Blue Collar Rocket Science

Democracy and Psychopathology on Facebook and Google+

2011-07-20T14:18:23Z

On Facebook, your past stalks you like a vengeful ghost carrying a litany of your indiscretions written on (pick one: damaged car doors | overdue library books | your grandmother’s linen tablecloth) with (pick one: warm beer | bicycle chain grease | all-weather deck stain).

Your only escape routes are blocked by your present and your future. Your coworkers have decided to be Facebook friends, and so have a number of your business contacts. Every time a post on your wall starts with “Doooood…” or “Your Father and I were wondering…” you cringe at the thought that what comes next is visible to people you are hoping will see you as a professional genius well on the way to world domination.

If this is a fairly accurate description of how you feel about Facebook, there’s a good chance you’ll prefer the granularity and control over interactions offered by Google+. (There’s also a chance you’re a psychopath, but we’ll get to that later.) The implications of preferring one social network to the other goes deeper than just the practical considerations of obscuring references to beer bongs from your boss. The differing approaches to how we control our information have societal implications.

Facebook throws a sop in the direction of granular privacy with its “Lists” feature. But doing this does nothing to control the visibility of the incoming content that others choose to associate with your identity. The truly dedicated can gain some measure of privacy control over this content, but unlike in Google+ these settings don’t relate to your lists, offering you instead abstracts like “friends,” “friends of friends,” etc.

All these additional steps and the confusion they engender appears to be by design. As danah boyd explains in her post “Facebook and ‘radical transparency’ (a rant)” Facebook’s foundational idea is complete openness. In support, she cites this Mark Zuckerberg quote from David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect:

You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

The designers of Google+ clearly disagree. On signing up for their service, the very first thing you are asked to do is drag icons of people in your Google contacts (assuming you have Google contacts) into one or more visual circles labelled “Friends,” “Family,” “Acquaintances” and “Following.” When others add you to their circles, you are given the option of adding them to your circles. When you share content, you have to make an explicit choice about who you are sharing with. Unlike Facebook where “everybody” is the default, Google+ asks you to stop and decide before you put up a post that will be visible to every one of your FBriends.

You can easily create more circle categories as you need them, but you can’t see what circles others have you in. Where Facebook tries to impose a “we’re all friends” view on our social interactions, Google+ supports as much nuance and ambiguity as we actually feel about human relationships in the real world. You may think someone has you in a circle called “Social Media Ninjas” when in reality they have you in “Echo Chamber of Self-Promoting Windbags.”

So, which approach actually does privacy right? Like everything else regarding privacy, that’s a very personal question.

boyd pursues an interesting argument, claiming Facebook’s confusing privacy settings can be harmful to those who don’t understand them:

Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outting people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

She sees a class element at play in Facebook’s model:

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury. I say this as someone who is privileged, someone who has profited at every turn by being visible. But also as someone who has seen the costs and pushed through the consequences with a lot of help and support. Being publicly visible isn’t always easy, it’s not always fun.

She calls out Robert Scoble’s post Much ado about privacy on Facebook (I wish Facebook were MORE open!!!) in which he says:

Yes, I know some of you have delusions of creating the equivalent of an exclusive dinner party, or, even, something bigger like a TED conference in your Facebook page.

I’m just so bored with all that talk. Just what are you doing that needs to be so damned private? Are you having sex inside Facebook? Doing illegal drugs? Cheating on your wife? Damn, your Facebook life must be SO interesting!

Me, count me out of this whole privacy thing. I want everything I do to be public and then I don’t have to spill thousands of words crying when Mark Zuckerberg takes my stuff and exposes it in a search engine.

I don’t necessarily disagree with boyd. But then I don’t disagree with Scoble either.

My Facebook profile sometimes seem a head-on train collision between a distant past as a teenage hanger-on in a punk-inspired art subculture, with all the attendant transgressive debauchery that implies, and a present as a father and media professional. Because I feel protected and stable in my present, I revel in letting it see my past.

I enjoy the apparent dissonance caused by being seen as a person with complex, seemingly contradictory aspects. Puncturing pretense was a big part of the punk ethos, and gleefully puncturing my own pretense is true to what I think is good for society. But then I’m clearly a member of boyd’s privileged class, and what’s good for me isn’t necessarily good for everyone.

Gizmodo recently hired the services of a company that offers Internet and Social Media background screening to investigate six of its employee’s fitness for their jobs. In the resulting article, I Flunked my Social Media Background Check. Will You?, writer Mat Honan describes the process and what factors in his past caused him to be the only one of the six to not pass. Hits against Honan included discussing drug use and photos of himself naked, albeit in a non-sexual context.

Scoble embraces Facebook transparency because he believes he has nothing to hide. I’ve embraced it as a form of performance medium in which I let people who know me in limited contexts see me in different ways than they might expect. Honan is quite literally letting it all hang out and cultivating something of a gonzo image that he draws on for his professional work. We are all privileged users, who are self-aware of how we control our images.

There are other privileged users who only want to use Facebook as a self-promotional tool. When Scoble talks about people wanting their Facebook Walls to be “an exclusive dinner party” these are the people he is talking about.

On Facebook, these image conscious users tightly control their personal information although their posts are almost always about themselves, even when the topic ostensibly is not. In one example that I’ve been struck by more than once, where many Facebook users might mark the death of a notable person by commenting on that person’s work, a highly image conscious user’s post might turn the topic to themselves by reminding the world of the time they met that person, or how something that person said influenced their career choice. Posts about matters of personal taste, such as music, movies or food, can likewise seem to exist solely to project the poster’s chosen image. They are stingy with the “like” and shy away from actual discussion, especially when those involving differing opinions.

In its current incarnation, Google+ seems custom-tailored for the image conscious. The controls on sharing favor intentional segmentation. I can certainly see the appeal in how it is easier to project targeted images of oneself to specific audiences.

Google+ makes it much easier for me to make sure I only share reminiscences of youthful mayhem with some people, and wordy analyses of the way we use social media with other people. I’ve enjoyed playing these two real aspects of myself off each other on Facebook, but would I really have bothered if Zuckerberg’s “radical transparency” hadn’t forced me to make decisions about how to handle my wildly disparate group of Facebook friends? While Facebook discourages users from limiting what they share, Google+ discourages users from sharing indiscriminately. In a twist on the old New Yorker cartoon, you could create a Google+ circle that knows you are a dog, while concealing the fact from all your other circles.

Google+ is to Facebook what Facebook was to MySpace. It’s where the smart kids with an advanced sense of themselves go, leaving the older social network to its increasingly déclassé users with their silly games and embarrassingly tacky self-revelations. And that’s a shame.

It’s a shame because Facebook pushes the image conscious in a direction that is more human, more democratic. boyd is right that Facebook can damage people who don’t know enough about what they are doing by exposing things they can’t afford to have exposed. But it can also expose something very useful about those who do know what they are doing: The fact they don’t want to be exposed.

Hypesters that promote social media as a transformative force in society, without wading into the messy fray of social media Facebook-style expose more about themselves than they think. The underlying tensions caused by actions not following words can be interpreted as fault lines of classism where pretenses of democracy grind against meritocratic self-regard, and privileged users feed on the sheep-like behaviors of the majority.

In the Google+ segmentation model where conversations are limited to target audiences, it will be harder to spot this “exposure via intentional concealment.” On other social media networks, someone whose entire output amounts to “I am a thought leader” can easily be spotted as having produced no actual thoughts. On Google+ there will always be the sense that these missing thoughts might actually exist inside a circle that you can’t enter because the doorman won’t unhook the velvet rope for the likes of you.

