Video Episodes:
4 Views
20:07:31 06/15/06
Echo Chamber Project's Collaborative Editing Demonstration at Vloggercon
[LESS INFO] 4 VIEWS | ADDED 20:07:31 06/15/06
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This is my demonstration of the collaborative editing workflow for The Echo Chamber Project during the Politics and Social Change Session during the first day of Vloggercon. Total run time is 9:15.
This software demonstration is at the prototype phase, and I'm transitioning to a private alpha and then a public beta over the next couple of months.
Please sign up as a user if you're interested in getting more involved with the project as it evolves.
More background information can be found in this post: Iterative Media: Treating Collaborative Media Like Open Source Code
1 Views
13:46:07 05/10/06
Video: Media, Politics & Social Change: An Overview of The Echo Chamber Project
[LESS INFO] 1 VIEWS | ADDED 13:46:07 05/10/06
Flash Version
This video provides explains how the media fits into political and social change and specifically addresses the following questions: >
* How is the Press supposed to Work?
* How and why does the Press act like an Echo Chamber?
* How is media changing?
* What does it mean that the "news is becoming a conversation"?
* Will these new media changes affect the nature of politics?
* How does The Echo Chamber Project fit into all of this?
Featuring: Amy Goodman , Lawrence Grossman, Jim Lobe , Jonathan Landay , Richard Sambrook , Jay Rosen , Dan Gillmor , Jeff Jarvis , Doc Searls & Merrill Brown .
You can subscribe to the Interview Audio here or browse it here.
Additional interview transcripts are here.
Sign up as a user here.
Music Credits: >
* “In The Sky” by disharmonic via ccmixter
* “On The Moon (Trip Hop mix)” by disharmonic via ccmixter
* "People" by cdk via ccmixter
* "Tree of Love" by Jami Sieber used by permission by Magnatune.com
6 Views
04:52:31 02/19/06
Video: Government Bypasses Press
[LESS INFO] 6 VIEWS | ADDED 04:52:31 02/19/06
Video essay in response to Jay Rosen's "Dick Cheney Did Not Make a Mistake By Not Telling the Press He Shot a Guy" bog post -- featuring Chris Nolan, Mindy Finn, Hugh Hewitt, John H. Brown, Don Beck, Steve Rubel, Merrill Brown, Tom Rosenstiel, Congressman Rob Simmons, and a virtual Jay Rosen.
You can listen to the full entire audio for some of the interviews -- and read the full transcript for the others.
Subscribe to this feed for future videos .
Subscribe to this feed to download all audio interviews posted so far.
Music: On The Moon (Trip Hop mix) by disharmonic
Here's a Windows Media version.
Full Transcript and Further thoughts are down below...
>
KENT BYE: The fact that Dick Cheney decided to inform the local newspaper instead of going through the national press when he accidentally shot a man -- this indicates that there's a fundamental shift in the power dynamic between the press and the government.
Now NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen says that, "Cheney took the opportunity to show the White House press corps that it is not the natural conduit to the nation-at-large; and it has no special place in the information chain."
This is a trend that Chris Nolan first observed during the 2004 election
CHRIS NOLAN (Spot-on.com): The idea that you can talk directly to voters past big media was a big, big part of the Republican campaign this past year. I think that that's a very little noticed and a very little appreciated fact. They treated the media as another constituent group like the tobacco lobby or whatever.
MINDY FINN (Republican National Committee, Deputy eCampaign Director): Where our opportunities are -- are through talk radio and through the Internet. And we found that was our best means for communicating our message -- to kind of cut through the mainstream media filter. And also, that there are so many cable channels now that those stations don't have the reach that they used to. And certainly the major networks don't have the reach that they used to.
CHRIS NOLAN (Spot-on.com): To a large extent, people bought it. And the people that were the most upset -- the people who complained the loudest were the big media people, and nobody really took up their cause. So I'd say that's a sign that something's changed in a big way.
KENT BYE: Something has changed -- The mainstream media is seen as less relevant, and politicians are more powerful.
HUGH HEWITT (Talk Radio Host & Blogger): What the blogosphere and the Internet have done to the Mainstream Media is just what Luther did to Rome, which was to -- not only to go around the gates, but to shatter them. There are no more gates. Now it's just a question of "What's true?" and "What's objective?" -- not what is an elite's understanding of the former.
KENT BYE: What's True and What's Objective is still a really big open question in our society. And I think it's going to come from some combination of traditional journalism, but also blogging -- and even collaborative media which is what I'm working on.
So let's take a look at this issue from the perspective of a politician.
CONGRESSMAN ROB SIMMONS (R-CT): If you look at the American media, and how it covers politics -- you basically interview a politician, take -- if it's TV -- take one or two sound bites, and build a story around that sound bite. If you look at radio, you allow that same political figure 15 or 20 minutes perhaps on a radio show -- a call-in to explain their position on a certain issue. If you look at the print media, depending on the nature of the interview, the journalist will take some quotes and build a story around it. But it's all based pretty much on what that one individual is saying, and then on how those words are interpreted by the journalist.
KENT BYE: So talk radio and new media provide politicians an opportunity to talk at length without having to be
filtered through the lens of an objective news story.
Well, that's great for them, but what about the public interest?
