MONDAY, 29 January 2001
Plenary
The Digital Media Challenge: The Place of Independents within the New Digital Environment
Denise Caruso, Moderator:
What does it mean to be independent in this world where virtually anyone can create and distribute media and where public policy actually allows AOL/Time Warner to exists?
Andrew Blau, policy analyst
To understand the digital transformation you have to understand that it's really not a transformation of the last five years. It's a transformation of the last twenty or thirty or more years. It has created a much deeper set of changes that go far beyond digital camera or digital editing suites. We're going to miss the larger structural changes.
| "The same technologies that strengthen the capacity of independent media makers by giving them more tools, greater sophistication, and greater distribution potential at lower cost also undermine the very policies that once supported and promoted independent media. * * * As Yogi Berra might say, the problem when you can reach anybody is just that you can't reach anybody!" ANDREW BLAU |
Let me lay out some of this background. First is the evolution of the semiconductor. The growth of processing power over the last twenty-five years has increased by about 65,000 times and that's had some enormously transformative effects. It created the consumer electronics market that we've all enjoyed and participated in. It's a market defined by rapidly falling costs but also rapid obsolescence, feature glut and miniaturization. These things flow from the incredibly fast growth of processing power that has been sustained since the 1960s. Second, fiber optics and communications satellites have radically changed the cost associated with distance, making distance almost immaterial. At the same time the capacity of our distribution systems has mushroomed, so that old notions about scarce bandwidth have been blown away. Third, packet switching makes data transport over any medium – fiber optics, copper wire, cable – much more efficient. This also began in the 1960s and underlies the creation of the Internet.
So what's the real impact of all these technological developments? They produce structural changes in the way information and media of all kinds are made, moved and managed. They lower costs for producers, distributors and consumers, but they also create new costs and raise others, so it's really a matter of cost shifting, not just cost reduction. They also undermine many of the policy rationales that had been built up to support community media and independent media. This is really a key contradiction: the same technologies that strengthen the capacity of independent media makers by giving them more tools, greater sophistication, and greater distribution potential at lower cost also undermine the very policies that once supported and promoted independent media. As Yogi Berra might say, the problem when you can reach anybody is just that you can't reach anybody!
Larry Kirkman, Benton Foundation
As Eric Barnow once said, "The independent spirit is about the
unimagined question and the unwelcome answer." I want to start with a little independent-media experiment I was involved in 1979 – an experiment that involved some other people who are speaking at Digital Indies, including Kim Spencer of WorldLink and Nick DeMartino of AFI. We got PBS to sell us three hours on its new satellite distribution system and we produced a live documentary, "Nuclear Power: The Public Reaction," on the Three Mile Island demonstration at the Capitol. In a couple of weeks we got together a hundred or so volunteers. A third of them were independent media producers from all over the country who went to Washington, DC, on the buses with the half-million demonstrators; another third were moonlighting commercial television workers out of stations from Washington and New York; the final third were my students from American U. We created a show that served as a demonstration of alternative independent media for the next decade. It was picked up by thirty stations in LA and San Francisco. Over the last twenty years there have been other such success stories.
I think the key strategy for independent producers is to look for alliances with the nonprofit sector, to really engage the world of organizations and networks that constitute "civil society." In the past these groups have been a useful tool for funding and promotion, but now they are fast becoming an imperative strategy for survival. In the new digital environment, the knowledge and networks of nonprofit organizations are more valuable then they ever were in the analog world with its narrow formats and scarcity of channels. The reliability, the reach of these organizations, their brand name if you will, their information, their devotion to action, the voices they represent are the sea independent producers need to swim in. The new media demand that nonprofits shape their communications and information for advocacy, for education, for soliciting support, for recruiting volunteers. Nonprofits can build on the trust that they have earned with their members, their constituencies, their donors. In a world of information overload, of overwhelming and indiscriminate search engines and bland mass media-like portals that are no more than TV under another name, there is a growing demand for trusted intermediaries that map, digest and layer information, enabling discussion and debate.
Mark Lloyd, Civil Rights Forum
It is true that media technology is changing at a very rapid pace. Both the tools of producing messages and the tools of distributing messages are changing. Imagine a world where we have multiple ways to tell stories and an abundance of channels through which to tell them. Even the concept of channels is too limited for the coming media environment of cross-platform mobile Internet surfing. If taken alone these changes suggest incredible opportunities and advantages for young independent producers. Producers untied to either old ways or cumbersome institutions are far better able to adapt to new technologies than cautious corporations.
Demands for social justice do not come from corporations. The place of independents in this new digital media environment is the same old place: their job is to stir things up. That is why independence matters. The challenge in our present environment is more difficult than ever before for independents. It involves what will enable individual voices to be heard by an audience large enough to exert power over the forces that determine the allocation of resources in our community - such as using the public airwaves to speak to the entire community as one audience.
Except for television, we are distracted and divided, split into a million different audiences. Exaggerations about the Internet have seduced too many of us into assuming that an online community interested in the same chat is a real community. Comforted in our isolation with the few others who are like us, we are impatient with disagreement and difference. In such an atomized, alienating environment, the place of independence, the place for those who would challenge the status quo, is not secured by technology, but neither is technology the problem. The problem is: how will corporations impose technology on our community? How can independents get this power – the power to use technology to improve human society. The answer is ironic and incongruent, like most true answers. For independents to gain real access to the power to use technology, we must join with others who seek to change society for the better. We must see these communities as necessary for independents to thrive and independents as necessary for communities to progress.
Gigi Sohn, Ford Foundation
The transition to digital is about two key issues -- access to bandwidth and access to audience. Both issues have policy and business implications. We all recognize it's not an easy policy environment, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be engaged. I think these issues cross partisan lines and there are opportunities for independents if we are smart and strategic and active. I want to stress the strategic and the active because it's too easy to sit here and ring our hands about how life sucks and President Bush won the election and all that stuff. We've got to get beyond that.
| "Is there any justification at all for giving large media companies free use of taxpayer assets with little or no attendant public benefit?" GIGI SOHN |
So, let's look at bandwidth. Digital compression represents a major opportunity for independent producers. I have spent a lot of my time arguing in front of the FCC and the courts about scarcity and how we need very detailed content regulation to deal with the scarcity of airwaves. I'm here to tell you that the era of scarcity is over. We've got direct broadcast satellite (DBS), digital TV (which will be here eventually), digital cable and broadband online – so, we've got lots of capacity that people actually watch. But not enough content. So, what's the problem?
Well, the problem is that these very numerous channels are controlled by a handful of major media companies. There are ten, twelve companies worldwide that own the vast majority of the channels that are emerging. The real issue is whether this handful of companies should be gatekeepers in the world of digital abundance. Is digital TV going to be a multiplex of reruns or an opportunity for new and diverse voices to be heard? In an era when telephone companies can be cable providers and cable providers can be Internet service providers or content providers, why aren't we talking about leveling the regulatory playing-field and demanding that those broadcasters be required to meet what I call "civic space obligations"? Going further, is there any justification at all for giving large media companies free use of taxpayer assets with little or no attendant public benefit? What is the public benefit? Embedded in the Communications Act of 1934 is the requirement that media owners meet public interest needs. Put simply, are these needs met by X number of hours of children's television per week and X number of hours of local programming? I'm here to tell you that they are not!