Getting fixated on exposure by concealment can be a slippery slope though. It’s similar to what author Jon Ronson described in the “How to spot a psychopath” excerpt from his latest book: If you look for aberrant behaviors you start to think you can see them everywhere.

But on the other hand, if it’s true that 1 in 100 people is psychopathic — bear in mind that we’re talking about your common everyday psychopath and not a crazed killer from a cheesy horror movie — and that the concentration is higher in business leaders, then might it not be likely that the concentration is higher in boyd’s privileged users as well? That little thing of turning a notable person’s death into a chance to talk about oneself? Hmmm…

It’s a stretch bordering on wacky conspiracy theory to think that each Facebook profile used primarily for self-aggrandizement is the result of an underlying abnormality the in user’s amygdala, the part of the brain suspected as the source of psychopathic personalities. But what if what’s actually going on is the fetishization and eventual normalization of psychopathic self-absorption because it is seen as a winning business strategy? Is it better to compartmentalize this behavior off in Google+ circles where it can be reinforced by like minded individuals, or keep it in Facebook feeds where the pretense might be punctured by friends or family that don’t buy into it?

Google+ looks to me like a winning product. It’s likely going to “MySpace” Facebook at least to the extent of capturing a large number of privileged users. It might even be the reason Facebook fades away into irrelevance sooner rather than later, if general users find it appealing. I certainly can see myself using Google+ more and more, and taking full advantage of the audience segmentation it offers for my own purposes.

But, while I’m by no means a fan of Facebook’s reputational risk to its users with the most to lose, I will miss it as a democratic leveler. The more the image conscious have to struggle to keep it all about them the better is is for the society America professes to be. I’ve enjoyed the times when my Facebook profile has facilitated interactions between friends from wildly different spheres and with wildly different perspectives. It’s like Scoble’s “exclusive dinner party” minus the exclusivity. When Facebook is at its best, everyone knows everyone else is a dog.

FtM + SEO

2011-04-12T15:57:25Z

My last posts about Flip the Media caught the attention of the faculty and students involved in running it as an independent study. After few emails back and forth I agreed to come back on board in an advisory capacity. Specifically, I’ve agreed to work on SEO (I’m thinking of it more broadly as “user acquisition” or SEO+), but it’s not possible to do effective SEO on a site that hasn’t defined a target audience or any success metrics. So I’m trying to help push in those directions as a precursor to any other work. That said, after the first meeting I attended, I spent less than 30 minutes with some very basic tools and learned some things about the site which I shared in an email, reproduced below.

The Flip the Media home page has a Google PageRank of 5/10. That’s actually quite a bit better than I would have expected. It suggests that FtM has some quality “trusted” sites linking to it.

It’s just a place to start, but the Google AdWords Keyword Generator will analyze a URL you give it, determine what the content of the page is about based on a text analysis, and suggest search terms you might want to bid on to place ads on that page, based on the search terms that return that page in the results. It’s an interested gut check to see if Google thinks your content is about what you think your content is about.

I ran it on http://flipthemedia.com, and found out these are the search terms Google thinks we would want to buy ads for based on the content on the home page:

audio editing equipment
sound editing equipment
best hd camera under 1000
professional video camera equipment
hd video equipment
audio and video editing software
sound and video editing software
all video editing software

By contrast, the 111 words on the about page (http://flipthemedia.com/index.php/about-2/) don’t include “social” but it’s the common element in long list of searches with that word in them. I’ve added that list to the bottom of this email for comparison.

With blogs, specific home page content is a transitory thing. There have been times when that AdWords list might have more accurately reflected the content on the home page, but it isn’t really accurate for much of what’s there now. So if we want to drive targeted traffic to the Flip the Media home page we need to think about what value the content we create has to the users. What sort of sites do we want voting up our PageRank? A super-quick look at the list of inbound links to the homepage suggests that being linked in the footer on Drew Keller’s “StoryLink” blog maybe having a strong influence on Google’s perception of the home page, and that’s where all the a/v strength is coming from. We once had a strong emphasis on a/v gear and software, so we got linked to as a source for that. What are we a source for now? What do we want to be a source for? Why haven’t the a/v site links been offset by links from sites that view us as a valuable source for other information? The content choices we make have a powerful and long-lasting impact on the visibility of the site to our target audiences. (Who are our target audiences?)

On the other hand maybe our strategic mission dictates that driving traffic to the home page isn’t the best tactic. Perhaps we want a long tail strategy relying on posts to act as link bait, or perhaps we want to create some sort of highly SEO optimized “Tools and Resources” landing page, or perhaps there’s some other tactic we want to use that would best support the strategic mission of the site if we knew what that mission was. If the strategic mission indicates that driving traffic to the home page isn’t the right tactic, then what do we want people to do when they enter via deeper pages? Do we want them to explore more posts in the category of the one they have landed on? Do we want them to learn more about FtM as an MCDM property? Dow we want them to to the home page?

When we know the internal traffic flow we want then we start to have a sense of the information architecture needs for supporting it. And we then populate that architecture with category labels that define the type of content we want to be know for based on our traffic acquisition plan. Once we get the IA nailed down, then we can start thinking about design because we are trying to encourage and benefit from specific user behaviors instead of just having a site that looks good. We then work the needs of SEO into the design and the coding of the template and write up SEO content guidelines that will help editors choose content that supports our mission, and strengthen the SEO value of that content once it’s written.

But then we need to find out if we actually improved things for FtM. What are our metrics, and what are our goals for those metrics? Do we value new visits more than we value pages per visit? Do we value time on site more than bounce rate? Without defining what goals support the strategic mission, analytics information is just Fun Facts.

As with everything else about running a website, Search Engine Optimization can’t really be improved until there’s an agreed upon purpose for the site to exist. It’s impossible to strive for an undefined goal.

-Brook

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Physician, Curate Thyself

2011-02-19T22:32:52Z

It’s been almost a year since I contributed a post to MCDM’s Flip the Media blog. This hasn’t been because I didn’t want to post there. Instead it’s because, just as the blog felt like it was reaching a groove of sustainable editorial policies encouraging quality content, decisions were made to change who was in charge and how work was solicited. Since that time, I haven’t really known who the editors are, how I should submit posts, or really anything else about the blog. I’m not even sure why I used to have an administrator account on it, why I don’t anymore, or when the change was made. It’s all a mystery to me, and with only a quarter to go until graduation I’m not going to try to unravel it.

Recently, the blog has begun adding features that, instead of being integrated with the WordPress platform it runs on, are hosted on Google Docs and displayed on the site in an iframe. This is the sort of HTML hackery that I help companies avoid or fix in my professional life, and which I wince to see my writing associated with on a site managed by the program in which I’m getting my Master’s Degree. It’s not my fault, but it reflects poorly on me.

Rumors that are going around have led me to suspect that Flip the Media’s days in its current form are numbered. Which might be a good thing considering its rickety state. But I’ve written some good stuff for the blog, and I don’t want to see it disappear in any sort of curatorial meltdown. So, using the RSS feed for my own posts, I’ve imported them to Blue Collar Rocket Science. They all appear with their original publication dates, and are in the category First Published on Flip the Media. I did discard one that was about an MCMD Wiki I set up, which never got any traction and is long since defunct.

My decision to duplicate my Flip the Media posts on to a blog I manage myself is tied to my decision some months back to archive all the Twitter posts I’ve made with my primary account as blog posts in the category Twitter posts. When it comes to curating your work, it’s best to take matters in your own hands.

Who’s in the Driver’s Seat, Social Media or People?

2011-02-18T14:28:02Z

Over on Flip the Media, the blog of the MCDM program, a new poll asks two questions:

Did social media tools like Twitter and Facebook drive the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions?
Could social media tools like Twitter and Facebook spur widespread demonstrations in the US or UK?

