JMS

Notice the ‘embarrassment of niches’ line was not actually refering to public broadcasting, as reported in the Wired piece about the conference, but rather to the emerging online social media world. The hope, in fact, is that a reinvented public media could be part of a solution to the nichification of civic discourse.

UPDATE: You can hear the audio from this introduction here.

The thesis we’ve been teasing out as we put this event together is that there IS tremendous potential at the intersection of public and participatory media.

You’ve got this exploding world of technology, social software, self-distribution, accessible tools of creation and interaction; 40 million blogs and the blogosphere doubling every six months, 50 million ipods out there and podcasting taking off, web 2.0 ventures bubbling up right and left with new hope and quite a bit of hype about a more open and expressive and global Internet experience.

And you have giants like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft competing to harness it all.

And it’s all creating profound changes in media, politics, culture.

But is it adding up to a new kind of public media – a third zone that’s not quite commercial or noncommercial? Generating its own communities and conversations, a kind of peer-to-peer civic engagement?

And does it satisfy the need of a democratic society to understand itself and its place in the world?

Does social media have a social mission?

Al Gore made a speech about six months ago warning “something has gone basically and badly wrong in the “marketplace of ideas”, that the strangeness of our public discourse is putting American democracy in grave danger”. He was talking about a disconnect between reality as it is lived, the critical issues of our time, and the media representation of it.

Al mainly faults commercial TV, except for his own new network of course. And for a guy who invented the Internet he’s pretty skeptical that it’s making a dent in the national discourse so far.

So is the flourishing of these new networks and conversations a solution or some kind of embarrassment of niches?

And this is where you start to think about the traditional, institutional public media, this ecosystem of public broadcasting stations, networks, producers, community television and radio.

Could the traditional and new public media align to create something that taps into the immense energy and expression and connection of the web while making use of the real strengths of these existing institutions: their public service goals, their core values and creative capacity, their brands and trusted relationship with audiences in the tens of millions, the deep local roots of stations, and a powerful broadcast reach.

Or do the limitations of imagination, infrastructure, resources, culture, and the broadcast business overall mean that the opportunity will be missed?

There’s a real risk that these worlds will remain on parallel and eventually divergent tracks.

What can we learn from the ways that commercial and mainstream mass media are starting to deal with the disruption—attacking, defending, coopting, buying, innovating?

And what about the BBC, who just last week unveiled their vision of the Creative Future, embracing a whole range of on-demand and participatory concepts, saying that “This new world creates new means for the BBC to fulfill its mission.”

And we do have some examples within our own field, some of which we’ll hear more about at this conference. MPR’s Public Insight Journalism project, Radio Open Source, the Public Radio Exchange. All of this is just scratching the surface.

It’s tempting to think that the open and democratic nature of the web and the innovation it continues to spawn is an unstoppable force, an inevitable and enlightened evolution towards a more interconnected, interdependent, and better world.

One thing I’ve learned here at the Berkman Center, is that this is not a foregone conclusion by any means. The threats to the Internet are many, and complex, and real.

So one hope is that the intersection of public and participatory media could fulfill the promise and potential of a democratic web, and the profound need for a public square in our civic life and culture.