Who's going to be holding the politicians accountable when the only organizations they're going to be talking to are going to be those who are sympathetic to their message.
Steve Rubel talks about the dynamic between public relations and journalism.
STEVE RUBEL (MicroPersuasion.com): The public interest is important, but I think that that's more important to a journalist than it is to the PR professional. PR professional is less concerned with public interest, and more concerned with doing results that are going to get paid for. And where the journalists and the folks in this room where I stand here, they're definitely worrying about the public interest. And ultimately, they're going to decide what's best for the public, not us.
KENT BYE: But now that the politicians can completely bypass the journalists, they're free to focus on their own self-interest, which is mainly to preserve their political power. This has created a very polarized political culture, which is then amplified by the mainstream media.
DON BECK (National Values Center): The Mainstream Media is simple a reflection of the mainstream value structures in a society, particularly in our political class, which is obviously is the "Win at any costs" and be reelected, using often "Us versus Them" polarity -- "From the Left / From the Right," "Conservative/ Liberal" to divide people in like Blue States and Red States, and so forth. So when one looks at the problems in a society, obviously the dominant media will convey those codes, and when it looks like many of those behaviors tend to make things worse.
MERRILL BROWN (Media Consultant): What this country needs, from my point of view, in addition to a skeptical, hard-working news media, is a political system in which members of party in power feel free and have the political courage to stand up and speak up when things aren't going well in their parties. And this applies to both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats who were unwilling to speak up about the failures of the Clintons -- the Clintons in particular, and the administration more generally. Same thing is true now. There's a lot of Republican -- members of the Republican leadership who realize how inept this administration has handled some number of issues, and yet the political dissent and the dialogue from those people in places of power in the Republican party doesn't happen.
KENT BYE: Without this internal dissent, our political system has turned into an all-out cultural war where short-term political gains for either the Democrats or the Republicans is more important than anything else.
JOHN H. BROWN (State Department Employee who Resigned to Protest Iraq War): These are people who think in narrow, political, day-to-day terms -- who are absolutely parochial in their thinking. What’s important is "Winning The Game", and the game is American Politics.
KENT BYE: We have a political culture where winning trumps compromise, where debate trumps dialogue, where polarization trumps consensus.
STEVE RUBEL (Micropersusasion.com) The political environment for PR is much more about spin & influence, and the message of the day, and "How do you get it out?" It's very reactive. It's trying to take what's already coming at you -- and issues -- and then making sure that you shape your position on it.
ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE: On the Federal Level, the war between government and press is one of unequal firepower. The government spends nearly half a billion dollars a year, and employs thousands of people in Public Relations, Public Information, Public Image Making, and Public Obfuscation. In the Executive Branch, all of them -- all of those people, all of that torrent of information, all of those Xerox machines -- can be controlled by the White House. A President's personal power to dominate the news is beyond measure.
TOM ROSENSTIEL (Committee for Concerned Journalists): They understand our tendencies better than we understand them ourselves. They understand our weaknesses better than we understand them ourselves.
KENT BYE: So the media is being manipulated by politicians who understand how the media work better than they do themselves.
Jay Rosen agrees by saying that the White House "correctly guessed that if it changed the game on you, you wouldn’t develop a new game of your own, or be able to react... They sensed that the old press system was weakened." And that essentially, "they knew you wouldn’t react because to do so would look 'too political.”"
So politicians currently have an upper hand over the media as far as setting the terms of the discourse for the country.
So where do we go from here?
I think collaborative media actually has a lot of potential in this area, and that's what I'm working on here at The Echo Chamber Project.
But the question is, "Can new media put the power back into the hands of citizens?"
MERRILL BROWN : So I don't think there's going to be fundamental political change any time soon. But I do think -- as in all things -- we go through cycles. And we're in a cycle today where the political discourse is of a certain kind. And I think we're moving -- and will move very quickly between now and the next Presidential election to have a much broader discussion about our national sensibility, our national priorities, the nature of political discourse, dissent and dialogue. And I think media, the blogosphere, and the democratization of thought in this country has a lot to offer in that regard.
THEORY OF THE COLLABORATIVE MEDIA SOLUTION
I believe that collaborative media that is able to mediate the relative truths and falsehoods within the many different perspectives has the potential to overcome the anomalies within the existing journalistic paradigm.
What I've done is to interview as broad and diverse range of experts talking about a particular issue (i.e. pre-war performance of the media), and then my intention is to have an even broader and more diverse range of participants participate in adding context and meaning to this gathered knowledge
Facts and information do not become knowledge for individual citizens until they have put within a personalized context. The intention behind the use of the information will determine how it is processed and applied, and there have been many innovations over the last couple of years that are able to make these contexts more explicit on an individual level while also yielding significant network effects of social behavior.
This is specifically achieved through mechanisms of folksonomy tags, comment threads, allowing users to dynamically remix audio and video into playlists, allowing people to listen to the entire interviews as podcasts, as well as allowing the reuse of the material through liberal Creative Commons-licensing.
So the three practical steps for journalism would be: >
* Collect interviews from experts on issues that are of importance
* Parse the information into granular sound bites.
* Publish these sound bites online in a way that they can be easily sequenced and recontextualized into larger meanings.