I find it hard to answer these questions as posed. Not only are “drive” and “spur” vague terms open to interpretation, but answering them invites a deeper discussion of Malcolm Gladwell’s article Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted, which simply is not possible in the binary mechanism of a poll. From the moment it was published, Gladwell’s piece has been the subject of many strawman challenges, in which many people have deftly countered all sorts of things that Gladwell never actually said. The poll also comes at the end of an article called “Could Online Political Activism Ignite the US like it did Egypt?” which seems to more or less give away the poller’s opinion even before the questions are asked.

When we talk about media tools, we have to remember that they are just tools. A house is not built out of hammers and saws, but they do make building the house easier. A revolution is not built of the tools used to organize it, but they make the revolution easier. Does a hammer “drive” the building of the house? Of course not.

In my mind, what “drove” or “spurred” the protests in Egypt that now seem to be spreading through the region is a very complex set of circumstances. The autocratic ruling elite in these countries are holding together systems that in their present form date back to the decades following World War II. It appears that a plurality of the populations they rule has reached such a state of frustration with the situation that they are protesting. To me, the driver is the social conditions that create that frustration, which includes the percentage of young people in the populations of those countries. Social media has been a valuable tool in giving voice to that frustration, because it is an existing disseminated network of communication. Because it’s one that’s not well understood by the rulers they find it especially threatening.

In May 1968, a youth revolt nearly brought down the government of French President Charles de Gaulle. At the time, in attempts to deny the true causes, blame was laid at the feet of rock and roll and rebellious movies. But looked at historically, it seems clear that what really happened was an old order had become so out of touch with the lives of the emerging generation that it led to an uprising. Rock and roll and movies may have helped express the frustration of the protesters but the media creators involved, the musicians and filmmakers, didn’t drive that frustration or the actions it led to. Those in the ruling class who didn’t understand what was really going on latched onto emblems of the protesters’ generation, therefore devaluing their legitimate complaints and dehumanizing them as individuals.

When we credit the actions of protesters using the social media tools to the tools themselves, we likewise devalue and dehumanize the protesters. In fact, we make the same mistake that the regimes they protest against do, by confusing emblems of the protesters’ generation with the actual protests. What makes these events historic is not that calls to action were issued via social media, but that there were calls to action and people responded to them. In Gladwell’s term, the message and the medium used to disseminate it are weak ties. The solidarity of the people who came out en masse and put their bodies at risk facing down the state police is the strong tie that actually drove the events. To confuse the bravery of what they did with the media used to share information about it is to do them a grave disservice.

What Facebook and Twitter have done is to disseminate the role of media creator to anyone with an Internet connection. Any of us may express common frustrations or make a suggestion about an action, but if the underlying conditions for that action to feel worthwhile aren’t there it will fizzle out.

The actual communication that organized the protests in Paris would have been mediated in the same way as the everyday communication among the participants was in 1968. Likewise in Egypt the communication went through the channels the protesters were already using in 2011. To not communicate via Facebook and Twitter in 2011 would be like ignoring the telephone system in 1968. People use the tools they have available. Facebook and Twitter may be better tools than phone trees, but they aren’t magical catalysts that play by rules radically different from how people have used their media for millenia.

As to whether social media could spur an uprising in the United States, it’s not necessary to invent a scenario when there’s a real life example playing out in this country every day. Social media is used to publicize protests that appeal to people who identify with the “Tea Party” movement. Often these events succeed and crowds turn out to express their frustrations. But does that mean the Tea Party is a movement “driven” by social media? Are those who are eager to embrace the idea of a “Twitter Revolution” equally eager to embrace the idea of a “Facebook Fringe Political Movement?” I don’t see how you can have one without the other, and I’m not convinced that either description is useful in understanding what’s really going on.

I’m still not sure that answering the poll questions will capture any of my actual views on the subject.

Do I think that Twitter and Facebook provided openly-accessible communication media platforms that helped tremendously in organizing mass protests? Absolutely.

Do I think that organizing the mass protests in such a way that they led to the current situation would have been feasible if Twitter, Facebook, or even the Internet itself didn’t exist? Absolutely.

Do I think social media tools either drove recent events in Egypt and Tunisia or could spur similar events in the US or UK? Absolutely not.

That doesn’t mean I think social media isn’t important. In times of unrest, communication is the most dangerous tool that can be employed against the established order. During television’s half-century of uncontested dominance, it sometimes seemed all it took to effect a government overthrow in some countries was to take over the TV station and announce you were the new ruler. Social media is different because it is disseminated, not centralized. Controlling the message is harder even when you attempt to take it over by turning off the Internet as the Egyptian government did. At that point, it was too late — the weak ties of social media and relatively safe message sharing had been supplanted by the strong ties of direct and dangerous action. And it’s those ties — the ties of people in the street expressing themselves in public instead of on Facebook and Twitter — that forced the change.

It’s still the case that as McLuhan wrote, “media are the extensions of man.” As dedicated to media as I am both professionally and personally, putting media in the driver’s seat is the sort of dystopian role reversal that would send me into the streets to protest.

Iceberg Right Ahead: Net Neutrality from Titanic to Today

2010-09-20T21:29:54Z

Brook Ellingwood
COM 588: Digital Media Law and Policy
Instructor: Kraig Baker
August 20, 2010

Introduction

In 2006 the term, if not the concept, of “net neutrality” gained a sudden popularly currency as media coverage of debates over how Internet traffic was handled and prioritized increased. In testimony before Congress, important architects of the Internet expressed concerns about the medium’s health if service providers were allowed to choose what content was allowed to pass through their systems, or at what speed it was allowed through.

Illustration 1: Google search for the term “net neutrality” over time.

Current communications legislation and regulations are not simply products of the Internet era. In fact, there is relatively little law in place that was developed with the Internet in mind. Contrary to the opinions of some I have spoken to, the Internet is not a public bastion of Free Speech. Instead it is a collection of privately held services that have no obligation to allow freedom of expression, and to date have only been perceived as doing so because they have chosen not to restrict the most popular uses. The fact that less-popular uses have been restricted could be seen as a red flag by civil libertarians who believe that it is the voices of dissent that most need protection in a free society.

To develop a better understanding of the legal issues of net neutrality today, including the recent Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal, I have conducted a survey of the major communications act of the past century.

Defining Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is a concept that has been gaining increasing levels of visibility for years, beginning with individuals and organizations active in issues of technology and society and growing to include government regulators, elected officials and an increasing number of business interests on both sides of the issue. With the August 9, 2010 announcement of a joint proposal from Google and Verizon, the debate moved farther into the mainstream even as interested parties were still examining what it is, exactly, that Google and Verizon have agreed to.

The advocacy group Common Cause (n.d.) defines net neutrality as

…the principle that Internet users should be able to access any web content they want, post their own content, and use any applications they choose, without restrictions or limitations imposed by their Internet service providers (ISPs).

In 2006 Google published “A Note to Google Users on Net Neutrality” which struck a populist tone above the signature of the company’s CEO:

The Internet as we know it is facing a serious threat. There’s a debate heating up in Washington, DC on something called “net neutrality” – and it’s a debate that’s so important Google is asking you to get involved. We’re asking you to take action to protect Internet freedom.

In the next few days, the House of Representatives is going to vote on a bill that would fundamentally alter the Internet. That bill, and one that may come up for a key vote in the Senate in the next few weeks, would give the big phone and cable companies the power to pick and choose what you will be able to see and do on the Internet.

Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.

Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.

Thanks for your time, your concern and your support.

