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5 Ubiquitous Media and the revival of Participatory Culture jack brighton Mass media technologies historically have been controlled by elite minorities . Not surprisingly, the products, authorship, and distribution patterns of media have largely served the interests of their masters. To be sure, many efforts have been made to establish models of public service media in pursuit of the “public interest, convenience, or necessity” (McChesney 1993, 18). But domination of media control by political and corporate elites, made possible by the demands of existing media technologies and economies, has largely tipped the balance in favor of private, commercial, and political interests. The emergence of broadcasting brought consolidation of media control to a new peak, by entrenching a literal “one-to-many” relationship between authors and audience. This model encodes an equation of authorship with authority, and audience with passivity. The technical and economic demands of broadcasting and of “professional journalism” have effectively discouraged participation in media-making by individuals and nonprofessional groups. What happens if this is no longer the case? What would it mean if anyone could create, publish, and share media on a global scale? We are not quite there yet, but the concept of a ubiquitous open media system, for the first time in the history of media, no longer seems farfetched. Several large barriers and contested areas of interest remain unresolved: intellectual property law, proprietary systems and formats, and resistance from established media models and entities, to name a few. But for those of us interested in public service media, we now have enough examples of “participatory ubimedia” to move forward with some confidence, perhaps even hope. 50 . brighton Digital Depression In early 2003, I found myself in a state of despair over the direction of news media on the Internet. I had just attended the first annual conference of the Integrated Media Association, a sort of think tank for public broadcasting on the Web. The keynote speaker was Merrill Brown, senior vice president at RealNetworks, who unveiled the company’s new (and short-lived) marketing slogan “All You Need Is One.” That would be the RealOne player, which in Brown’s RealSpeak is a “consumer appliance, not the piece of software.” Actually the RealOne player was more than that. It was an all-purpose digital rights management system, the core of a new media business model. And Brown brought the announcement of a major new media business breakthrough: an exclusive deal with CNN to stream online news video only through the RealOne paid subscription service. Many of my colleagues were nodding their heads. We were all scrambling for ways to cover costs for streaming our public radio and TV content. Those costs include expensive servers and lots of bandwidth, which for most public stations could total between one thousand and ten thousand dollars per month, depending on the scale. The “streaming conundrum” held that the more successful you become at developing an audience for online media, the less you could afford it. If you succeed, you fail. Unless you find ways to make users pay for the service, said Merrill Brown, and suddenly we were talking about subscription models and charging people for public TV and radio content on the Web. We were advised by resident gurus and industry consultants to adopt a “shopping mall” model for online media, serving boutique content to affluent customers and low-quality bits for the freeloaders. I came up in journalism during a time when we considered our work vital to the health of community, democracy, and culture, when our product was in essence not media but informed and engaged citizens. In public broadcasting we are supposed to be shining a light on the world, exploring histories and cultures , and helping people understand other peoples’ stories. You can have that for a monthly charge of $29.95? I could not imagine hustling that. Some of us thought the promise of the Internet was to make information accessible, not lock it behind firewalls and logins. We believed public media should be truly public, on the air and on the Internet. So we declared ourselves “open content radicals,” and began plotting ways to steer the public broadcasting system toward an open media philosophy. We launched a Web site focused on methods of sharing content as “open source media” (Brighton and Tynan 2004). We got busy developing a metadata standard and technical infrastructure for publishing and aggregating media collections throughout the public broadcasting system in order to make content findable and more useful...

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