Mediacology

This Way to Better Media | Free Press:

Despite increasingly complex digital-media offerings and hundreds of channels, we see the diversity of media ownership shrinking, along with the diversity of voices that are broadcast. People are fighting back, organizing, creating alternatives and holding the corporate media giants accountable. The corporations are pushing back. With life and death, war and peace, at stake, hinging on an informed and engaged populace, the stakes have never been higher, the media never more important.

So begins Amy Goodman’s recent editorial and wrap-up of the National Conference for Media Reform. I was initially hooked by the article’s title, “This Way to Better Media,” but found the story rather disappointing. Let me qualify my critique by stating that media reform is necessary and I applaud the work of both Goodman and Freepress who hosted the conference. My letdown was with a lack of stated principles that would lead to better media. To be specific, media reformers allow their argument to be framed by corporate media– they are a response, an opposition, an offset to mass media’s foreground. I was hoping to read about some kind of paradigm shift that was behind the bourgeoning movement, but I’m at a loss for seeing what that might be.

More newspapers? Though I appreciate the necessity of investigative reporting that newspapers occasionally invest in, I find most newspapers an incredibly boring waste of paper that are instruments of propaganda. It takes me about five minutes to read a typical paper, including the highly vaunted New York Times. To be fair, I’m a right-brainer, so I’m more attracted to the graphics and headlines, but really there is rarely much to read any more, and the Times in particular seems to be covering more and more other media. They have become class A media navel gazers.

More TV news? See above.

More radio? Ditto.

“Better media” is not a utopia. It is here. We are doing it, you are reading and clicking through it right now. The one threat to this revolution is net neutrality, and on that one issue alone the media reform movement has salvaged its legacy. And thank god they/we are fighting for it tooth and nail. But as long as we keep thinking in terms of the industrial media model by focusing our energy on reforming a centralized kind of media, we’ll remain trapped within a reality tunnel that doesn’t offer a fundamental paradigm shift that comes through practice and open networks that model the kind of sustainable social change that we really need. Such a shift would not be to revert to more traditional media, but to promote a kind of ethics that restructure our global outlook. For a way to a better media, these are some qualities to consider:

• Community-produced media (”glocalized” media)/citizen journalism
• Open source media
• Hackable media
• Open networks
• Authentic and credible sources
• Flexibility
• Right Livelihood
• Reciprocity

In practice, both Democracy Now! and Freepress are examples of these principles in action, yet notice that much of what they say is just a negative reaction (such as the video above). For an example of something a little more proactive, check out Global Voices.