Eric Schmidt

Although they are accurate descriptions as far as they go, these definitions were designed to be easily understood by an audience with little detailed background in the issue. Google’s note is interesting as a document of the company’s evolving position on net neutrality. It was published at a time when the Communications, Consumer’s Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006, proposed by the late Senator Ted Stevens, was being opposed on the grounds that it would undermine net neutrality. In describing the act, which did not pass, Stevens memorably described the Internet as “not a big truck” but “a series of tubes.” The latter phrase quickly became a symbolic catchphrase implying that politicians writing laws that impact the Internet actually understand very little about how it works.

In truth, “a series of tubes” could be an apt metaphor for describing the infrastructure of the Internet – like a municipal water supply, the Internet provides a networked conduit between far-flung points. What flows through Stevens’ tubes is, of course, not water but electronic information. Like water, the volume of information that reaches your house in any given period of time is determined by the carrying capacity of the infrastructure carrying it. But when you go to the sink and turn on your faucet, it’s not the miles of underground piping that you think of as the point of the water utility – the water filling your cup that’s the reason you pay your water bill and the pipes that deliver it are just the means by which it gets to you.

Water systems lack any foreknowledge of what the water they deliver will be used for. Although the idea may have a certain appeal in some circles, water utilities can’t turn valves and adjust delivery in times of drought so that you get a normal flow for showering, but a greatly reduced flow for watering your verdant expanse of lawn. You may know which tap you’ve opened, but when seen from the water tower, it’s all just water flowing.

At its core, the concept of “net neutrality” is that Internet information should flow through the “tubes” in the same way that water flows through a municipal water system – without any consideration of how it will be used. Net neutrality principles hold that if an email sent to you and an email sent to Bill Gates happen to pass through the same server, that server should not pass Gates’ email faster than your email. If you are watching a video distributed through a television network owned by your broadband cable provider, that video should not stream more smoothly than one distributed by a different network. Website data flowing to your Amazon “faucet” should not be delivered more quickly that data flowing to your Onlineshoes.com “faucet.”

Fire Hydrants, Data Protocols and Metered Mail

The design of any sort of distribution network requires some compromise of strict neutrality. Fire hydrants, for example, connect into the water supply with bigger pipes giving them greater carrying capacity than your house does. You would no more want the fire department trying to save your house with the flow of water that comes out of your shower head than you would want to take your morning shower buffeted by the stream of water from a fire hydrant. The backbone of the Internet has a carrying capacity enormously greater than the fastest connections available to the average household. While you might want that kind of speedy data connection to your house, for most of us it would be cost-prohibitive to install, and we really wouldn’t derive that much benefit from it.

But it’s not this kind of matching capacity to use that “net neutrality” refers to.

The flow of information through the Internet is not like a steady stream of water. Information is broken into discrete “packets” at the supply side, and then these packets are reassembled into complete files at the user side. To successfully complete this trip the average packet “hops” through 18 different computers before arriving at its destination. Like paper packages sent by mail, electronic packets have to be clearly labelled so as to not get lost at each intermediary stop. Everyone computer a packet passes through reads the header information so it know what to do with it.

Electronic packet headers include a “from” address and a “to” address, of course, along with a variety of other useful information. One of these other bits of information is the “protocol,” which identifies how it is that the requesting computer and the responding computer are talking to each other. The familiar “http://” at the beginning of Web addresses stands for “HyperText Transfer Protocol,” while email typically moves around the Internet with via SMTP (“Simple Mail Transfer Protocol”), POP (“Post Office Protocol”) or IMAP (“Internet Message Access Protocol”). The popular BitTorrent file sharing software uses yet another protocol.

By and large, the many computers through which packets of information you request don’t care who you are, who you are getting information from, or what type of information you are receiving. A packet comes in and is passed through just the same as any other packet. But there are compelling business reasons for the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that operate these computers to change that.

The United States Post Office has multiple categories for mail, indicated by different stamps on the packages it handles. First Class postage costs more than Bulk Rate, but gets your package to its destination quicker. Next Day costs even more, but delivery is quicker still.

From the perspective of an ISP, providing the same speed of delivery to all packets passing through seems like giving a free upgrade to Next Day delivery to everything put in a mailbox anywhere. As more and more data is transferred, they have to build more and more expensive servers and pay more and more in data transfer fees to other ISPs. But from the perspective of most users, it seems like the level of service they feel they are paying for and are entitled to.

Test Case: Choking the Torrents

The real world has already provided a test case in the form of data transferred using the BitTorrent protocol.

BitTorrent packets are estimated to comprise up to one third of total Internet traffic, due to the large media files that typically are shared through that protocol and despite the smaller number of BitTorrent users compared to users of email, Web pages or other common protocols. Some ISPs have chosen to minimize the impact of BitTorrent traffic on their systems by identifying it via header information and passing it through more slowly than other forms of traffic. In 2006, Comcast went farther and began disrupting BitTorrent traffic completely, by identifying it as it passed through their servers and inserting false “transfer complete” into the packet stream (Singel, 2007).

BitTorrent is an attractive test case for ISPs to use in pushing the boundaries of neutrality, not only because the files are large, but also because much of the content sharing is in violation of copyrights and the sharers affected by speed throttling or blockage are hesitant to risk legal exposure for piracy. But the ethical questions raised these practices touch on far deeper matters, including the relationship between the First Amendment and new communications forms that the framers of the constitution never imagined.

Even assuming most BitTorrent users are engaged in illegal activity, there is nothing illegal about the protocol itself. It is used for many legitimate purposes. Examples include updating the servers of both Facebook and Twitter, distributing the software for the online game World of Warcraft and sharing the government of the United Kingdom’s public spending records (Ernesto, 2010).

In 2008, Comcast ceased blocking BitTorrent traffic in favor of throttling the heaviest users of bandwidth during times of high traffic. Later that year, the FCC ruled that Comcast’s practices were not acceptable and order the company to stop restricting certain types of traffic (Hansell, 2008). The tables were turned in April, 2010 when a federal appeals court ruled the FCC lacks authority to regulate Internet service (Wyatt, 2010).

Looking Forward by Looking Back

With no clear regulatory framework in place the stage has been set for a contentious debate on net neutrality, a debate in which Google and Verizon’s joint proposal has caused a stir. Underscoring the unique role the Internet plays in the lives of many people, the net neutrality discussion often takes on an emotional tone in which Google’s “Don’t be Evil” corporate mantra is twisted and thrown back at the company, and civil libertarians worry about an Internet regulated by the same FCC that fined CBS half a million dollars for Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in the name of community standards.

My approach to getting past the sensationalized aspects of the debate has been to examine past debates about communication in the United States and look for commonalities in the legislative and regulatory approaches taken. In doing my research, it occurred to me that historically some communications media have been regulated as services, while others have been regulated as utilities. The average consumer likely gives little consideration to the difference, and may have unclear expectations as a result.

Shroedinger’s ISP: Quantum Utilities and Services

Quantum physicists attempting to understand the nature of the universe, work with a model in which sometimes subatomic particle truly are particles of matter, but sometimes they are waves of energy. The only way to accurately describe a particle is through the concept of wave-particle duality, which holds that it is simultaneously both a particle and a wave until someone checks in to see just what it’s up to.

Understanding the debate about net neutrality can lead to a concept of utility-service duality. Although less mind-boggling than quantum physics, this model requires us to make a clear distinction between utilities and services.

Utilities, such as the municipal water supply, deliver necessities to the public, “…such as water, electricity, natural gas, and telephone and telegraph communication.” Typically in the United States utilities are either run by governments or tightly regulated private companies that have been granted monopolies. The reasons for regulation are often tied to the societal value of the service provided: A water utility that maximized profits by only supplying water to customers that could pay top dollar would not be operating in the best interests of public health.

