PRECONFERENCE #5

This preconference is cosponsored by ICA’s Communication and Technology; Communication, Law and Policy; Journalism; Mass Communication; Philosophy of Communication; and Political Communication Divisions, and is a Future of Public Media project of the Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American University. Partial funding comes from the Ford Foundation.

Title: Remapping Public Media

Time: Thursday, May 22, 8:00 – 17:00

Limit: 40

Cost: $60.00 ICA Members (Includes morning and afternoon refreshment breaks)
          $30.00 Students

This preconference examines ways to imagine public media in an open, digital environment. What makes media public in an open, digital environment? How can scholars and audiences recognize public media that is generated neither by legacy outlets nor by traditional media producers? What does a new “map” of public media look like? What new behaviors, phenomena, or connections emerge? How do traditional mass-media and digital intersect in emerging public media? How do traditional public service media use new digital opportunities? How can effectiveness be understood, measured, depicted? What kinds of organizations, policies, and resources are needed to create not only incidents and projects but habits and archives in emerging public media? What kinds of research are needed to analyze and imagine emerging public media?

As digital innovations open up new opportunities for communication, they also create new questions about how media central to public engagement in democratic self–determination can be fostered. These are questions that cross traditional communications divisions—mass communication, technology and policy, and political and visual communication. At the same time, they focus on a core issue in communication: how the creation of shared meaning can create cultures of democratic participation and fuel social action. Scholars as diverse as James Carey, Robert Putnam, Michael Schudson, Robert McChesney, Annabelle Sreberny, and Stuart Hall have found this concern central to their research; now the challenge is to take those concerns into the open, digital environment.

Over the past decade, public service broadcasting, public access cable, and newspapers of record have seen business models shaken, traditional funding bases decayed, and policies changed. New distribution possibilities (broadband, peer-to-peer media sharing, satellite networks, digital cable, handheld devices, and more) are decoupling content from its original context and creators. Digital networking tools allow communities of media-makers, citizens, activists, and experts to communicate with one another, share information, and collaboratively learn like never before. So-called Web 2.0 tools emphasize user participation above all other features, and the explosion of blogs, user-driven digital video sites, social networking sites, and collaboratively authored texts like Wikipedia testify to the power of these new models. Aggregation tools, as David Weinberger discusses in Everything Is Miscellaneous, make it possible to configure and share significant new meanings on the fly.

What can public media—public media in the Deweyan sense of media for public knowledge and action—mean, given these new possibilities and challenges? As Yochai Benkler notes in The Wealth of Networks, this new environment creates enormous possibilities for a reimagining of public media as created by and for the public at points of need for action. At the same time, possibilities must be envisioned, encouraged, supported.

This preconference will build upon the Center for Social Media’s Mapping Public Media project (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/mpm), directed by CSM Research Fellow Jessica Clark. This research forms part of the Future of Public Media project, funded by the Ford Foundation and directed by CSM director Pat Aufderheide. It will showcase cross-disciplinary perspectives and conclude with discussion of a research agenda on public media in a participatory digital era of communication.

This conference will be intimate, about 40 people. The format will be that of facilitated discussion, triggered by very brief presentations. To apply to participate in discussion, send a one-page document including: a short biography (one paragraph); a description (one to two paragraphs) of how your work is concerned with the future of public media; and the current research that you intend to explain or make available to the group, all suitable for posting/publication.