Lizzie Jackson

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

There will be older ones, I’m sure,  but the e-mint list has been going since 2000 when four of us UK online communities folk got together at Vircom, an online communities conference in San Franciso. There were only five UK online community managers there and 455 from the USA.  A slightly larger group of six got together a month later in the Mint Bar, St John’s Street in Clerkenwell. ‘Oink’, a friend of the esteemed Howard Reingold, showed us all how to send an email from a mobile phone.

e-mint’s gone on over the years and has grown, had meet-ups and video conferences.  Has met in pubs, empty offices and basements. During one post-meeting drink at the BBC’s Bush House men in space suits burst in looking for Anthrax as we simultanously watched what was happening outside the building on the 9pm BBC News.

The idea to formalise e-mint was accepted,  and then rejected (but the paperwork has all been done). The idea to lose the – between ‘e’ and ‘mint’ was also discussed and rejected. The Drupal platform came and went (sorry Ian!), and the idea of conferences have come and gone (sorry everyone!).  Chairmen came and went (Mr Brake,  Mr Hall and Ms Littleton). Reports were sent into Government which helped keep our industry from having legislation imposed on it in the UK (thanks e-mint!).

People have come and gone…and come back again.  I’ve been gone for the last year or two, but the PhD (on social media) will be handed in next week, hurrah, and not before time. So I hope to be around a bit  more.  There was a meeting last night which I missed, darn. Everywhere you look there are groups forming about social media…but few (IMHO) have the same friendliness, open qualities, and longevity, as e-mint (thanks Beks et al!). It’s about time for a ten year celebration isn’t it? Thanks for the reminder Jen.

Funny how the social media industry  has survived both the dot.com crash and now the global recession. For something which continues to elude a ‘traditional’ economic model, that’s pretty good.

Today is the first day of the Social Media World Forum for which, the organiser’s say, 1,600 people have pre-registered. The website announces it’s the world’s home for discussion about social media, but there are not many posts up there as yet…how long does it take to become world leading? A few days apparently. The event looks interesting and I hope the online presence has elements of the f2f.

Channel 4ip are reinventing public service media for the digital age. Their strategy is the inverse of the BBC’s, they will aggregate engagers around tools, rather than aggregating participating audiences around branded content (BBC).  The 4iP-ers have got off to a good start with a workshop organised by Frank Boyd (ex-BBC) in the NE to brainstorm what forms this will take, working with potential suppliers. 4iP will develop ‘interactive media not TV’ and concentrate on ‘networks not broadcasters’. They have £50 million to play with, but have not said where it has come from…Ofcom?

Things are shifting in the world of public service media. A new team are  in position at Channel 4 (4iP) who will explore what PSM might become in the future. 

Activa Multimedia, a subsidiary of the Catalonian public service media,   contacted me  last week to see if the University would be interested in finding out how 3D media, iPTV and avatars might combine in interesting ways.  But for a great overview of future trends and the bigger picture -  in October last year I went to RIPE the bi-annual conference on public service media, which took place in Mainz in Germany.  One of the most interesting keynote speakers of the day was Professor Karol Jakubowicz who gave this presentation (from this paper). Well worth reading.

Nice to see that the idea of having good hosts and Community Editors is returning to the BBC. A recent BBC internal meeting about the Points of View Message board offered this insight from Rowan Kerek, who hosts the television section of the board, “The community feel they are not listened to by the BBC and want a closer relationship and better feedback. As she put it, they feel like they are sometimes ‘talking in a corner’”.

This absolutely ties in with my thesis findings, that more listening to and acknowledging of audiences needs to  happen in the participatory media hosted by the BBC. Public service media organisations are likely to need to have a different relationship with audiences from the commercial media, in interactive content.

The hoo-hah about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s comments on BBC Radio 2 are interesting. Not because of the incident itself but because it is saying something important about the relationship between the BBC and its audiences. The audience are assuming much greater ownership of the BBC, therefore they are beginning to want greater transparency from BBC managers. They appear to also feel that the salary Jonathan Ross receives is too high, as the public servant with the highest salary in the UK (6 Million pounds Sterling), the return on investment must be very great indeed.

Audiences are beginning to colonise the BBC, on the BBC’s invitation to have a deeper two-way relationship, an interactive relationship. There are ‘islands’ of audience-generated content laced between the professional content produced by BBC staff. The BBC is framing itself as being interactive, therefore offering a reaction for every action, or enough – and good-enough - reactions to qualify as having an interactive relationship. But how much listening is going on and how much responding?

Russell Brand’s Radio 2 show was recorded on Tuesday 16th October and broadcast two days later, after the nine o’clock watershed, between 2100 and 2300 GMT. On Saturday 25th October Brand apologised, but it was not until the end of the first week of November (nearly three week’s later) that an ‘official’ apology is made. In addition, it takes the agency of The BBC Trust and Ofcom to unravel what ‘really happened’ for the public, not the BBC. And it was The BBC Trust who asked the BBC to make a formal apology.

What this is about is the BBC being open to its shareholders, the public; being much more responsive, faster. The BBC is often compared to that great liner The Queen Mary; it takes a long time to turn it around. The BBC must listen, acknowledge and respond more to audiences, and in different ways. An official announcement is also incredibly old-style. If someone from Radio 2 management had responded instantly, via the website, for example, in real time, would this have reduced the amount of complaints received  from the public?

Interestingly most of the complaints came from older members of the audience, suggesting Brand was out of step with his audience (who are mainly over 35 years of age). However there were also a huge number of complaints from people who hadn’t even heard the show. So I suggest this is not about the show at all, it’s about the BBC’s audience wanting the BBC to reply, in a timely manner, appropriately…oh and it’s also about salaries.