I haven’t been blogging in a while, partly because I’m a bad blogger and also because I’ve been a traveling madman for what seems like months now.
I’m just back from a week in Moscow Russia where I was invited as a consultant to the Ford Foundation’s Media/Arts/Culture (MAC they call it) workshop where program officers from all of Ford’s MAC offices around the world (Indonesia, China, India, Vietnam, Egypt, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, US) convene and reconnect. This is evidently an annual gathering and the first time it’s been in Moscow. I was there doing triple duty as a MAC US grantee, a former Moscow resident (1993-1995), and a guest speaker on PRX, Internet and social/public media issues. A big thanks to Orlando Bagwell and all the Ford folks for including me in this remarkable gathering.
Moscow is a boomtown these days, and certainly earns its standing as the world’s most expensive city. What used to feel like a sliver of wealth and ostentation in the 90s is now a thick coat of shiny new real estate, shops, restaurants, fancy foreign cars and ubiquitous advertising for luxury goods and vacations for a growing and ambitious middle class. There’s still enough Soviet dilapidation and neglect at every turn to remind you of the pace of transformation under way.
The theme for the meeting was “freedom of expression in a networked communications environment,” in a framework developed by Andrew Puddephatt for a broader project that is worth learning more about here.
With a nod to others pioneering this approach, Andrew divides up the global media environment into four stackable layers: physical (like fiber optics, broadcast towers, telephone lines); Connectivity and Code (packet switching, operating systems, http), Applications (software, sites, services access/creating/finding); and then Content (documentary films, radio pieces, music, text, etc). These four layers are then influenced by three drivers of change: Technology; Politics, Regulation and Governance; and Economics and Markets.
This ended up being a helpful starting point for my PRX presentation, because a lot of Ford’s MAC effort is funding content of various kinds, but PRX is an example of how to have an impact at the applications layer and there’s lots more work to be done there. Ford and other foundations could support more open source software projects that intersect with media access and distribution, encourage more civil society organizations to adapt web 2.0 approaches to their online presence, and help develop new networks of their own grantees that cross disciplines and geographies.
There was an excellent discussion of copyright, remix culture and intellectual property, including a screening of Good Copy/Bad Copy which I highly recommend watching and sharing. Ford has to strike a careful balance in supporting creators and their careers while generally advocating for open access to knowledge, creativity and culture.
Other presentations and discussions included the challenges of supporting contemporary art in transitioning countries where ambiguous and ‘edgy’ ideas can be seen as threatening to emerging national identities; the idea of sustainable artist spaces; a screening of the excellent documentary Miss Gulag about Russian womens’ prisons; a view into the Arab media revolution where where 200 channels of satellite TV across the ideological spectrum are shaping new realities; a moving performance by Palestinian singer Kamilya Jubran; and site visits to Ford’s very impressive local grantees, including a peek at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and some exceptional dance and musical performances at converted factory/art space “Fabrika”.
Of course there’s a particular resonance in discussing freedom of expression while in Moscow, which in the last several years under Putin has seen a consolidation of media and political control and a disturbing trend of violence against journalists.
The journalist and Carnegie researcher Masha Lipman was a guest speaker and gave a very compelling and discouraging update on the state of Russian media, basically boiling down to total control of national television (the three network heads meet with Kremlin staff each week to set the agenda) and a sophisticated stance towards other semi-independent media outlets that are ultimately rendered politically irrelevant. The internet is open, but she says there’s a small Kremlin army that publishes stories, blog posts and generally invisibly seeds lots of pro-government information all over the place. And Putin has something like 80% popularity and in general the population is apolitical and resigned to the current configuration as long as the economic benefits continue. Here’s a really good piece by Masha on the attitudes of the Russian middle class, and for more gloom and doom read Remnick’s great piece on Kasparov in last week’s New Yorker.
I also went to visit the Fund for Independent Radio (FNR), an energetic group of radio folks who are doing some very PRX-y things with college and community radio stations around the country. They recently launched “Podstation” as a site to showcase new storytelling and documentary work. We’re discussing ways to work together with some help from Charles Maynes, and American indie radio producer deeply embedded over there.
Friday night a convergence of radio worlds took place, when we managed to gather the visiting Kevin Klose (NPR president whose son works in Moscow with a college friend of mine) with Greg Feifer (NPR’s Moscow correspondent and yet another college classmate of mine), Charles Maynes (aforementioned indie producer and FNR link). Kevin was in town in part to attend the opening of the Russian rendition of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia. Our friend the hardest working documentary filmmaker ever Robin Hessman (who ran Russian Sesame Street in the 90s and is currently making a film about Russia’s “Pepsi Generation”) interviewed Stoppard and managed to get us tickets (thanks Robin!) to the opening performance on Saturday. So, quite a bit hung over, I spent my last day in Moscow attending most of the the 8 hours or so of this epic play, and though I confess that some of the rapid Russian dialog about the competing philosophies of 19th century intelligentsia totally passed me by, it was an inspiring and fitting final experience nonetheless.
(left to right: yours truly, Charles Maynes, Kevin Klose, Greg Feifer)
[on the blog post title, "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears" was a very popular Soviet film of the early 80s and also a film that all Russian language students are always made to watch.]