Services are intangible goods, such as the delivery of mail, that also may be provided by governments or private companies. The United States Postal Service exists in a sort of in-between state as a private company that is owned by the government. Services are not seen as necessities, and therefore have more latitude in creating differing rate structures or choosing which tasks it will agree to: The USPS charges more for faster delivery and places limits on the size and weight of packages it will send through its facilities.

Internet Service Providers are structured as services, but their customers typically expect them to function as public utilities. It isn’t until someone checks to see just what they are up to that we know which of the two models they are acting more like at any given time.

Communication, Regulation, History

While concerns about the role of communication media in society go back at least as far as Socrates, a better place to start with net neutrality is with the invention of radio.

Events Leading to the Formation of the Federal Radio Commission

As with many new technologies, radio had a large early adopter base of hobbyists who took pleasure in building their own equipment and using it to connect with other enthusiasts. But it also had a commercial “killer application.” With radio, ships at sea were no longer isolated from instant communication with land, or each other. Radio became a revenue generator as telegraphic messages were sent to and from ships. The United States Navy adopted radio.

In 1909 an amazing demonstration of the value of radio occurred when a ship in distress sent an emergency message and the lives of 1200 people were saved. Congress reacted by passing the Wireless Ship Act of 1910, which required all ships with more than 50 passengers and traveling more than 200 miles off the coast to be equipped with radios.

This act just added to a growing problem with crowding and limited bandwidth. As a self-regulated medium, radio was becoming a free-for-all, with amateurs resenting any corporate or government use. Some hobbyists began jamming broadcasters they didn’t approve of, or sending false messages including fake distress calls and orders to Navy vessels (Slotten, 2000).

The 1912 sinking of the Titanic proved a watershed moment in the regulatory history of this new medium. Although the Californian, the closest vessel to the sinking, didn’t receive Titanic’s distress calls because its only radio operator had gone to bed for the night, the more distant Carpathian, did and arrived in time to rescue many survivors. In the hours after the sinking, the unregulated radio waves were jammed and confused although it is reported that the following night New York area amateurs voluntarily maintained radio silence so as to not interfere with the transmission of survivor lists from the rescuing vessels (White, n.d.).

The disaster left a perception that more lives could have been saved had the airwaves not been so chaotic when it happened. Despite the radio enthusiasts’ vociferous belief that no regulation was the only acceptable form of regulation, Congress moved quickly and enacted the Wireless Act of 1912, which established the United States Department of Commerce and Labor as the regulatory body overseeing radio. For the first time, licenses were required to operate radio equipment and limits were set on broadcast frequency, hours of operation and signal strength (Slotten; White).

Protestations continued, with many maintaining that the Commerce Department’s radio licenses were a violation of the First Amendment’s Free Speech protection. Court cases were pursued and in 1927 the federal government created the Federal Radio Commission to regulate the licensing and use of the broadcast spectrum. In its first annual report, the commission itself acknowledged uncertainty about what it was being asked to do.

The passage of the radio act of 1927 presented a situation without parallel in the history of American executive departments. A wholly new Federal body was called into being to deal with a condition which had become almost hopelessly involved during the months following July 3, 1926, when it had become clear that the Department of Commerce had no authority under the 1912 radio law to allocate frequencies, withhold radio licenses, or regulate power or hours of transmission. The new law itself was, of course, totally untested, and the Federal Radio Commission was called upon to administer it with no clear knowledge as to the limitations which might be created by subsequent court action (Messere, 1997).

The FRC’s confusion about what, exactly, it had authority over stemmed directly from the circumstances of its formation:

…the Radio Act of 1927 was emergency legislation, passed to bring order to the airwaves after a Federal judge had ruled in 1926 that the Department of Commerce’s licensing of stations was unconstitutional, thus leading to a period of chaos in the ether, as many stations disrespected the existing frequency and power assignments (McChesney, 1992).

Despite having debated and approved the act, Congress seemed unsure about what it was doing as well:

Senator Key Pittman of Nevada expressed his frustration to the Senate chair: “I do not think, sir, that in the 14 years I have been here there has ever been a question before the Senate that in the very nature of the thing Senators can know so little about as this subject.”

Nor was the public much better informed, Pittman noted, even though he received telegrams daily urging passage.

“I am receiving many telegrams from my State urging me to vote for this conference report, and informing me that things will go to pieces, that there will be a terrible situation in this country that cannot be coped with unless this report is adopted. Those telegrams come from people, most of whom, I know, know nothing on earth about this bill.” (Goodman, n.d.)

Perhaps due to its origins in a struggle over free speech, the newly-created commission was given very limited explicit power over content. The act stated that radio programming could not be “obscene, indecent, or profane” and that radio stations had to give equal time to political candidates. While this power may have been limited, the real power of the commission – the ability to revoke licenses for broadcasters that didn’t toe the line – gave it a much heavier regulatory hand than indicated by the act on its surface. In addition to revoking licenses to stations that broadcast foul language, the FRC shut down broadcasters who transmitted material supporting political or religious views that the commission felt were outside the mainstream of American opinion. (Goodman)

In 1928, the FRC reallocated the broadcast spectrum in a scheme that heavily favored stations that were part of the NBC and CBS radio networks, relegating non-commercial broadcast uses to low-power stations that were only allowed to broadcast during daylight hours. The amateur operators were licensed to operate in a separate part of the spectrum, where they wouldn’t interfere with the broadcasters or the military users, who had yet another part of the spectrum.

A key argument used to rebut First Amendment challenges of broadcast licenses was the concept of the radio frequency as a scarce natural resource. Without regulation, the argument went, overuse would destroy radio’s capability to be used by anyone.

The FRC Becomes the FCC

Of course, radio as a communications medium wasn’t invented out of whole cloth. In many ways it was an extension of the wired communication networks that had developed in the 19th Century: the telegraph and telephone. In 1910, the Mann–Elkins Act had given the Interstate Commerce Commission regulatory authority over the nation’s telephone and telegraph carriers, and in the 1913 Kingsbury Commitment, American Telephone and Telegraph had fended off possible anti-trust action by agreeing to ICC approval authority over any further acquisitions of other phone companies and allowing AT&T’s competitors access to its extensive network of phone lines (“American Telephone & Telegraph,” 2010).

The Communications Act of 1934 was less sweeping legislation than the act it superseded and more of a bit of regulatory housecleaning. Following its passage, the Federal Radio Commission was replaced by a new Federal Communications Commission, which inherited its predecessor’s duties plus the oversight of telephone and telegraph carriers formerly carried out by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

The establishment of the FCC was the last major communications act for the next 62 years, until the Telecommunication Act of 1996.

The Cusp of a New Millennium, the Passage of a New Act

Coming as it did in the late 20th Century’s era of deregulation, it is hardly surprising that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 loosened many previous restrictions on communications companies. For example, after the acts’s passage cable television companies and telephone companies could compete in offering each other’s traditional services, as well as for the growing number of customers looking for broadband Internet connections.

Deregulatory aspects of the act were promoted as methods to foster competition amongst media companies. However in the wake of the act’s passage, consolidation that had begun in the 1980s continued unabated. With the country’s communications media owned by fewer and fewer people, there has been criticism that deregulation had a far more detrimental effect on supporting freedom of speech through access to media channels than the regulations it did away with.

The era of the act’s passage was also the peak of the so-called “culture wars” when debates about behavior and character often seemed to take precedence over other topics. Title V of the act, known as the “Communications Decency Act” was legislation that made a major regulatory grab for control over the content of cable television and the Internet. Much of the CDA was subsequently removed following successful legal challenges. As subscription services, cable and Internet providers are not bound to the same decency rules that the FCC enforces against broadcasters whose signals can be accessed for free.

