I did the “wrapup” at BeyondBroadcast, and tried to talk about the thought I keep coming back to but am never able to articulate. At least it was brief – under 10 minutes, I think. Here’s the outline of what I said:

1. What’s the thread between participatory culture and participatory democracy? Why think one has to do with the other? How can participatory culture be “transformative,” as Henry Jenkins suggested in his terrific opening talk. (Digression: The mainstream media are focused on including “user-generated content” on their sites as their response to participatory culture, but that’s not transformative.)

2. Well, what is democracy. There are bunches of definitions: Majority vote, society of equals, government that gets its authority from the people. But most important, it’s ours. The government isn’t theirs, the way it was the king’s.

3. So, what does “ours” mean? Again, there are bunches of definitions: What the law gives you control over, on our side, of our nature or essence. But, when it comes to culture, look at the difference between your study of a foreign culture and your participation in yours. Culture is ours because it makes us who we are; we are indistinguishable from it.

4. But, participatory culture is changing the nature and topology of ours. It’s ours in a different way. We can create works with strangers, with anonymous crowds, and in all the other ways we’re inventing. This is a very different sense of ours. And it’s not just that we can build Wikipedia or Flickr streams. We also get to make these works matter to one another: That we can surface and pass around the video or the prose so that it becomes a shared cultural object also changes the nature of the ours.

5. So, how does this new ours affect democracy? (And it’s more likely to affect democracy before it affects politics since those folks have a death grip on power.) How does this ours get turned into an us that operates politically? I dunno. I.e., this talks makes no progress on the question it raises :( [Tags: beyondbroadcast07 culture politics democracy media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason magazine, is moderating a panel on the relation of participatory and commercial cultures. He begins by saying that the inersection is older than the Web 2.0, “or, as I like to call it, The Web.”

Panelists: Kenny Miller, creative vp for MTV media; Elizabeth Osder, sr. dir. of product dev at Yahoo media; and Arin Crumley, one of the creators film Four-Eyed Monsters .

Kenny talks about “navigational dominance. [What a phrase!] “We navigate our world by means of brands,” he says. Each of the MTV properties has its own demographics (ComedyCentral, Nickelodeon, etc.). Each is a brand with navigational dominance. But now there are lots of ways to getting to info. “How do you enter that world in a respectful way?” It’s no longer a one-way conversation, he says. There’s more chunking. It’s a fundamental shift. MTV is getting more of the audience’s voice back on the air. “American Idol is awesome and we think about that.” It’s a binary world and we’re divided into teams; people might like another option, but people don’t know what it is. Attention is a zero-sum game.

Elizabeth (who was the first girl to play Little League softball officially) says that Yahoo makes connections among people. She points to the single sign-in identity system with 400M registered users. Yahoo bought Flickr, Delicious.com and MyBlogLog, she points out. “Every day citizen journalism and photo journalism is happening” there. Now at Yahoo she’s trying to figure out how to disrupt Yahoo news. Seven years ago Yahoo started a Digg-like facility for news.

Arin talks about the reception of his movie. They did festivals for 9 months and 3,000 people saw it. The same number saw the first portion of it in the first 36 hours they put it on line.

Jesse asks questions.

Q: Arin, how is the process affecting your film-making?
A: The MySpace page surfaces ideas and questions that would never show up in the Q&A at a conference showing. Real conversation. We can see what the audience got from the movie and can adjust. Also, we can share the backstory, etc.

Q: Elizabeth and Kenny, how have users used your tools in ways you didn’t expect?
A: Kenny: We put up a message board. We made a game. They took moderation off a board.

A: Elizabeth: Flickr taught us that users want to take your stuff and stick it on their site.

Q: What do you have to offer that we can’t get elsewhere?
A: Kenny: You can’t compete with everyone. The world is open and flat. We only ask if the audience is liking what we’re doing and is it growing. [Shouldn’t use the “audience” word in this crowd.]

A: Eliz.: We’re part of an ecosystem. The job on our news sites is to point people to the best info on and off the site.A: (arin) A lot of what’s been done seems contrived. The Web is becoming a means of expression. “We’re just peers.” We’re sharing what we do with other peers. And we have tutorials about how to create videos and post them.

Q: (audience) How do commercial sites connect the needs of advertisers with needs of participatory participants?
A: Eliz.: We understand our audience. And we share revenues with bloggers.

A: Kenny: That’s the big question.

[Tags: beyondbroadcast07 media yahoo mtv]

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John Palfrey says we don’t know how the Internet might affect democracy, but there lots of possibilities. He lays them out. [I’m typing quickly trying to capture the outline. As always, I’m missing stuff and getting it wrong.]

