entry: "The mainstream struggles to co-opt citizens media"

Things are heating up in what could become THE media battle in the months and years ahead. Will the mainstream succeed in efforts to co-opt the personal media revolution? Not a chance.

An article in today's Washington Post helps explain my ambivalence about podcasting. The title itself ought to give pause to anybody following this technology: "Mainstream Media Is Tuning In to 'Podcasting' — Corporate America Overtakes a Popular Grass-Roots Digital Format." Citing Apple's move last month to include podcasts in the latest version of iTunes, thereby making it easier for novices to download and listen, the article tells it like it is:

Corporate media moved quickly to stake out podcasting as an avenue for reaching new listeners. While early podcasters offered talk radio-style shows with quirky titles such as "The Frat Pack Tribute" and "The Rock and Roll Geek Show," big companies have elbowed in with condensed versions of popular broadcasts. Now, it's "Queer Eye Hip Tips" and "ABC News" that dominate as the most popular podcasts on iTunes, making the one-person, in-house shows harder to spot in a sea of media logos.

The result demonstrates how a new technology can remain part of an underground culture only for so long before corporations adopt it.

This is an immutable marketing law in the one-to-many, top-down, mass media world, and it's why I've been hesitant to jump on the podcasting train with both feet. Podcasting is many things, including a way for the little guy to "broadcast." But broadcasting belongs to the big guys, who are now stomping all over the potential of the little guy to make it big. This was inevitable, because the value props of a podcast are portability and time-shifting, two serious issues for mainstream broadcasters in today's on-demand world.

And once the stomping settles down, what's next for podcasting? The article raises the $64,000 question:

It's not clear that there is a mass audience for podcasting, or whether the phenomenon could turn out to be a fad.
I don't have the answer, but my gut tells me that while a few podcasting stars will emerge, people will continue to move away from the mass marketing model. Hence, my reticence.

But podcasting isn't the only technology being pursued by the mainstream. The soul of the blogosphere itself is the prize in numerous attempts by the mainstream to re-frame and re-define the "sphere" in a way that suits their mass media goals. In Greensboro (Note: I sincerely admire and respect what John Robinson has done so far.), John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro News & Record, is recruiting citizen journalists for a new venture:

One of the goals of our citizen journalism initiative is to create community sites on the Web. Our community news editor, Betsi Robinson, describes the first such site. We're starting in Summerfield.

Soon we'll be contacting churches, schools, civic groups and neighborhood associations in Summerfield to find people interested in becoming "community correspondents," people willing to write short stories about what their groups are up to and snap photos at community events. You know, the civic club's latest effort, the Little League championship, the church mission trip, the neighborhood park project, the school play. We figure you know more about what's going on in your community than we could ever hope to.

...Most of what we'll offer by way of news and photos will be posted first on the Web, with the best of what we get appearing in the printed News & Record each week.

We're excited about the Web-to-print model. This is just the first. Want to participate? I hope you do.

Note that this is a "Web-to-print model." In other words, it's about boosting the N&R, and who could blame them for that? It's smart. But here's my problem with it. A manufactured "blogosphere" has to end up different than the existing blogosphere, because its reason for being is different. Robinson wants to extend his reach, and so he's trying to raise up citizen reporters in areas important to the paper's overall goals and missions. This is where the conflict exists between what is genuinely a bottom-up phenomenon and the top-down media.

In San Francisco, Current TV is trying to raise up a group of citizen video journalists to help them with their innovative network, and they are employing a version of the "create your own blogosphere" model. Jeff Jarvis doesn't like it:

The big guys think it's still about them. They don't understand -- and perhaps never will -- that it's not about speaking but listening, about blowing up their networks to take part in vastly bigger networks than they ever could have imagined.
Jeff references a post by Umair Haque at BubbleGeneration that's worth reading:
Check this out:

"...Assignment: London

Okay: We want to put together a reflective piece on the London bombings and their implications. Get out a camera -- a webcam will do -- and start talking."

Look, peer production is not about ordering prosumers around to meekly do your bidding. It's about building a platform/community that does theirs.

Not to sound harsh, but perhaps Current has the whole dynamics of this stuff backwards.

In a sense, this is the same kind of mistake that 1.0 dot commers made - assuming that the www was just another distribution/mktg channel. Dot com 2.0 peer production plays like Current seem to be assuming more and more that the www is just another production channel (supply chain, if ya like). It's emphatically not.

Umair is exactly right. My view of the whole Current concept has fallen dramatically, for they're proving that they just want to be another mainstream player.

The citizens media movement or personal media revolution is a new thing and cannot be corraled by deep pockets. The sooner the mainstream accepts this, the sooner we can get on with the process of building new economic models. Meanwhile, however, we need to be fully exploring smart aggregators and software that helps people participate in their own media experience. That, my friends, is the future.


"The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create."
Leonard Sweet