connecting*the*dots

Citizen media is an authentic media.

The amateur (Etymology: French, from Latin amator lover, from amare to love) doesn’t create out of a responsibility to a deadline or a paycheck; the amateur creates out of a love for the process, the output, the feedback, the very notion of creativity itself. And in this new world of interconnectivity, the availibility of our tangibly crafted desires and dreams has increased exponentially.

We are connected.

photo by Mexicanwave

And entrepreneurs are taking notice.

We’re quickly moving towards a period where a good chunk of the web will be explicitly designed (or re-designed) to take advantage of such authentic creativity. The old 1.0 slogan “Content is king” didn’t die off — it simply redefined itself through the lens of the passionate, authentic amateur.

YouTube and flickr have captured the very essence of what makes video and photography communities, respectively, thrive.

• Instantaneous feedback and discourse
• The ability to shelve favorites
• Discovery of new objects based on meshed interests with other community members
• Being able to add friends and join/start groups to extend the conversation

Between the commitment to upload massive amounts of media and the amount of time and effort one invests participating in these communities, the “throwaway” gap that previously existed for most web services (think about web analytic services or even a blogging platform) has practically disappeared. These particular domains aren’t ripe for member disengagement anymore based on a single bad experience, as they’ve progressed to becoming a part of our psyche, partially defining us through the connections our authentic media creates with others and vice-versa.

Though, as much as I believe in the potential of interconnected authentic media to inform, inspire, entertain and generate new communities, I equally believe that our media should not be leveraged from afar to pay someone else’s bills without explicit financial returns from the ecosystem. So if this perspective became a reality, would it cause authentic media to cease being authentic? Is this perspective just an excuse for a low entry point into the mainstream media ecosystem? I don’t think so.

From Kevin Kelly and The New York Times, Scan This Book:

[…]

We see this effect most clearly in science. Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo- and parasciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there is a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we have devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own. They are financed with extremely short-term (20-year) patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to truly inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, they make their living by giving away copies of their intellectual property in one fashion or another.

[…]

Scientists “are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own.” If we were to view authentic media creations as nodes of input, for which entrepreneurs can generate beyond-hyperlink synapses of interconnectivity, the difference between the goals of science and the intrinsic behavior of the web would be rather slim.

This is where the conversation shifts to the concerns of the elite to the desire of the commons.

What side of the aisle do you sit?

UPDATE: Can we do this together?

After a ton of hard work by many people, the redesigned Media Matters for America site has launched.

OLD:

NEW:

Behavior Design knocked out the visual design, we shared the information design, I handled the tagging schema/information architecture and we all tag-teamed with the Media Matters crew.

Now that the site is live, I’ve a bunch of tagging and findability methods I’d like to discuss here, but not tonight. Tonight I digest my sushi dinner with friends in San Fran.

Indy films definitely hit a substantial delay in finding their way to my new home in Greensboro, NC, so after a month or so of waiting, I finally had a chance to see Good Night, And Good Luck this past weekend.

Classic.

Heading into the film, I had already regarded Edward R. Murrow a warrior for exposing the truth and championing the rights of the common man and woman, but if GNAGL enlightened me to anything it was to his absolute dedication to a pure journalistic method and a deeply, refined and realistic business acumen.

The Prototypical Newsman

With his classic, stoic, "just the facts ma’am" delivery, Murrow captivated his audience. He came across as an authority figure to the less media savvy audience of the 1950’s, but he also played the role of friend and confidant in the daily struggle to keep on keeping on. Murrow knew very well that if he didn’t consistently frame the paradoxes and contradictions of reality (in this case, Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt), he’d be fair game for criticism and his career would head south quicker than a goose caught up in an October jet stream. That recognition of ethical behavior and accountability was too refreshing to view on film, because in our modern day, mass media world, those self-applied standards of journalistic integrity have all but flown the coop.

Understanding Power

If the film was even close to truly representing the relationship between Murrow and William Paley (the head of CBS), they provided an amazing service by exposing the foundation which drives decisions within the media ecosystem: advertising.

While Murrow bartered with Paley at every turn in order to continue exposing the world around him, Paley seemed forever caught between a rock and a hard place; he needed to keep Murrow happy with his role at CBS by providing the latitude necessary to fuel his journalistic passion while somehow balancing the finicky palette of his paid advertisers. The character development of Paley was rich and multidimensional, as I truly felt his angst in the midst of his paradoxical role within such a Darwinesque ecosystem.

And to see Edward R. Murrow, champion of the people, interviewing Liberace, well, it spoke volumes about the character of the man. He didn’t play the role of prima donna, refusing to lower his standards to run chatty interviews. He didn’t use an agent to threaten litigation. He recognized his role in adding value to the network by spreading his good name across programming that would return a dollar for Paley and the executive team. Though, the look on his face while he ran a fluff interview reminded me of a look and a feeling I’ve seen and heard hundreds of times over.

Modern Day Murrows

The majority of present day citizen journalists—Murrow molded bloggers—have day jobs. We design websites, write code, run businesses, multi-task like madmen, etc. Do we all wish we could blog for a living? I’d venture to say that most of us would say yes, as long as we wouldn’t have a strict editorial edict with advertising pressures. You see, we’re a bit spoiled like that.