This is what I've been building with this collaborative filmmaking infrastructure , and all of the puzzle pieces now exist -- but they still need to be put together.
So I've gathered 86 interviews up to this point , and I have quite a body of sound bites from knowledgeable experts -- You can download the 40+ interviews that I've posted already with this feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/EchoChamberProjectInterviewAudio
I hope that this video comment can demonstrate the capacity for creating a system that allows other people to easily juxtapose streams of facts and sound bites together to achieve a larger meaning.
15 Views
13:56:13 02/16/06
Video: Solution-Oriented Media * Audio: Media, Culture & Consciousness
[LESS INFO] 15 VIEWS | ADDED 13:56:13 02/16/06
The media spends so much time and energy focusing on problems, but how can they do a better job at empowering citizens towards a vision of hope and possibility?
Music: On The Moon (Trip Hop mix) by disharmonic
This video features some insights on this from Sharif Abdullah , Marilyn Schlitz , Don Beck and Van Jones.
I conducted these interviews at a conference on Consciousness and Healing with the following two lenses: >
* How the press can be more solution-oriented?
* How can the press better account for our subjectivity, worldviews and the influence of our culture?
The full audio of 10 interviews from the conference can be found below...
Don Beck National Values Center & Spiral Dyanamics Integral Model of Worldviews and Value structures Marilyn Schlitz Vice President for Research and Education, Institute of Noetic Sciences ( bio ) Dean Radin Senior Scientist at Institute of Noetic Sciences ( bio ) Fred Alan Wolf Quantum Physicist featured in What the Bleep Do We Know? Lynne Twist Author of The Soul of Money Van Jones Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights ( bio ) Susan Davis President of Capital Missions Company ( bio ) Peter Russell Eastern Philosophy Author & Futurist
( bio ) Duane Elgin Futurist & Media Activist, OurMediaVoice.org ( bio ) Sharif Abdullah President of the Commonway Institute ( bio )
ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS AND CONCLUSIONS
This is a passage that I wrote upon returning from this conference: >
There are actually a lot of parallels between the conflicts between Objective Mainstream Media vs. Subjective Blogs / New Media Technologies and between Objective Mainstream Medicine vs. Subjective Mind-Body Healing techniques.
The conference participants provided a lot of insight for the importance of holistic thinking, being inclusive of many different perspectives, how subjectivity and worldviews filter perception, and the importance of how community and collaboration can be facilitated through relationships and conversation.
These interviews are definitely outside-of-the-box of the mainstream way of thinking, but I believe that there are actually a lot of interesting insights packed within this set of interviews. It is an ongoing journalistic experiment to see how to incorporate perspectives that are normally marginalized or ignored.
So I'm really curious as to hear people's responses to these interviews as well as how the material will end up being used throughout the collaborative post-production process.
ENJOY!
Photo Credits: katemina, ford, old_sarge, dwstucke & roland
4 Views
20:24:15 01/25/06
Interviews from an Open Source Intelligence Conference
[LESS INFO] 4 VIEWS | ADDED 20:24:15 01/25/06
I attended a conference on Open Source Intelligence and collected over 3 hours of interviews from the 10 of the presenters. My citizen journalism coverage was looking through the following two lenses: >
* What types of insights could intelligence analysis provide to journalism?
* How can information and communications technologies be used to help avoid and prevent armed conflict? >
UPDATE: Here is a 90-second video introduction to these interviews
Music: On The Moon (Trip Hop mix) by disharmonic
FYI: You can use this feed to download all of the interview audio.
More information below ...
Here are the 10 people I interviewed: Congressman Rob Simmons Chairman of the Homeland Security Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment Subcommittee Robert David Steele Open Source Intelligence Evangelist, Retired CIA Case Officer Michael Andregg Intelligence Reform Consultant and Professor of the Causes of War Carolyn Stewart Retired Colonel with Military Intelligence Mats Bjore Retired Lt. Colonel with Swedish Military Intelligence & Founder of Infosphere & Silobreaker Ralph Peters Retired Army Lt. Colonel, Author and New York Post Columnist Robert Young Pelton Adventurer , Journalist and Author of "The World's Most Dangerous Places" Stephen E. Arnold Technology Consultant and Author of "The Google Legacy" Peter Morville Information Scientist, Information Architecture Pioneer & Author of "Ambient Findability" Elliot Jardines Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Open Source
AUDIENCE AT THE OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE CONFERENCE
* What type of people attended this conference?
There were over 300 people from within the intelligence community, retired analysts, other corporate contractors as well as other attendees who were interested in the concept of open source intelligence.
One of the common values that seemed to unite all of the attendees was the perspective that classified sources of information do not necessarily mean that the information is any more relevant or useful than information that can be collected from open sources (i.e. newspapers, Internet, academic literature, reports from non-governmental organizations, etc.)
Another common value seemed to be that open source intelligence provides a more collaborative and transparent environment for generating knowledge. There were many people who have been fighting the compartmentalization of intelligence for many years.
Open Source Intelligence has also been traditionally underfunded and undervalued within the intelligence community, partly because of the vested interests of defense contractors have been influencing the political decision makers, who have been continuing to invest in very expensive satellite equipment and other types of fancy signals intelligence collection technologies.