The act and subsequent court battles left interested civil liberties groups wary of the potential impact on freedom of speech that might come from granting strong regulatory authority over the Internet to the FCC. These concerns continue to color the current debate over net neutrality.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Corynne McSherry wrote in 2009 of concerns that granting the FCC authority over net neutrality would be akin to a “Trojan Horse,” and that once the regulatory body was inside the gates of the Internet it would quickly overwhelm the inhabitants and take over:

…it doesn’t take much imagination to envision a future FCC “Internet Decency Statement.” After all, outgoing FCC Chairman Martin was a crusader against “indecency” on the airwaves and it was the FCC that punished Pacifica radio for playing George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” monologue, something you can easily find on the Internet. And it’s also too easy to imagine an FCC “Internet Lawful Use Policy,” created at the behest of the same entertainment lobby that has long been pressing the FCC to impose DRM on TV and radio, with ISPs required or encouraged to filter or otherwise monitor their users to ensure compliance.

…

EFF’s concerns are born from more than just a general skepticism about government regulation of the Internet. Experience shows that the FCC is particularly vulnerable to regulatory capture and has a history of ignoring grassroots public opinion (see, e.g., media consolidation). That makes the agency a poor choice for restraining the likes of Comcast and AT&T.

The “regulatory capture” that McSherry refers to is a term describing what happens when an industry subject to regulation in the public interest begins to unduly influence the body charged with regulating it. The FRC was accused of becoming a captured agency after its reallocation scheme so heavily favored commercial interests, and the FCC has often suffered similar complaints. As alluded to in the quote, the consolidation of media companies during the 1980s and 1990s has been seen by many as a blow to free speech and other aspects of the public interest.

Patterns in the Legislative Record

While there is much about the Internet that is new and unprecedented, it is striking how many parallels there are between the current debate over net neutrality and the situations that gave rise to the key communication acts of the 20th Century. Similar concerns about balancing the role of government against the constitutional rights of individuals and commercial interests recur throughout.

As with the Internet, radio’s early users were heavily skewed towards enthusiasts who formed a community around building their own equipment and sharing technical information that often was the intellectual property of others. Faced with the encroachment of commercial interests and government oversight into a medium they felt rightfully belonged to them on the basis of the First Amendment, they fought back by disrupting the medium, essentially launching denial of service attacks and messages with viral payloads, using telegraph keys instead of computer code.

In the end, these techniques proved counter-productive as they underscored the medium’s fragility when ruled only by a self-policing community. As radio became more important to civil and commercial functions, the existing community’s stridently libertarian resistance to regulation pushed it to the sidelines as the commercial users increasingly came to sound reasonable in comparison.

And when, in the end, Congress finally acted decisively, it did so with admittedly poor understanding of what it was doing. The debate was over matters that elected officials had no great knowledge of. The Davis Amendment to the Radio Act of 1927 underscored this point, as legislators directed the Federal Radio Commission to spread radio licenses equally across the country in five identified geographical zones, without consideration of population density or bandwidth capacity, thereby immensely complicating their already burdensome task (Messere, 1996).

The Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal

In August, 2010, the “Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal” for a legislative approach to net neutrality was published. In many corners of Internet, reaction to the release was swift and condemnatory:

Google, a company that I’ve long admired and currently hold thousands of dollars of stock in, just “went evil.” (Green, 2010)

The whole approach just seemed so at odds with Google’s past fiery statements on the issue. Maybe we misread the search engine giant’s previous statements, we worried. Until this month, wasn’t Google one of net neutrality’s biggest advocates? (Lasar, 2010)

The vehemence of the reactions was in no small part amplified by the perception that Google had reversed its previous public position on net neutrality. Yet, after reviewing the legislative history, it was difficult not to hear the recent uproar echoes of past communication regulation.

The first two sections of the proposal directly address the issue of net neutrality:

Consumer Protections: A broadband Internet access service provider would be prohibited from preventing users of its broadband Internet access service from–

sending and receiving lawful content of their choice;

running lawful applications and using lawful services of their choice; and

connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service.

Non-Discrimination Requirement: In providing broadband Internet access service, a provider would be prohibited from engaging in undue discrimination against any lawful Internet content, application, or service in a manner that causes meaningful harm to competition or to users. Prioritization of Internet traffic would be presumed inconsistent with the non-discrimination standard, but the presumption could be rebutted.

Google’s stand in its “A Note to Google Users on Net Neutrality” of 2006 and in other statements strongly indicated a no-compromise stance. But the proposal of 2010, they have left loopholes. These two sections each fail the “Bittorrent Test.” First, the phrase “harm the network or service” is not defined, allowing an interpretation that would allow Bittorrent users’ computers to be blocked. More baldly put is the statement “Prioritization of Internet traffic would be presumed inconsistent with the non-discrimination standard, but the presumption could be rebutted.” In other words, net neutrality must be enforced unless the service provider argues that it shouldn’t.

While sections one and two offer net neutrality loopholes, section four would expressly allow for the throttling of traffic for a variety of reasons:

Network Management: Broadband Internet access service providers are permitted to engage in reasonable network management. Reasonable network management includes any technically sound practice: to reduce or mitigate the effects of congestion on its network; to ensure network security or integrity; to address traffic that is unwanted by or harmful to users, the provider’s network, or the Internet; to ensure service quality to a subscriber; to provide services or capabilities consistent with a consumer’s choices; that is consistent with the technical requirements, standards, or best practices adopted by an independent, widely-recognized Internet community governance initiative or standard-setting organization; to prioritize general classes or types of Internet traffic, based on latency; or otherwise to manage the daily operation of its network.

It seems that that Comcast’s disruption of legal Bittorrent traffic based solely on the protocol being used and no other criteria would be allowed under this section.

Section three mandates transparency, requiring broadband providers “…to disclose accurate and relevant information in plain language about the characteristics and capabilities of their offerings, their broadband network management, and other practices necessary for consumers and other users to make informed choices.” While on the face of it, this would encourage competition, with current wired connections the primary means of delivering broadband services, most people in America would continue to have very limited choice of providers.

Probably the part of the proposal that has received the most attention is section five, entitled “Additional Online Services”:

…A provider that offers a broadband Internet access service … could offer any other additional or differentiated services. Such other services would have to be distinguishable in scope and purpose from broadband Internet access service, but could make use of or access Internet content, applications or services and could include traffic prioritization. The FCC would publish an annual report on the effect of these additional services, and immediately report if it finds at any time that these services threaten the meaningful availability of broadband Internet access services or have been devised or promoted in a manner designed to evade these consumer protections.

In essence, what is being described is a sort of Internet take on the FRC’s broadcast spectrum reallocation of 1928. Verizon and Google are suggesting that there could be parallel Internets – the existing one which is open to all and which would observe net neutrality, and others which would be used by paying customers looking for guarantees that their traffic would not be hindered by the unpredictable activity of the open Internet.

A companion press release from the proposal partners described some compelling uses for these parallel Internets, which emphasize the potential public good they might provide:

…broadband providers can work with other players to develop new services. It is too soon to predict how these new services will develop, but examples might include health care monitoring, the smart grid, advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options (Davidson & Tauke, 2010).

There can be little doubt that the services described would benefit from reliability and security that simply can’t be found on the Internet we have today. Putting health care monitoring or control of the nation’s electrical grid into an environment where denial of service attacks are commonplace, and hackers break into servers for numerous reasons is a frightening thought. Not allowing health care monitoring or control of the nation’s electrical grid to enjoy the benefits of being managed across the Internet is in some ways an equally frightening thought. Are we to take a Luddite approach to advanced services for the common good in the name of security?

