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September 19, 2008

Future readers:

As the proverb goes, we are now living in interesting times—perhaps too interesting.

As I write this, I’m visiting my father in Miami. Presidential candidate Barack Obama is just blocks away, addressing a college crowd in the context of this now-historic credit crash. My dad and I are media multitasking as usual, following the financial crisis on four screens—the TV, his desktop, my laptop, my iPhone—and trying to figure out how Medicare, the stock market and the election might interact to shape our joint futures. The situation seems to change hourly, and we follow it at this pace.

We are fortunate. We have access—cable, broadband, mobile. Thanks to the Web, we can consult an overwhelming array of information options—mainstream sources, government web sites, blogs by both partisans and those pledged to provided unbiased perspectives. And we have the savvy to skate between those sources, debating the information we’re getting and weighing interpretations. Still, like many of the experts we’re seeing across the range of media, we’re struggling to understand how these complex forces affect our lives.

How would we manage if we had to depend on only a few sources, shaped by the interests of media owners, advertisers and the bottom-line logic of celebrity entertainment? I’ll tell you: not well. The times might get yet more interesting, but we wouldn’t know how or why.

We still turn to public broadcasting for a reality check, but we know it’s no longer enough. At the Center for Social Media, we’re exploring a future for public media that has online participation at its core. The old assumptions about what kind of media citizens need for a democracy to function—solid reporting, intrepid muckraking, lively debate, meaningful films—are now only the first step. New technologies give us the ability to find the information we need, talk back to gatekeepers, and make our own media if we find what’s out there lacking. We believe that public media projects should rise or fall according to how publics use them to learn, connect and mobilize around issues.

A future built around and through such truly public media will require lots of organizing in the here-and-now. And the very tools that now allow us to organize and move people to action—as One Web Day demonstrates—are contingent on a complex array of looming policy decisions. Net neutrality, free or cheap broadband access, media ownership questions, and restrictions on advertising are just a few of the fronts on which media activists are fighting.

To the e-barricades! By the time you read this, I hope we will have won.

Jessica Clark

Director, Future of Public Media Project

Center for Social Media, American University
www.centerforsocialmedia.org