First, it might affect participatory democracy by providing open information enviornments, making new networks, enabling tools for individual activists, a productivity tool for campaigners, and attracting new participants. On the other hand, it might provide too much information, it can fragment us (“The Daily Me”), the participation can be watered down, it limits participation to those with access, some states are instituting censorship (cf. the ONI project), and maybe we should be jumping to “postdemocratic” order. So, maybe we’ll see refinements; the context matters a lot and it depends “a ton on what baseline you choose.” That is, if you’re only asking if participatory culture makes demcoracy better, that’s an easy bar. But maybe we should be aiming higher.

Second, acadmics says that the real story is about economic democracy and the emergence of a stronger middle class, and Doc Searls’ “Vendor Relationship Management.”

Third, academics also talk about semiotic democracy, e.g., control of cultural goods, with meaning created by many, not by the few. More YouTube and Second Life, less Disney. But (he asks), will people participate? Will we just create the old structures online? And won’t new intermediaries emerge to decide what we see?

John lists takeaways:

The Web is about creativity, innovation, and greater power at the edges.

This is a global phenomenon.

Big media companies generally have no idea how to deal with participatory democracy.

The legal and political battle over the future of the Internet is where a lot of this will play out. The outcome is not assured.

This conference is about where theory meets practice.

Q: First, participatory culture and democracy are non-partisan. Second, someone has to tell us what’s true or else we’re liable to end up with fascism, racism, anti-semitism, etc.
A: Something to talk about this afternoon. [Tags: beyondbroadcast07 john_palfrey media democracy politics berkman]

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MIT’s Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture ) opens the Beyond Broadcast conference. Henry asks what the line is that connects participatory culture and participatory democracy.

Henry begins with the always-delightful chain that led a parody site’s photos of “Ernie is Evil ” (the Muppet) to be included in genuine, pro-Bin Laden posters. Henry points out that our current images of democracy recycle previous images, such as Mr. Smith in Washington, Rockwell paintings, etc. He shows captures of an avatars’ protest march in a game space in China, an anti-Bush music video, Flickr images of the London bombing, American Idol voting (and “Vote for the Worst” as an anti-corporate Idol site), and the Moonite lite-brite (which he says is becoming a symbol for the young for a regime that’s “frightened of its own shadow,” is unaware of pop culture, and unable to respond to threats). Are these the new images of politics, Henry asks. The left, he says, uses the same images as the media does when talking about media reform. We talk about conformity, being narcotized, being turned into idiots and fools…as if we are victims of media. “The media reform movement is self-defeating the moment it holds mass media in contempt.” He is going to propose a way of conceiving media reform.

He cites Stephen Duncombe’ s vision [but my computer stopped working so I have no notes :( ]

What should politics look like? Henry points to a purple map of the US that shows states as a mix of red and blue depending on the proportion of Reps and Dems. This is not a partisan issue, he says. First, he says, we need free speech. We need to fight how copyright is being used by government and business as a “pincer move” squeezing participatory clture. We also have to “guarantee that everyone has access to participate,” he says. We need to look at non-political sites where we come together, e.g., we could have used Survivor as an opportunity to talk about race, or 24 to have a dialogue about torture. We should mobilize fans without condeming the fantasies they embrace. We need to look critically at astroturf but also see it as a sign that participatory clture matters. He ends by looking at AskANinja’s rant on the Net neutrality movement.

Q: My high school blocks all social networking.
A: Our schools are turning off sutdents’ best access to information. It’s a mass deskilling…

[Great talk. I’m left wondering more particularly about how the democratizing of media affects democracy, i.e., the very point of the conference.]

[Tags: beyondbroadcast07 henry_jenkins media democracy politics ]

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I’m at the lunchtime presentation at a conference the name of which I’m not sure of — too many conferences, perhaps? — where a woman is in the middle of a presentation about research based on 350 observational sessions about how we’re using media. I came in late and ate my sandwich during most of it, but the gist is that we’re still watching more TV, but the Web and Radio are about equal in how many of us use them and how many hours we spend with each. Plus Webby folks spend money, apparently. (Dave Sifry is in the audience and hade the speaker drill down into more statistical detail, but it involved understanding numbers work, and I never got much past the concept of some numbers being “bigger” than other numbers.) “Online drives offline usage, and offline drives online usage.”

There seem to be about 100 people here, and they are definitely media related — I see Maria Thomas of NPR.org, and I’m next to a guy from WQED.

The conference is the Integrated Media Association ‘s. The woman giving the talk was Pam Horan of the Online Publishers Org. [Tags: marketing]

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I’ve spent the day doing video interviews with speakers and attendees at the Fast Search user conference. We did about 15, so I’m too tired to get the urls of all of them, but you can page through the blog and find ’em, if you want. Some great people talking about search, social software, knowledge management, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Two Dot Oh 2.0 …Some names you’ll recognize some companies you’ll recognize, and some really interesting people you may not know. (Disclosure: Fast is paying me to do this. But the interviews are not about Fast.) [Tags: video search km social_software ]

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Steve Schultze, from MIT Comparative Media Studies , is giving a Tuesday luncheon talk at the Berkman about the Beyond Broadcasting conference, which has as its theme this year “From participatory culture to participatory democracy.”