But on the flip side of this picture are questions about access to a level playing field. In 1928 it was just such a multi-tiered approach to radio that gave 37 out of the 40 nationwide “clear channels” to commercial network affiliates, squeezed nearly 600 other stations into 50 “non-clear channels,” and relegated the 30,000 amateur operators to a completely different part of the spectrum where they couldn’t interfere with the commercial broadcasts.

In section six, the proposal also controversially calls for exempting wireless networks from almost all of the other provisions being suggested:

Because of the unique technical and operational characteristics of wireless networks, and the competitive and still-developing nature of wireless broadband services, only the transparency principle would apply to wireless broadband at this time. The U.S. Government Accountability Office would report to Congress annually on the continued development and robustness of wireless broadband Internet access services.

While the description of wireless networks as differing technically from wired networks is certainly accurate, the proposal for yet another tier of service contributed to the generally negative response.

The final three sections layout proposals for the scope of the FCC’s regulatory authority. The agency would be limited to oversight only over broadband service itself “but would not have any authority over Internet software applications, content or services.” Rather than taking preemptive action, the FCC would only be allowed to act on a case-by-case basis in response to complaints. Internet broadband service would be defined as a form of interstate commerce, removing it from the maze of local regulations it is currently subject to.

These last sections go a long ways towards addressing the broader free speech fears of groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which labelled the ideas “good” (Cohn, 2010).

A Full Cycle

When viewed in the context of communications legislation history, adoption of the Verizon-Google proposal would seem reminiscent of the early days of radio regulation: A mass of vocal but disorganized users of the medium resist regulation on principle. Meanwhile demonstrable degradation of service through overuse reduces the amount of public good the medium can offer. Business interests organize and make a case for compromise regulations that strongly favor their positions.

The public’s voice in the net neutrality debate is fractured by an anarchic situation in which behaviors which are unlawful, destructive to the public good of the medium, or both, represent the far edges of the argument. While organizations like the EFF try to rise above the chaos, they often can seem a part of the din themselves. If there proves to be no better way forward than the “many Internets” proposed by Verizon and Google, we would do well to seriously consider the potential impacts of such an approach.

What the Verizon-Google proposal would do is separate the “hobbyist” traffic from the commercial traffic, in a manner strikingly analogous to the broadcast reallocation of 1928. It should be remembered that this approach also relegated educational and public interest broadcasting to a relative backwater of the spectrum. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was an attempt to remedy this, but while it has produced a public good, the value of that good lags far behind comparable solutions in other countries that took a more proactive approach to the educational and public interest potentials of broadcast.

On the Internet a purely free market “pay-to-play” approach to prioritized network access likely would ensure that the producers of valuable, but less profitable, content would struggle to compete on delivery speeds and that their product would suffer. As the United States carries on a parallel debate about the state of our educational system in comparison to the rest of the world, it would serve us well to consider the uses of media in producing an informed, innovative and productive population.

In the end it may be that the only compromise for a public that seems unclear about whether it wants the Internet to be a utility or a service is to give them both: A utility that offers the open access we generally enjoy now, but is tightly regulated to ensure performance standards and free speech protections, plus parallel “priority” services including subsidized educational and public interest services. While similar in some respects to the Verizon-Google proposal, this approach would let the service providers pursue maximum profitability in some areas, in return for regulating profits in others.

References

American Telephone & Telegraph. (2010). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved (2010, August 15) from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Telephone_%26_Telegraph

Cohn, C. (2010, August 10). A Review of verizon and google’s net neutrality proposal. EFF Deeplinks Blog, Retrieved from http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/google-verizon-netneutrality

Common Cause. (n.d.). Net neutrality. Retrieved from http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=4773657

Davidson, A., & Tauke, T. (2010, August 9). A Joint policy proposal for an open internet. Google Public Policy Blog, Retrieved from http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/joint-policy-proposal-for-open-internet.html

Goodman, M. (n.d.). The Radio act of 1927 as a product of progressivism. Media History Monographs, 2(2), Retrieved from http://www.scripps.ohiou.edu/mediahistory/mhmjour2-2.htm

Green, A. (2010, August 9). Google goes “evil”. Huffington Post, Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-green/breaking-google-goes-evil_b_676021.html

Hansell, S. (2008, August 2). F.c.c. vote sets precedent on unfettered web usage. The New York Times, Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/technology/02fcc.html?ref=federal_communications_commission

Lasar, M. (2010). A Paper trail of betrayal: google’s net neutrality collapse. Ars Technica, Retrieved from http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/08/a-paper-trail-of-betrayal-googles-net-neutrality-collapse.ars

McChesney, R. W. (1992). Media and Democracy: The Emergence of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, 1927-1935. OAH Magazine of History. 6 (4), 34-40. Retrieved from http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/communication/mcchesney.html

McSherry, C. (2009, October 1). Is Net neutrality a fcc trojan horse?. EFF Deeplinks Blog, Retrieved from http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/net-neutrality-fcc-perils-and-promise

Messere, F. (1996, March 15). Analysis of The Telecommunications Act of 1996. Retrieved from http://www.oswego.edu/~messere/telcom1.html

Messere, F. (1997, August 22). Welcome to the federal radio commission archives. Retrieved from http://www.oswego.edu/~messere/FRCpage.html

Messere, F. (1996). The Davis Amendment – overview from the dictionary of American radio. Retrieved from http://www.oswego.edu/~messere/FRCdavis2.html

Schmidt, E. (2006). A Note to google users on net neutrality. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality_letter.html

Singel, R. (2007, November 14). Comcast sued over bittorrent blocking – updated. Wired.com, Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/comcast-sued-ov/

Slotten, H. R. (2000). Radio and television regulation: Broadcast technology in the United States, 1920-1960. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Verizon-google legislative framework proposal. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/verizon_google_legislative_framework_proposal_081010.pdf&pli=1

White, T.H. (n.d.). Radio at Sea (1891-1922). United states early radio history. Retrieved from http://earlyradiohistory.us/sec005.htm

Wyatt, E. (2010, April 6). U.S. court curbs F.C.C. authority on web traffic. The New York Times, Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/technology/07net.html

Copyright: A Growing Chasm Between Law and Culture

2010-09-20T21:06:37Z

COM 558: U.S. Digital Media Law and Policy
Instructor: Kraig Baker
Brook Ellingwood
July 9, 2010

General Position Statement

It is time to revisit the foundation of United States copyright law, simplify it to make it more comprehensible and reconcile conflicting philosophies concerning ownership of intellectual property and how the benefits of ownership accrue to individuals, business interests and society.

Copyright law in the United States is built on the comprehensive Copyright Act of 1976. Since the enactment of that legislation it has been amended by a patchwork of statutes passed in reaction to specific situations, often benefiting parties that have lobbied for the changes for their own purposes. The trend in copyright legislation is to strengthening and lengthening the terms of intellectual property ownership.

Running counter to the trend in copyright law is a vibrant grassroots embrace of sharing intellectual property, backed by organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and Free Software Foundation. This philosophy provides the basis for the licenses used in open source software and much user-generated media published on the Internet.Well-known examples of these licenses include the GNU General Public License often used for software, and the various Creative Commons Licenses often used for media content.

Copyright law as it now stands is premised on the greatest benefit to society deriving from profit generated by fees paid to copyright holders. Broadly speaking, proponents of less-restrictive approaches to copyright believe greater societal benefits arise from the value of intellectual property as prior work on which new derivative works advancing the state of the art may be based. Both positions may defensible, but as they move farther from each other they are opening a chasm between law and common practice. Legislators can no longer choose one side over another, but must do the hard work of forging a compromise acknowledging both forms of societal benefit.