Murrow had to navigate closed, controlled environments with a high degree of grace in order to shed light through one window of opportunity, one night a week. Bloggers? Well, we’ve become accustom to firing from the hip, espousing our opinions, perspectives and, yes, researched journalism on a intra-day basis, with no editor or advertising revenues to be concerned with. Has this new paradigm created irresponsible reporting? No more than the closed venue of the mainstream media. The difference is that we’re now empowered to network common visions and dreams, driving the potential of a new day into an actual sunrise, and the power of that freedom is upsetting the status quo.

Corporate media and industries are absolutely petrified by the potential of ordinary people gaining broadcast reach. And as much as I plan on assisting corporate America through this transition into the fast track of iterative development and customer accountability, until they can recognize that everything has changed and that we, the people, are now empowered, I won’t lose one wink of sleep over their concerns.

Can There Be Flat Hierarchy?

It’s true that if it weren’t for the relentless corporate push to rapidly develop and monetize the web in the mid-90’s, blogging technology might not have come about as quickly. Just as true was that VC investment in the potential of the web greatly contributed to the explosion of the infrastructure of information retrieval — collaborative filtering, search algorithms and now folksonomies.

So yes, we are all in this together. The talent needs the funding, but not as much as the funding needs the talent. Remember the last time we danced to this tune: capitalist power players funded the development of the internet on the shoulders of false stickiness, returning large dividends of ad revenue while the innovators focused on innovation. Many of those same capitalists continued to overinvest by underwriting ridiculous IPO’s until the bubble burst. Was it coincidence that a majority of them could reinvest in the internet at a basement entry price, while the talent scrambled about just to retain paid gigs?

Now the power players are scrambling to monetize our blood, sweat and tears at every turn, on every feed, on every page, while we continue to blaze paths two steps ahead of them with our eyes focused on the greater good. We’ll keep doing our thing, they’ll keep doing theirs.

In the end, what else can we say to them but “Good Night, and Good Luck?”

The longer we drag forward within a partisan run government, the more the Republican Party proves to be vile and full of power mongers.

This particular administration spins faster than a dreidel on Hanukkah and smears more often than a left-hander writing in a rainstorm, but if one can remain objective when studying their tactics, one cannot discount the fact that they’re a well oiled machine, running their party with business-like effectiveness. They’re so organized, they remind me of a hive of worker bees, humming to the whim of the queen, existing only for the future of the hive and a taste of the honey they produce.

This is how they roll — deep and in-tune.

So how do the Democrats stack up?

Bill Bradley recently wrote an opinion of the state-of-the-party in the New York Times, describing political organization in explicit detail; how the Elephants have created a thirty-year strong infrastructure — with defined roles, responsibilities and financing — to further their agenda, while the Jackasses get lost in the tactical arguments of the moment and eat their own in a fight to reach an elected seat. More specifically, the Republican Party has mastered the pyramid organizational structure. They’ve created a template for a replaceable leader at the top of a sustainable ecosystem, built to pro-actively defend their ideologies via responses in a moments notice from any type of Democratic Party or citizen retort.

Democrats, on the other hand, are renowned for tearing each other up during the primary season, unwittingly exposing each candidate to the Republican propaganda machine; a media machine that instills doubt in the minds of the casual electing public with repetitive rhetoric. So without the head-on-a-swivel organization of the GOP, each potential Democratic leader has to build his/her own pyramid of a strategic platform on the fly, sans the years of networking, research and coordination.

The results of such a non-strategy should be obvious. I mean, imagine how well an upside-down Egyptian pyramid would’ve worked out?

The Democratic Party claims to be the party for the common man, but through their actions they actually project the appearance of being selfish and petty. Individually, they don’t seem willing to barter for their place in a sustainable, Democratic Party structure, as they far too often seem overly anxious to take the weight of the world on their individual shoulders.

This me first perception can be illustrated in numerous tangible forms; their website is a classic example:

In the topical, global navigation, one category (People) reads as an attempt to describe the make-up of the Party. Rolling over the navigation nomenclature speaks volumes to their organization as a Party. What the Dems seem to want to do is show people that they have a broad set of programs and focus geared to numerous types of people.

What it says to me is that the Democrats cut the population into discrete targets, placing ethnic groups next to the disabled community; farmers next to Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual and Transgenders, etc. Sprinkle in each religion, old people, small businesses, unions, families, women and students and you have the American mixing pot.

Yeah, right.

Which groups did the Democrats leave out? How about Caucasian, middle-aged men?

By creating this hodge-podge of American faces on a single level labeled People, such a representation in the navigation screams, “Us white guys can help you needy and poor minority slobs out… Vote for us.”

What kind of an inclusive message is that? How does that message leverage the very diversity they’re trying to represent through their party? It fails miserably.

Imagine an African-American, bi-sexual woman coming to the site to find out more about the Party. Wouldn’t she feel a bit more like a cattle poster — with dotted lines drawn on her psyche, trying to leverage her leanest and most tasty parts — than as a partner in a political movement?

What about an atheist, homophobic, union member? Or a young, white metrosexual? Would this unspoken classification of European ethnicity as the default power representation model made someone feel uncomfortable?

Don’t get me wrong, compared to this current administration and the spin cycle of the right, the Democrats are still a beacon of hope… but an asteroid hitting the White House right about now would get the same props from me.

If the Democrats want to expand their reach into the Independent voter arena, they’ll have to start off by throwing their egos out the window, begin working together with a purpose, show some sack by speaking with conviction on topical issues and begin to create some form of a strategic plan to combat those evil, memory laden, pachyderms.

And fix the damn website.