This Monday I attended the Citizen Journalism UnConference put on by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
It was put on “Unconference” style, where the content was largely audience-driven. I think most people regard BarCamp to be the prototypical Unconference, where the sessions are literally organized by the participants the morning of the conference. The conference on Monday had a very open and informal atmosphere, and there were no panelists, only moderators, but it still had significantly more predetermined structure and content than I would expect from something that is touted as an Unconference. I think a lot of this pre-planning did happen on the wiki, but still, it feels a lot different from BarCamp.
Which is in no way a criticism, I think this was the best format for the group and subject matter. There needs to be a new name for these kinds of one-day, everyone-in-the-same-room, lots-of-group-discussion, wiki-planned conferences (such as the conferences ibiblio put on over the last couple years: BloggerCon and PodcasterCon. WikiConference? ColabConference? DemocroCon? Okay I will stop now.
It was great to be observing and participating in this conversation with this group of folks. Being the developer of Lyceum, an occasional activist/filmaker/journalist, and sometimes convinced to participate in partisan politics, citizen journalism is something in which I am extremely interested.
Several folks took great notes at the conference, most notably Doc Searls, who sat in front of the room all day and generated his “docNography” [seems I can't do a direct link to the Citizen Journalism notes, as of this writing they are at the top of the page]. Also check out the notes on the wiki and posts from technorati. And wow do I need a haircut.
In general the conversation was mostly interesting throughout the day. In one sense, not much new happened. But what became abundantly clear (to me anyway) is that the citizen media issue is tightly bound to the evolution of the blogosphere and, to a lesser extent (for now), social software. In that regard, I wish that we had spent more time exploring how, as the nature of communication fundamentally changes (phone/cable tv -> email -> IM -> blogs/myspace, to put it very simply), how this will effect perception and reception of mainstream media and of citizen media. Instead, I feel the conference was more focused on how new tools and models were being adopted by those who already identify in some way as citizen journalists.
I was mostly an observer throughout the conference, but piped up in the last session when Ethan Zuckerman was giving an example of how one of the Global Voices bloggers got quoted in the Wall Street Journal (I think that was the context of the story– at any rate he was showing an example of a blogger’s story getting attention by the mainstream media). I raised my hand and presented what I thought would be on most people’s minds (given the crowd) but no one else was mentioning: we are too cool for the mainstream media, The Long Tail will save us, and if we all get on The Cluetrain, we can forget about the mainstream media altogether. Zuckerman did not like my line of thinking at all, and clarified that Global Voices’ very mission was to float underattented issues up to the mainstream media. I receded, but that line of discussion continued throughout the session, much to Zuckerman’s frustration. I think Zuckerman had more to say and would rather have not had to spend a lot of time discussing if gaining the mainstream media’s attention was worth it. But clearly this was an issue that was on the minds of a lot of folks in the room, so from that regard it was worth spending some time.
After the session ended, I approached Zuckerman to continue the discussion. He quickly convinced me that he was not in the business of developing new tools or models, but instead organizing a community around a common goal. I agreed that the work he was doing was valuable and apologized for having sounded overcritical. I then tried to chat about my ideas regarding what would happen to media in the mid- and long-term, and referenced a few ideas from media ecology. Zuckerman was unamused and and inattentive, and glared at me like I was some ivory tower scum. I fully understand his sentiment — he is trying to bring attention to wars in Africa that are almost completely ignored by western media and governments, and here I am trying to illustrate how communication patterns between teenagers on MySpace illustrate secondary orality and the coming establishment of a true global village.
The conference ended with Dan Gillmor giving Doc Searls a hug while everyone applauded. It was a touching Conversationerati moment, and a fitting end to what was a great day of conversation about conversation.
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