massive-MEDIA

Information Contours

I'm taking a class this spring at ITP, Information Contours, taught by Marc Libarle, that explores the ways the distribution of information impacts modern society. Our primary reading material for this class, Frank Webster's Theries of the Information Society, introduced me today to some of the theories of Jürgen Habermas. I think I need to puchase and read the unabridged translations of some of his writings, but here's a few tidbits that captured my thoughts this afternoon.

Habermas writes that public broadcasting corporations were established "because otherwise their publicist fucntion could not have been sufficiently protected from the encroachment of their capitalist one." Webster says that this argument can be extended to cover other public institutions such as public libraries, state statistical services, museums and art galleries, and higher education. Around the world, and especially in the US, even these public institutions are increasingly funded and influenced by large entities, both corporate and specific interest group-controlled. Public radio and television broadcast has had much of its public funding pulled and is now financed in large part by large entities with interests that don't necessarily match up with the public good. The same goes for museums and art galleries. In higher education, many of our best research institutions have as some of their biggest goals to spin off successful for-profit companies, and they get a good deal of their financing from corporations that shape what they teach.

And corporations are gaining more and more control over the government, through lobbying, campaign contributions, and public relations to sway and dull the opinions of citizens. The mass media has become yet another vehicle for this propaganda. News reports have begun shamelessly "reporting" the interests of their parent corporations. (See my 1998 paper about G.E. written from the inside when I was an intern there for some perspective. It's interesting to see how shameless indeed the media has gotten since then. What was surprising just 6 years ago is now normalcy.) I'LL POST A LINK TO THIS SOON - SORRY!

So, now that both media and government are both greatly influenced by large private entities, a viscious cycle of control has been created. I think that it would be tough and inefficient to fight this trend solely by creating large, influential entities to counteract ones that aren't truly in the public interest. The big corporations are already bigger and have consolidated much of the power of the media. They're preventing others from using their channels. These recent examples are all arguable, but the general trend is not: CBS wouldn't air MoveOn.org's anti-Bush ad during the Superbowl. The Bush campaign is now arguing that MoveOn.org's financing is illegal. ClearChannel Communications pulled Howard Stern from their radio stations only after he began speaking badly of the Bush administration. I'd love some more examples of this if you'd care to repond to this post.

Anyway, my hope is that not just large organizations in the public interest alone, but technology as well, can play a large role in the solution to this problem. A platform like massiveMEDIA can counteract these trends by putting the power to control what media gets to the brains of the citizenry with the public itself.

The current media powers are becoming increasingly good at striking a balance between providing content that their consumers desire and serving their own needs, which include keeping those consumers consuming their content. With massiveMEDIA, each participant, be it an individual or a collective entity such as a community, has a set of distribution resources that is in line with that of other participants. Effective distribution may become larger as a participant gains popularity, but this popularity is kept in check since the system encourages diverse content by always giving some distribution to untested media creators, sampling their media with small groups and only pushing it to increasingly larger groups if participants like it.

All this rhetoric doesn't mean I see massiveMEDIA as distributing primarily fight-the-man, politically-minded content. On the contrary, I see this as being only a small portion of what's distributed. In fact, I hope the man himself puts content on the system. The important thing is that what content gets pushed and pulled around the network is what people actually want.