Beyond Broadcast: Maps of public media plus maps as public media
Question: When is a map more than merely a map?
Answer No. 1: On the Web, where maps increasingly serve as the front ends of databases jammed with information about places and their populations.
Answer No. 2: At the third annual Beyond Broadcast Conference June 17 at American University in Washington, D.C. AU’s Center for Social Media used the metaphorical “mapping” to describe its big-tent vision of “public media,” incorporating many bloggers, online mappers, public broadcasters, professionals, nonprofessionals, and even some commercial media producers as forces for the public good.
The first two Beyond Broadcast events — notable powwows in the quest to advance participatory digital media — were held in Cambridge, Mass., at Harvard Law School and then at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This D.C. version of Beyond Broadcast featured more pubcasting projects and issues, says Pat Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media.“Being in the heart of public broadcasting, with CPB and PBS here,” she says, “we wanted to reflect some of the innovation in public broadcasting as well as the challenges it faces.”
In bringing together Web 2.0 activists and pubcasters with academics and policy wonks, the conference promotes a new definition of public media not limited by traditional media categories, Aufderheide says. “Public media isn’t something you are,” she says. “It’s something you do.”
Public media, according to the center’s definition, go beyond ordinary journalism by helping groups of people recognize common interests, understand shared problems and connect with one another to take action. (See the center's Future of Public Media FAQ.)
These views may have more effect than many academic papers, because key grantgivers are watching closely. Aufderheide’s Center for Social Media, for instance, is working on a multiyear, $3 million exploration assigned by the Ford Foundation (article, May 16, 2005).
As for the more geographical kinds of maps, Jessica Clark, the conference organizer, said she wanted to call the event “Aren’t maps awesome!?”
They’ve always been good for armchair exploring but now have evolved into online products that convey more meaning and are conceived by more diverse mappers than ever before.
They can function as storytelling tools and, thanks to the open technology adopted for Google Maps and other customizable tools, they’re elegant vehicles for interaction and hyperlocal services.
NPR and the NewsHour are using a deep, interactive election map that dispenses 2,400 news stories — with more added daily — from stations and national producers (Current, Jan. 22). The project’s overseers recently gave users a way to map their own election predictions and are considering how to make the map viral, or more easily available to bloggers and others, Lee Banville, editor of the Online NewsHour, said at AU.
Most of the snazziest conference displays featured non-pubcasting efforts, such as a complex map charting relationships among political blogs and websites.
The examples were designed to point up both the types of interactive cutting-edge content pubcasters could create and possible partners to help them do it, Aufderheide said. During each session, a big screen behind the panelists filled with real-time remarks and questions submitted by the audience via Twitter.com, further signaling the interactive vibe.
Mixed with the 21st-century discourse, however, were pointed exhortations with only a PA system as medium.
Some speakers lamented pubcasting’s slow embrace of new platforms and its self-perpetuated obsolescence among people of color (story).
CPB Board member Ernest Wilson, the new dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, pounded a table for emphasis as he warned that pubcasters’ lack of innovation online — specifically stations’ lack — put the future of the system at risk.
“We are frankly way behind the curve in adjusting in public-service media to what is taking place on new digital platforms,” said Wilson. “It’s enormously frustrating. It’s ridiculous.”
Keynote speaker Larry Irving, a respected tech consultant and former Clinton administration info-tech policy chief, agreed that the system must get on the digital stick if it hopes for any traction with the so-called millennial generation or others to follow.
To a large extent, he indicated, that means doing better by nonwhite audiences, which are growing faster than whites in numbers and in cultural and, eventually, political influence, where they will affect decisions about pubcasting aid and policies.
“You’re going to see a lot more chairmen of a lot more committees who are people who look like me,” said Irving, an African-American. “If you’re not dealing with issues that reflect the interests of the people in their community, they are going to be very unhappy.”
Conference organizers saw clear connections between the push for new digital innovation and the system’s longstanding reputation among progressives and academics of being too white.
“The diversity issue is so closely linked with the interactivity stuff,” Aufderheide says. The only way the system can reach those who don’t care about it now, for whatever reason, is to “actively engage people to co-create that future with them,” she says.
Watching for Australians to die
Maps will be prominently involved, if last week’s conference was any indication. Some attendees took pains to note that maps don’t necessarily match reality in every way. One said that crime maps, however practical for potential victims, usually reflect only one aspect of a community and can reinforce stereotypes about underprivileged areas of a city. The NewsHour’s Banville warned that a map can easily become a meaningless “data dump.”
Many online maps were built by noncartographers on Google Maps, such as KPBS’s impromptu and heavily used map of fires raging through San Diego’s suburbs last October [Current, Nov. 5].
There were enough innovative examples to suggest many possibilities for public media. Among the most striking:
Presidential Watch 2008 (presidentialwatch08.com): The addictive piece of work by Linkfluence, a French social-media research group, charts the prime drivers of online U.S. political news and chatter, based on their links to one another and on those they attract from other sites. The nodes representing the various mainstream sites, blogs and online communities grow based on their number of links. [Pictured: NPR.org was among the central "information pit" sites that linked widely.]
Virtual Harlem (secondlife.com): This project funded by the National Black Programming Consortium is not exactly a map but rather a representation of the upper Manhattan area being constructed in Second Life by Bryan Carter, an English professor at the University of Central Missouri. When complete, it will represent Harlem during its cultural Renaissance between the world wars. NBPC hopes to promote its shows in the space, hopefully attracting the Second Life devotees to on-air offerings, Leslie Fields-Cruz, programming director, said last week at the AFI SilverDocs conference in Silver Spring, Md. [Virtual Harlem Project site; NBPC Virtual Harlem site; Virtual Harlem described in blog by Second Life producer Rik Santos Panganigan, a.k.a. Rikomatic. Photo above by Rikomatic.]
Breathing Earth (breathingearth.net): The global map created by David Bleja shows the real-time carbon dioxide emissions, births and deaths in nearly every nation, based on data from the United Nations and other sources. Nations are color-coded by their emission levels, and icons appear within their borders to represent births and deaths. Paula Le Dieu of Britain’s Magic Lantern Productions (www.magiclantern.co.uk) said she was less interested in the CO2 angle and most affected by the ongoing patterns of births and deaths. Right after noting she had never seen either births or deaths register in her native Australia, attendees applauded the appearance of a black dot before realizing they’d just cheered for some poor Aussie’s demise.
Media Focus on Africa Foundation, Mobile Report (mfoa.africanews.com): A simple map introduces the foundation’s efforts to cover Kenya’s bitterly contested December elections, which sparked two months of violence. The hyperlocal effort arms citizen reporters all over the country with video-capable mobile phones. “Thank god that cell phones were invented,” said Chaacha Mwita, former Nairobi newspaper editor and now training director for the foundation. Visitors click on a region to hear what the citizen reporters phoned in. One reported on school-improvement promises that the government had not kept. “It actually did shock the government a lot,” said Mwita. He said the Kenyan minister of information later warned that people spreading rumors and lies by text messaging would be arrested.
Web page posted July 1, 2008
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