Robert David Steele has been advocating for Open Source Intelligence for the last 18 years, and there has finally been the first government official assigned within the intelligence bureaucracy to lead the government's open source intelligence collection efforts. Elliot Jardines has been assigned as the first Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Open Sources, and I was able to interview him at the conference.
PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
I went in with a specific hypothesis that intelligence analysis has a specific tradecraft that could easily process and help make sense of facts and information over long periods of time. I've written about some of these techniques here and listed some references here.
I was surprised to learn that a lot of the sense making capabilities come from the more qualitative aspects of interpreting information. When comes to understanding other cultures and societies, it is often much better to talk to many different subject matter experts and gather a wide range of perspectives and worldviews than it is to try to break a problem into component parts and try to quantify the individual pieces.
It is my sense that the quantitative tools and tricks of the trade within the intelligence agencies are too reductionistic for practical sense making purposes because they don't actually help explain the nuances or complexity of cultures.
As Charles Cameron, a former Arlington Institute analyst, described to me last year: >
"It's my contention, however, that they are heavily weighted towards the quantitative, and are not of much help in dealing with the subtle complexities that arise when people, their motives, histories, traditions, beliefs, emotions, reluctances, denials, prejudices, clarities and insights are involved."
So even though the US intelligence agencies do a great job of collecting and gathering dots, but they have a much more difficult time connecting these dots back together in a useful or predictive context.
In Robert Steele's conference presentation , he describes some of the characteristics these "dots" that intelligence agencies are collecting: >
* Dots don't know they are secret until some human decides this.
* Dots gain value from swarming, lose value within compartmentalization
* Dots gain value from history and context.
* Dots gain value from speed of delivery.
* Dots in a foreign language are smarter.
These granular dots that are collected through classified sources and methods are just raw nuggets of information, and the "knowledge" is added to them when analysts are able to make contextual links and qualitative associations between these dots.
So it seems as though that journalism and academia actually has a lot to teach the analytical tradecraft of professional intelligence. The openness and transparency of journalism and the scientific method creates generates knowledge from the feedback and conversations that are started -- while the sense making capabilities of classified world of intelligence analysis is limited by the obsession with secrecy and a closed infrastructure that blocks the flow of information and context between compartmentalized silos.
Intelligence agencies have to pay subject matter experts while experts will talk to a journalist or other academics for free because there is an open exchange of information and knowledge. The public exposure also helps create a positive reputation of expertise, and more of an exchange of social capital.
I still think that there is a lot of potential for a finding a hybrid between combining more sophisticated analytic tools with interviewing a large set of domain experts. In our interview with Stephen E. Arnold , he describes how technology is going to continue to help analysts on the front-end and the back-end of the sense making process -- and he points out that he doesn't see technology completely replacing the sophistication of human analysis and judgment.
So openness, transparency, authenticity and a dedication to education seem to be the key differences that allow journalists and academics to create symbiotic relationships and better networks of distributed knowledge than the governmental intelligence agencies. And I see that my collaborative filmmaking schema could actually provide an interesting catalyst and mechanism for making this distributed knowledge more explicit by aggregating additional context and meaning from a diverse audience on the 50+ hours of multimedia sound bites.
INFORMATION PEACEKEEPING
I discovered that there is a difference between "Information Peacekeeping", "Peacekeeping Intelligence" and "Information Operations."
"Information Peacekeeping" is how information and communications technologies can be used to avoid and prevent conflicts by creating the means for the creation of indigenous knowledge and wealth creation. This is a term that Robert Steele has coined and a concept that I talk more about in this post: "Can Open Source Intelligence Be a Non-Violent Alternative to War?"
"Peacekeeping Intelligence" is the information that is used by military forces after conflict has already broken out, and peacekeeping military operations have come in to stabilize a region.
And Information Operations are the combination of Strategic Communication with a foundation from Open Source Intelligence. The intent of information operations is to explain and offensively communicate US Foreign Policy and our National Security interests.
Robert Steele sees US National Security as being fundamentally interconnected with Global Security, and that the free and open distribution of information helps to stabilize countries and avoid and prevent conflict.
"Information Peacekeeping" seems to be quite separate from the mandate that have been given to the US intelligence communities or the Department of Defense with regards to Open Source Intelligence. It is certainly a related concept and a potential application of Open Source Intelligence, but the application of OSINT products in this way would probably fall underneath the umbrella of diplomacy and the State Department. There are also some who suggest that there needs to be a new institution like a Department of Peace that would be explicitly tasked with coming up with these types of best practices for avoiding and preventing conflict.
In a lot of ways, I'm trying to achieve a lot of the goals of "Information Peacekeeping" with The Echo Chamber Project in that I'm trying to create mechanisms for people to be able to explore and experience complex issues in a comprehensive way that promotes critical thinking and education.
More Information:
* Powerpoint Presentations from the conference
1 Views
05:39:10 10/26/05
Episode 5: An Edited Debate Over Pre-War Intelligence
[LESS INFO] 1 VIEWS | ADDED 05:39:10 10/26/05
With potential indictments looming over Washington, here's a video of an edited debate of the different arguments surrounding the Niger uranium claims and pre-war intelligence that is at the center of Fitzgerald's CIA Leak Investigation featuring: >
* Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher
* Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media
* John R. MacArthur: Publisher of Harper's Magazine
* Retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Department of Defense Policy Analyst
* Greg Thielmann, Retired State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Political junkies are anxiously waiting for the result of Fitzgerald's 22-month invesitigation, and it will be interesting to see whose arguments stand the test of time. These interviews were conducted in July 2004, but the gap between the two perspectives hasn't changed all that much since then.
