Lisa Williams, who was great in the previous session on the world of media in 103 (which I didn’t blog because I’m so damn tired) is moderating a panel on “viable models.” [I’m live blogging, missing stuff, getting it wrong. I’m posting this before I’ve proofread it because I have to get to the next session. Reader beware.]

Mark Ranalli from Helium gives a quick talk about Helium, a site where people compete to create the highest-rated content on a topic. They share the money they make with the writers. Only peers can evaluate. They do head to head evaluations of two articles and use that to rank what may be dozens of articles on a topic. Helium also flogs its content to publishers in their “freelance marketplace.” And it integrates content into mainstream media. E.g., Boston Now invites readers to write articles and sends them to Helium. A PBS show uses Helium to run a weekly essay contest. [Ah PBS and its essay contests!]

John Sawyer from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting reports from tough areas. They create content and place it all over, from MSM to YouTube. All the reporters blog.

Doc Searls is talking about “a new business model for free media” (= VRM). Marketers have a split in their heads, he says, that allows them to talk about “targeting” consumers even though they themselves are members of markets too. We no longer have to be put into silos, as if we were owned by businesses. We need Vendor Relationship Management. “With VRM I can inquite and relate to markets on the fly.” Express global preferences without having to give all the same info. He’s willing to pay money to reach a human in under 60 seconds. We should be able to manage our own health care data.VRM’s first use case is paying for public media. VRM is introducing the “relbutton” which you can put anywhere you want; press it and you can remember the site and relate to the site in the way you want. It has four visible states: Intention to relate, an existing relationship, an existing relationship, or an intention to sell.

Q: Why isn’t this the same as a PayPal button?
Doc: Because that’s take it or leave it.
Q: Sites have lots of ways of interacting with viewers. What’s different here?
Doc: There’s no one way to interact with them. And they’re not under you’re control. Public radio’s tip system takes too long to pay.
Q: This is not a micropayment system…
Joe Andrieu: It’s an invitation to relate in any number of ways. It’s a generalized approach.
Q: is this supposed to replace the pledge system?
Doc: It’s not intended to replace them. But 90% don’t pledge, and everyone hates the pledge drives.
Q: So how does the RelButton generate money?
Doc: It’s uniform and efficient.

Q: Can you give an example of something that’s approached solving a problem in this way? Letting people take control of a transaction?
Doc: For transactions, no. It’s like an old-fashioned marketplace.
Joe: An example are the old proprietary email systems.

Q: Could you explain how Helium makes money?
A: 1. We have about 700,000 articles, attracting 3M visitors/month. Ad revenue, which we share with the writers. 2. We take part of the fees publishers pay our writers. And, no, we’re not profitable yet but we hope to be soon.

Why do people write for you?
Mark: Individuals building a portfolio. Non-profits have been sending people to us. I’ve stopped trying to guess why people write.

Lisa: You’ve all presented transactional models. That’s where many people are going, but they require huge volumes to work. How do you get to the volume you need?
Mark: Advertisers and publishers.
Doc: We’re not burdened by a business model…
Lisa: You still have to get users…
Doc: You make it available. A Firefox download, etc.
Q: Any partners integrating the button yet?
Doc: It’s a barn raising. A few dozen are highly active on a list. [Tags: media mediarepublic lisa_williams doc_searls helium pulitzer_crisis ]

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I’m at the Berkman-Annenberg Media Re:Public conference. Manuel Castells (AKA The Manual Castells) leads off. [Note: Live blogging. In fact, I’m doing this while on stage as one of the presenters who follows Manuel. Reader beware. I get lots of things wrong.]

He wants to connect communication, democracy, power, and social change. Whoever prevails in the field of power relationships defines what that society is. “There’s never absolute power,” he says. “That’s how democracy comes about.”

If the construction of meaning is a key source of power (and it is, he says), meaning is constructed through a process of communication … communication between our neural networks and the external communication networks. A growing stream of research in neuroscience (e.g., DiMasio) shows the role of emotion/feelings in the construction of meaning and cognition. Political scientists are now developing studies that show how important feelings are in the realm of politics, through the construction of meaning. E.g., people reject info that doesn’t fit into their basic feelings. Such info has 4x chance of being rejected. The theory of affective intelligence (cf. “The Affect Effect”) says politics is substantially rooted in feelings that trigger emotions that lead to cognition. This has extraordinary consequences for democracy.

George Lakoff has shown how the metaphor of the war on terror has dominated American politics through linking to powerful images in our brain, appealing to the deepest emotion in human experience: fear of death. This helps explain why so many Americans still believe that there was a connection between 9/11 and Hussein.

This goes further than politics. Social movements act on the mind more than politics, he says. E.g., Environmental has transformed societies by activating mechanisms that led us to think we have a relationship with the planet that cannot be reduced simple to mining it for materials. The movement is scientific but also media-focused. Same thing with the women’s movement, the most important movement in [I missed the range] of history. This has been a revolution in the miond of women. Men try to accept but fundamentally we have not changed. What’s changed is how women think about themselves and their place in the world. It’s become normal. That is a cultural revolution. That goes through communication which comes through the process of activiating images and feelings in the brain.

That’s why media are fundamental, critical. They are the connection between our environment and our brains. That fact is widely recognized now. Media are the field of power, where power relationships get constructed, even though the media themselves don’t have the power. Politics are not determined by the media, but without the media politics doesn’t reach the society and have an effect.

Media politics in the past twenty years has led to the politics of scandals. Everywhere except in Scandinavia, major political changes are now always linked to some form of scandal. That’s become the fundamental weapon for political change.

If media are the political field, then politics and democracy depend on the power battles in the communications field at large. Therefore the transformation of communication and the media system is a fundamental component of the transformation of politics and democracy. There’s a fundamental transformation underway. Already 50% of the planet is connected to wireless communications. The wall that was stopping the rise of the Net in developing countries is beginning to crack. (There is of course still a digital divide, he notes.)

Corporations loom large, but corporations are being interpentrated by the horizontal communication the Net allows. You have to transform freedom into a commodity. [Not sure if he’s recommending this.] That’s where the business is. The endless capacity of hackers to create more levels of communication means the corporate world has to try to incorporate this. Ultimately the corporate media have to rely on a new form of articulation.

The key is that this distributes power to the edges of the network. The consequences are powerful. New images. Public debates. And throughout history, they have watched us; now we watch them. The real citizen journalist is anyone with a cellphone who can upload into YouTube.

The media space is where political struggle is being contested because that’s where the struggle over meaning is waged. [Tags: manuel_castells mediarepublic politics ]

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