Chris Lydon in a video clip asks, “Is the Internet the new public?” Steve plays a clip of Rebecca Mackinnon talking about Chinese repression of speech that leads to political action. Nevertheless, she says, the Web is enabling new forms of social discourse. Before the Web, she says, you couldn’t be famous in China without getting past an official gatekeeper. Steve tells of a Chinese woman, Xiang Xiang , who uploaded an MP3 that’s been downloaded a billion times—a song about a pig. There may be political echoes to the song, apparently.

The hypothesis of the conference: “Skills that emerge in the course of participating in pop culture can become powerful forces when translated into tools of citizen engagement.”

The first half of the conference will be us listening to speakers. The second half will be working groups. Steven asks us what the working groups should be. (There’s a wiki here.) [Tags: media conferences beyond_broadcast everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Mochila says it’s doing for all content what iTunes has done for music: Enabling people to buy the content they need when they need it. It has a marketplace to let you monetize your “high quality” content. You can set rules for embargoes and usage [=DRM]. From the annoying promotional video he shows, it seems to be aimed at big time publishers, e.g., Redbook, Popular Mechanics and Enterpreneur. “Mochila has solved a huge problem in the media market: Licensing doesn’t scale…We make licensing safe and scalable.”

ThisNext helps you do social shopping. There are 60M SKUs. People want to help each other decide what to buy. At ThisNext users can talk about the products they care about. “McKinsey reports 27% of all personal conversations in USA include discussions of products.” Only 15% of us trust advertisers. “Social shopping is the future of online marketing and brand merchandising.” ThisNext tries to attract the “influencers.” You can see who’s making the recommendation and can connect one-to-one. [Did I ever tell you about the time a couple of friends and I started a company called WordOfMouth.com to enable local communities recommend local services? Someday someone will get online word of mouth right.]

[Tags: onmedia07 alwayson marketing media drm everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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ClickForensics has launched a network of advertisers to detect fraudulent clicks on ads, either by a competitor trying to burn up the budget or move up in listings, or by contentent publishers looking to make more money for the clicks. It’s done through bots, spyware, click farms, pay-to-read… They say over 20% of the clicks coming from content sites (?) are fraudulent.

Michelle Wu of Social Television (mediaZone) — omigod, I think it’s a woman! — talks about “social tv,” which is professional TV with social interactivity. She’s shows an over-produced promotional video, with the faux-important voice of Robin Leech. Then she pitches. It lets users talk together—chat—while watching professional packaged, long-form TV. It does p2p peering, saving “over 99% bandwidth costs.” It serves ads to users based on their demographics and behavior. [I’m just not convinced that these various platforms we’ve seen today do much more than starting up a chat room while watching TV; that’s what we do for political events we couldn’t otherwise stand to watch.The P2P delivery is interesting, but I’m guessing someone else will solve this problem in a way that catches on, at which point SocialTV doesn’t seem to be much more than a chatroom with ads. Unless I’m missing the point. Again.]

Dave Networks builds “video social communities around brands.” E.g., the Stargate site is a money-making community site.The content developed there can be syndicated. “We’ve created a monetization model for syndication.”

Real Time Content promises a “disruptive approach” that they call Adaptive Media. “Real Time Content, doesn’t just play media, it adapts it to the audience.” Every viewer sees his own TV program. [Well, ad.] It even adapts to the viewer’s mood. In his example, Honda FR-V has four user profiles, although you could have thousands. He creates a thirty second ad in real time for a “young married couple” profile. Then he does one for a socer mom. The first is in Scotland with soothing music and the second features a mom packing kid’s equipment, with spacey music and a voice-over. “We’re empowering the consumer to control the ad.” The ad creator creates the template using a Flash inteface that has metadata for content fragments for mood, demo, etc. [Great. Now we can wait for the blog post titled “My Adaptive Media ads think I’m gay.”]

Jay Hallberg of SpiceWorks does “Ad-supported IT management for SMBs.” If you subscribe, it inventories your network automatically and sets watches on things you want to watch, such as low disk space or low toner. As they do that, they show you ads. [Hmm. Could I be sick of seeing ads? Nah. How could I ever tire of that??] [SpiceWorks may do more than that, but I didn’t hear.] [Tags: onmedia07 alwayson marketing advertising metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I came in at the end of a discussion of marketing to the “IM Generation.” The part I caught was good — you can’t lie, you can’t tell them what’s cool, you have to be transparent. “There’s a lot of top-down marketing that will be roadkill in this environment.” One says that we’re only at the beginning of the development of grassroots videos as an art form.

The panelists are Tom McInerney (Guba ), Steven Starr (Revver), Justin Townsend (IGA Worldwide ) and Jeremy Verba (Piczo). Sorry I missed most of it. [Tags: onmedia07 media ads marketing alwayson ]

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