(5:58 minutes / 14.4 MB)
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FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
GREG MITCHELL (Editor of Editor & Publisher):
This whole episode of the build-up to the war is going to turn out to be one of the most appalling periods in the history of the press -- which is not to say that there wasn't a lot of tremendous coverage, and a lot of tremendous work by various reporters, and so forth. But I think that when they look at the end result, which is a very costly war, it's going to have to rank as one of the worst press performances in recent time.
CLIFF KINCAID (Accuracy in Media):
I don't think there's any evidence that the reporters for The Washington Post or the The New York Times , which are big liberal, Democratic Party papers, gave too much leeway -- or prominence -- to what the Republican Bush Administration was saying.
JOHN R. MACARTHUR (Publisher of Harper's Magazine):
The main threat that the Bush administration propagandists were selling to get the Congress to vote for war authorization, was an atomic bomb threat -- a nuclear weapons threat. And The Times contributed mightily to that, to the belief, the popular belief, that Saddam was on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon.
CLIFF KINCAID (Accuracy in Media):
As far as the nuclear program is concerned, Mr. Duelfer has confirmed that Iraq did have a prohibited nuclear weapons program.
RETIRED LT. COL. KAREN KWIATKOWSKI (Department of Defense Policy Analyst):
In the fall of 2002, the Office of Special Plans was formally split off from where I worked in Near East and South Asia to be its own entity. It was still under the same boss, Bill Lutie. But one of the services that they would provide to us -- to us the sister organization, and other staff officers throughout policy -- was a set of classified talking points that we would include. We were directed to include these talking points in all the papers that we would prepare for internal use up the chain.
CLIFF KINCAID (Accuracy in Media):
In fact, Joe Wilson, the ambassador, who was sent over by his CIA-employed wife to look into this question, actually confirmed that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. But he did not emphasize that part of his report when he went public, and tried to bash the Bush Administration.
RETIRED LT. COL. KAREN KWIATKOWSKI (Department of Defense Policy Analyst):
They were written in a way that made them sound very believable. But the things which they were saying were not substantiated by intelligence in all cases. One of the -- An example of this is one of our talking points from OSP would say, "Saddam Hussein seeks -- actively seeks uranium in Africa." Well, the intelligence on that said that 'Saddam Hussein in the late '80's during the Iran/Iraq War actively sought uranium and other nuclear-type support materials in Africa.' But he hadn't done it during the '90's. He hadn't done anything like that since then. But that's not what the talking point was. The talking point would gloss over the fact that things have changed, and simply indicate that this was an actively, ongoing type program.
CLIFF KINCAID (Accuracy in Media):
So the fact is that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program. He was seeking uranium from Africa. And he was trying to reconstitute this program. The President had that information. He provided that information to the American people and the Congress. And it has stood the test of time.
GREG THIELMANN (Retired State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research):
One of the last and most dramatic things in this series of exaggerated and alarmist reports was the President's statement about the uranium from Africa in his January 2003 State of the Union message. And this hit me as a particular thunderbolt, because once I realized that what he was referring to was something that we had assured the Secretary was a very dubious report back in March of 2002, and the Intelligence Bureau's comment on this issue.
CLIFF KINCAID (Accuracy in Media):
The President's statement in the State of the Union Address about citing a British report that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa was absolutely true. It was absolutely true from the time he made it to the time that we're taking today.
GREG THIELMANN (Retired State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research):
I realized that not only was the President conveying sensitive intelligence from foreign intelligence services, which was highly unusual to quote a British report as if we had no comment on it other than to present it as fact. But beyond that to put the kind of weight that he did on that report combining it with the aluminum tube story distortion to address the most worrisome of all of the categories of weapons of mass destruction -- that is the nuclear account -- I thought was simply unjustified. And in light of the use of this kind of comment to build a case for war was really a crime against the American people.
2 Views
22:43:46 10/25/05
Episode 4: Open Media Summit Follow-Up
[LESS INFO] 2 VIEWS | ADDED 22:43:46 10/25/05
Description: I'm getting a lot closer to getting the collaborative editing infrastructure up and running. Here is my follow-up video from the Open Media Summit, with some of my thoughts and future intentions: >
* Contact selected participants one-on-one.
* Specify the specific needs of the common ground that we share.
* Record and release the conversations as podcasts to build up the developer community and support network.
* Further specify job descriptions to give to volunteers -- and other action items.
* Promote these conversations to the larger network to recruit programming labor or financial resources.
(2:02 minutes / 4.7 MB)
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2 Views
14:31:59 10/14/05
Echo Chamber Project Vlog Episode 3
[LESS INFO] 2 VIEWS | ADDED 14:31:59 10/14/05
Here is the third Echo Chamber Project video blog entry featuring some interviews from the We Media Conference.
Description: Four Big Media executives and consultants talk about how the Internet is affecting the business models of mass media and how it is evolving towards a more participatory and collaborative environment.
Featuring: Tom Curley, Richard Sambrook, Susan Mernit, Merrill Brown and Kent Bye.
(2:53 minutes / 6.7 MB)
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3 Views
17:30:12 08/19/05
Echo Chamber Project Vlog Episode 2: Media & Politics
[LESS INFO] 3 VIEWS | ADDED 17:30:12 08/19/05
Here is the second Echo Chamber Project video blog entry
Description: Technology is transforming media & politics, and large-scale collaborative media can provide some insights into grassroots leadership and bottom-up democracy.
Featuring: Chris Nolan , Jeff Jarvis , Doc Searls , Scott Heiferman , Markos Moulitsas , Mindy Finn & Kent Bye.
(5:08 minutes / 12.6 MB)
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Listed below is a full transcript of this video with additional links...
BIG NEWS! >
[ UPDATE: November 2, 2005 ] The Rasiej campaign was never able to provide the necessary footage for this proposed remix. More details here.
This video blog episode will be one of the first citizen videojournalism reports to be remixed by a political campaign. This could provide a viable model for how traditionally top-down driven political campaigns could release some control over their communications strategy, and facilitate collaboration with citizens and issue-based advocates for talking about the niche concerns of constituents.
Vlogger and citizen journalist Ryanne Hodson will be gathering sound bites from Andrew Rasiej's campaign for Public Advocate in New York City, and then remixing them with sound bites from this Echo Chamber Project vlog episode in order to create a message that is unique to their campaign.
Both entries discuss how technology is changing media and politics, and how the Internet could faciliate a true grassroots, bottom-up democracy like we've never seen before.
Here is the pitch that I sent to the Rasiej campaign in order to open source the National aspects of their local campaign.
I framed the potential vlog remix as a way to "catalyze and energize a National-to-Local, peer-to-peer communications strategy" by having bloggers to tell NYC Democrats to know for Rasiej on September 13th.
In other words, since the Rasiej campaign has been so focused on the local Get Out the Vote efforts, then they didn't have time to connect the dots for what Rasiej's vision means for grassroots democracy and how political parties could use technology in new and innovative ways. Since I had already made this argument in this vlog entry, then I suggested that we collaborate on getting this message out there by open sourcing his national campaign strategy.
New York City also has a lot of political and cultural power, and if Rasiej is elected and his vision for Universal municipal Wi-Fi is implemented, then could set a trend for other cities to follow.
Rasiej founded the Personal Democracy Forum, which advocates for using technology to manifest a more grassroots democracy. This also happens to be where I gathered these interviews.
Here is a link to Rasiej's remixed video blog entry ( Remix Still in Production ).
It's nice to have the opportunity to put some of this theory into action for what is possible with using citizen journalism as a way to "open source" political campaigns. It is also opening more doors and paving the road for more doing collaborative media.
The Echo Chamber Project has more plans for how to take this idea to the next level by creating the tools to make large-scale collaborative media possible.
I am still searching for potential funders and computer programmers, so please leave a comment below if you're interested in getting more involved. Screen Capture Transcript Kent Bye ( EchoChamberProject.com ): I wanted to talk a bit about the intersection between media and politics for a couple of reasons. Collaborative media can provide a lot insights into grassroots activism and bottom-up democracy. The Echo Chamber Project is also developing a lot of the open source tools for collaborative media that could also be used for political campaigns in the next election cycle. So here are some insights from the Personal Democracy Forum.
[Intro Music Cue from Telekinetic Soulmate "Searching" courtesy of Defective Records] Chris Nolan ( "Politics from Left to Right" Blog): Back five / ten years ago, the people at Wired Magazine used to say, "The Internet changes everything." They were right. We're just getting -- I mean, outside of Silicon Valley -- people are just beginning to understand just how dramatic and how important those changes are. Jeff Jarvis ( BuzzMachine.com ): If you give the people control of media, they will take it. If you don't give them control, you will loose them. And I think we have to look not just at media where this is occurring, but also in marketing and in politics. I don't think here at the Personal Democracy Forum we've yet seen nearly the endgame of the people taking over their political process, and I do believe that will happen. Doc Searls ( Doc Searls Weblog ): Sooner or later, the connected electorate essentially imposes Democracy back on government in a way we've never seen before. So I think five years from now what we're going to see is something that's much more like democracy than we've seen in the history of the Republic. Kent Bye: It's safe to assume that the Internet will continue to change the way that we interact with media and politics. One of the founders of Meetup.com talks about the challenges of coordinating large-scale collaboration. Scott Heiferman (Co-Founder/CEO Meetup.com ): How do organizations find that balance between top-down and bottom-up? How is that you can both give people direction and leadership while at the same time giving people enough freedom to truly have a grassroots feel? Not just look grassroots, but authentically be grassroots. Not just sort of look bottom-up, but authentically be bottom-up. Markos Moulitsas ( DailyKos.com ): Now people want you to be proactive. They want you to be innovative. They want you to really look for solutions to problems. They don't want you to just follow orders. Yet we have a media environment and a political environment that are still very top-bottom driven. They still expect to issue proclamations and edicts and have people follow those. It's not like that any more. And I think that what we're seeing with the blogs is a creation of this new citizen's movement to take over things -- like I said -- politics, journalism and activism. Mindy Finn ( Republican National Committee eCampaign ): We're really tasked with online strategy. Leveraging the web and new media to help advance the committee's goals at all levels. For finance goals, which is raising money. To mobilization -- our political goals, getting grassroots out there, getting folks to the polls and actually voting for our candidates. And message, which is getting our message out there and hoping that it resonates, and helping drive the message into the grassroots and to the public. Markos Moulitsas: But I hope that what we're creating is culture where people don't feel a need to wait for "so-called leaders" to tell them to act to do anything. It's that they'll take that initiative on their own -- the tools are available. Mindy Finn: There's some hierarchy to respect. And I think there always -- I think there always will be and there always has been just to make sure that it's efficient and organized. But that what that hierarchy is all about is really putting people in touch with like-minded individuals -- empowering the grassroots. I mean, you have to have someone kind of crafting message. You have someone making sure that message is getting out to these individuals. Kent Bye: I think it's important to find that balance between top-down leadership and bottom-up participation without being too extreme on either end. What I hope to do with my open source documentary is help find that healthy balance. What I've done is I've gone out and taken the initiative to gather all of these interviews -- and ask the questions. But I'm releasing a lot of control with how the final film comes together. So I hope to have a community help collaborative edit and shape the film. So here's Doc Searls talking more about open source communities work. Doc Searls: Groups of people that work together in much the same way as -- say as a group of farmers would raise a barn. Right? And there's a shared understanding of what needs to be done. People step forward who have particular expertise, and they'll work on that part of the project. Kent Bye: Large-scale collaborative media can provide a lot of answers to some of the questions surrounding grassroots activism and bottom-up democracy. Small-scale collaboration is already possible with blogs, podcasts and video blogs -- but additional tools -- like the ones that I described in the previous episode -- have to be developed in order to facilitate collaboration on a large-scale. I'm still searching for funders and potential [software] programmers. So if you're interested in getting more involved, then please drop by the website and leave a comment.
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20:39:00 07/27/05
Echo Chamber Project Vlog Episode 1: Introduction
[LESS INFO] 4 VIEWS | ADDED 20:39:00 07/27/05
Introducing the first Echo Chamber Project video blog entry & vlog !
Description: First vlog episode about an open source, investigative documentary on how the television news became an uncritical echo chamber to the countdown towards war in Iraq -- and proposed tools for collaborative journalism that can provide some solutions.
Featuring: Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jonathan Landay, Pamela Hess, Bill Plante, Halley Suitt, Marilyn Schlitz, Kent Bye and 60 others.
To Watch the Video click here -- or on the picture below -- or try here if that link doesn't work. Check back in 10-15 minutes if neither work, the Internet Archive has been a bit spotty.
Sit back, relax and enjoy the show!
(6:15 minutes / 15 MB)
Download QuickTime
Listed below is >
* A full transcript of this video with additional links
* How to keep informed with the project ( Vlog RSS / Blog RSS )
* How to get more involved
* Click here & scroll to the bottom to leave feedback or other comments.
SUBSCRIBING TO THIS VIDEO BLOG
If you enjoyed this video, then you can have future Echo Chamber Project videos automatically delivered to you with this RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/EchoChamberProjectVlog
Just copy & paste the URL above into iTunes' "Advanced" > "Subscribe to Podcast..." window. For more details, watch Andrew Baron's instructional video on Subscribing to Rocketboom's feed with iTunes.
Or here's another program that allows you to automatically download videos by using RSS subscription feeds -- FireANT (includes instructional video). >
UPDATE: The feed should work in FireANT now. It was having troubles, but I modified some Drupal code to make it work. More details here.
GETTING MORE INVOLVED
Three things you can do to get more involved with this project: >
* Sign up as a user to this website in the left-hand column to receive periodic e-mail updates and join the community.
* This page http://www.echochamberproject.com/tag/volunteer will aggregate the latest things you can do to get involved.
* You can make a financial donation to help fund the development of the open source tools to facilitate collaborative media by contributing to this PayPal account.
TRANSCRIPT Picture Transcript Echo Chamber Project Title Sequence [Photo Credit: chamomile remixed by Jen Gouvea & Kent Bye] Kent Bye ( MetaThought Productions ): My name is Kent Bye, and I'm a documentary filmmaker Kent Bye: Can you hear me?
Jen Gouvea: [Offscreen] Yep. Kent Bye: I've got this film, and a lot it's criticizing -- about the media, but I didn't just want to -- just like have this big rant about "The media is really screwed up" -- Everyone knows the media is screwed up. I'm trying to do something about. I'm trying to like find some viable alternatives. Jay Rosen (New York University / PressThink ): The world is not going to be the same for the major media in five or ten years -- That much I'm convinced of. [ Full Interview ] Kent Bye: This isn't too bright or anything? You see, that's what I'm thinking. It might not -- like -- Dan Gillmor ( Grassroots Media, Inc. ): The traditional mass media are a lecture. And we're evolving media into something in between a conversation and a seminar with some lecture as well. Doc Searls ( Doc Searls Weblog ): You know, the conversational mode of relating to each other is as old as humanity, but it's actually new to what we call "Media." Kent Bye: This project takes a look at how the ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts became an "Echo Chamber" to the countdown towards war in Iraq. And how I produce the film will provide some collaborative alternatives that can make media more inclusive of different perspectives and points of view. Jonathan Landay ( Knight Ridder National Security Correspondent ) And it was a failure of most major media to delve behind -- in a meaningful way -- the administration’s rationale for going to war -- the intelligence that it was using to make it’s case. [ Full Interview ] Pamela Hess ( United Press International Pentagon Correspondent ): I don’t think I ever doubted that there was going to be a war. There was a lot of talk about how "No decision has been made." But -- I don't -- Maybe we’re just too cynical, but all of the entire press corps at the Pentagon was just kind of looking at our watches and wondering when it was going to be. There was never any doubt, I think, in any of our minds that it was an "if." Tom Brokaw ( NBC Nightly News ): Target: Iraq Peter Jennings ( ABC World News Tonight ): The Road to Possible War Dan Rather ( CBS Evening News ): Showdown with Saddam Bill Plante ( CBS News White House Correspondent ): But if you take it as a given, as I've already suggested to you that we did, that the administration was hell-bent on going to war, then you could only point out the steps that were being taken down that path. [ Full Interview ] Kent Bye: [Screaming] Halley Suitt ( Halley's Comment Blog ): People want to know how things feel. I don't know why it's driving it in that direction, but I know that it is going that direction. Dr. Marilyn Schlitz ( "Consciousness & Healing" ): You cannot separate out what happens inside of us -- our belief systems, our worldviews -- from the nature of the world in which we're embedded. And this is true for journalism. It's true for medicine. It's true for science. It's true for every domain of human inquiry -- where we know that as thinking, feeling human beings we're much more complicated than just the biological, mechanistic aspects of our being. Kent Bye: I'm trying to do collaborative media that's scalable and profitable for big organizations to do it. Kent Bye: Why not just get all of the information out there? I can open source all of the text of the interviews. I could release the audio at some point with podcasts. And eventually, when the film is done, I could release the video so that people could remix it in whatever way they wanted to. They could add more conservative voices, or more progressive voices, or whatever voices they want to. Collaboration Dan Gillmor: In think in general. on any beat at any publication or broadcast, the readers by definition know more than any individual reporter Kent Bye: So collectively, my audience knows more than I do. And there are technologies that can tap into the wisdom of this crowd. Websites like del.icio.us or Technorati use something called "Folksonomy Tags" to add context and meaning to webpages. Kent Bye: Folksonomies could also be used to add context and meaning to film sound bites in order to facilitate collaborative editing. Doc Searls: Right now we're in a model where lots and lots of people are capable of inventing exactly what they want to do what they want, and then sharing it. Kent Bye: My website is running the open source community software called "Drupal." This allows the creation of specific tools to facilitate collaborative media. These tools can then be shared with any other website that's running Drupal or CivicSpace. Halley Suitt: I think a blogger's mantra could be, "Whatever else you do, bring intelligence to the network and share it. Make the network more intelligent." Kent Bye: So we went out and interviewed the following journalists, media critics and other scholars about the performance of the mainstream media leading up to the war in Iraq. These are the interviews that volunteers have been helping me transcribe so that I could post them on my website. [Photo Credit: Sam Holden ] Interviewees :
Journalists : Bill Plante , Jonathan Landay , Warren Strobel , Julian Borger , Helen Thomas , Greg Mitchell , John R. MacArthur, Pamela Hess, Amy Goodman, Jim Lobe , Verna Avery Brown, Robert Dreyfuss, Jack Nelson, Lawrence Grossman, Tom Rosenstiel
Media Critics : Steve Rendall, Cliff Kincaid, Danny Schechter , Andrew Tyndall
Journalism Professors : Susan Moeller, Todd Gitlin, Jay Rosen
Think Tank Scholars : Michael O'Hanlon , Grover Norquist, Cliff May , David Sirota , John Prados, Joyce Battle, Thomas Donnelly
International Law : Ruth Wedgwood, Phyllis Bennis, James Paul, Sean Murphy
Retired Government Analysts : Greg Thielmann , Ray McGovern, John H. Brown , Karen Kwiatkowski
Other Experts : Reed Brody , Nathalie Loiseau , Damu Smith, Afaf Stevens, Christopher Queen , Sulak Sivaraksa , Gola Wolf Richards Kent Bye: So I interviewed all of these people about where media is at, but what about the future of the media? What about all of these New Media technologies? New Media Interviewees
Markos Moulitsas, Jeff Jarvis, Hugh Hewitt, Dan Gillmor, Chris Nolan, Halley Suitt, Rebecca MacKinnon, Doc Searls, Mindy Finn, Sheldon Rampton, Christopher Rabb, Scott Heiferman, Hossein Derakhashan Kent Bye: How can you make a media that is more integral and holistic? Media & Consciousness Interviewees
Don Beck, James O’Dea, Marilyn Schlitz, Dean Radin, Fred Alan Wolf, Lynne Twist, Susan Davis, Peter Russell, Duane Elgin, Sharif Abdullah, Van Jones Kent Bye: You know, this media revolution is just starting to begin. And I look forward to hearing your insights for how we can make a better media. www.echochamberproject.com
Music Credit: Telekinetic Soulmate "Searching" courtesy of Defective Records -- Thanks buMp
07/27/05