The Law Today

The Copyright Act of 1976 was sweeping legislation on which all existing United States copyright law is based, superseding the Copyright Act of 1909. Since that time, several additional acts have modified the Act of 1976. Each act has had the effect of strengthening copyright protections, with some key changes summarized in the following table:

Table 1: Some Effects of Copyright Legislation since 1976 (Sources: Copyright Act of 1976, 2010; Copyright Term Extension Act, 2010; Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 2010; Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, 2010)

The table shows that the Copyright Act of 1976 shares one thing in common in the Act of 1909: Both were written at times when major new media forms were emergent, yet failed to provide a framework sufficient to address the changes in behavior relating to copyright brought about by those media. Both acts were followed by a series of statutes attempting to keep up with these changes.

During a period generally marked by decreased regulation of businesses, copyright regulation significantly increased, almost always favoring the copyright holder. Counterintuitively, considering the dominant political climate of the era, many of the changes enacted brought the United States into closer alignment with international law. In 1988 the country became a party to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which has its roots in French common law rather than the Anglo-Saxon underpinnings of most American laws, and many of the changes instituted in the Copyright Act of 1976 were steps towards eventually signing the Berne Convention.

The trend towards specificity in the statutes shows that even with Act of 1976 partly an acknowledgment of technological advances since 1906, new methods of creating, distributing and copying intellectual property continue to emerge. A key change was replacing the word defining the state a work must achieve to be copyrighted. The Act of 1909 used “published,” while the Act of 196 used “fixed.”

Just as the Act of 1909 was ill-prepared to handle the new media forms that would define the 20th Century, the Act of 1976 was drafted without foresight of the digital media revolution that was shortly to come. The result has been ad hoc, overly specific, legislation that responds to perceived threats to copyright ownership rather than articulating a deeply-considered philosophy on the role of intellectual property in modern American commerce and society. Since 1976, the categories of work considered to be “fixed” in Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code have been:

literary works
musical works, including any accompanying words
dramatic works, including any accompanying music
pantomimes and choreographic works
pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works
motion pictures and other audiovisual works
sound recordings

An eighth category was added in 1990:

architectural works

(“Copyright Act of 1976,” 2010; “Subject matter of copyright: In general,” 2009)

Extending the law by explicitly making it ever more granular and specific, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 added a chapter to title 17 covering “Protection of Original Designs.” But “original design” only applies to “useful articles” and the only useful article defined “is a vessel hull or deck, including a plug or mold, which in normal use has an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information.”

In other words, if you design a boat hull that has a unique design, you will receive copyright protection for it without needing to do anything. Understanding why innovative boat hull designs receive this benefit while other forms of industrial design have to explicitly seek protection through the patent process is beyond the research scope, and possibly comprehension, of this paper and its author. (“Protection of Original Designs,” 2009)

The Left Hand Knows What the Right Hand Is Doing

Prior to the Copyright Act of 1976, it was easy to share intellectual property with the world. All that was necessary to make a work public domain was to not affix a copyright notice to a published work. After 1976, that was no longer true: The act of “fixing” a work that fit a defined category now carried with it an implicit claim of copyright. This provided much greater protection to content creators, but had a chilling effect on derivative works: With works implicitly copyrighted upon being “fixed,” it was no longer possible to know the intent of the creator with regards to ownership. It became possible to imagine a scenario in which intellectual property could be released with the intent of sharing, then after derivative works gave it great value, the creator could reassert his or her copyright and make claims against the profits of the derivative works.

The same year the Act of 1976 became law, the youthful co-founder of a rising company then called “Micro-Soft” wrote “An Open Letter to Hobbyist” which was published in a number of computing magazines. In the letter Bill Gates estimated that less that 10% of the users of Altair BASIC, his company’s first commercial product, had paid for the software. He laid out an argument that unlicensed copying of software would “prevent good software from being written.” (Gates & Usher (ed), 2009)

If Gates and Microsoft had not gone on to become household names, his open letter might well be forgotten. Instead it is often cited as a waypoint on the transition from most software being freely modifiable code available at no cost, to being proprietary code that had to be purchased. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Open Content Alliance and the Internet Archive website, goes as far as to say the shift to proprietary software was a direct consequence of the Act of 1976. In 1980, computer programs were explicitly added to the list of works eligible for copyright protection. (Cringely, 2005)

By 1983, Kahle’s MIT colleague Richard Stallman decided to actively promote the development of free software, and soon he had launched a project to write good, free software in the form of an operating system called “GNU.” Stallman also founded the Free Software Foundation and popularized the idea of “copyleft” or using copyright law to grant users the same rights to software that standard application of copyright law reserved for the author or assignee. (Free Software Foundation, Inc., 2009)

In the years since, this philosophy has branched into other well-known approaches to distributing intellectual property without reserving rights, most notably through open-source software licenses, or the Creative Commons licenses frequently used for media.

What all these copyleft-derived approaches have in common is a fundamental questioning of the value of copyright. Rather than economic value, these licenses concern themselves with societal value. Software and media that come with no strings attached, Stallman and others argue, benefits us all more than software that can’t be modified and which lines the pockets only of the original authors or assignees.

When Are Violations not Violations?

Illustration 1: The image used on TechCrunch.com While in general it might be good policy to align national laws with widely accepted international agreements, it seems that applying some of the core principles of the Berne Convention to common practice in the United States, especially in the era of digital media, can create new areas of confusion. Berne-derived aspects of American copyright law can unnecessarily create jeopardy when they collide with assumptions and behaviors common on the Internet and in broader American popular culture.

A Minor Tragedy of the Creative Commons

Jeffrey Zeldman is mad at TechCrunch. The star Web designer, promoter of standards, author and founder of the influential “A List Apart” Web site announced his annoyance with the online technology news and review site the way so many announcements are made in 2010 – via Twitter, using the form of shorthand popular on the microblogging service:

Boo! TechCrunch steals illo from A List Apart. http://j.mp/cTiy9n Compare: http://j.mp/d8GEWn Hat tip: @Lascurettes #dontripmeoffbro

(Zeldman, 2010)

Decoded, what Zeldman was saying was that another person, using the handle “Lascurettes” had alerted him to the fact that an illustration copyrighted to A List Apart had appeared in a modified form accompanying a TechCrunch article. It appeared TechCrunch had copied the graphic and had a designer modify it. But the story turned out to be more complex. Less than an hour later Zeldman followed up with this tweet:

Illustration 2: The original image from alistapart.com A List Apart fan parodies copyrighted ALA design, uploads to Flickr with creative commons license. TechCrunch uses it w/o credit.

(Zeldman, 2010)

And then, a minute later, he provided a succinct, if impolitely worded, opinion on the root cause of the situation that had offended him:

This kind of copyright clusterfuck is precisely why I dislike (and don’t use) Creative Commons licenses.

(Zeldman, 2010)

Illustration 2: The original image from alistapart.com

There are multiple ways to look at this particular issue. One is to examine how Flickr allows users to upload media under a Creative Commons license when Flickr isn’t screening the images for rights issues at all. While Flickr’s Terms of Service certainly are written to indemnify it from any damages that might arise, in essence it is passing on the risk to anyone who assumes the license is valid. Zeldman’s initial anger at TechCrunch was a trivial response compared to what a legal department at a major corporation might do in a similar situation.
On the other hand it might actually be found that the derivative work, likely protected under fair use, was different enough to be assigned a new license. Perhaps not likely, but in a more complex example of this situation it could be conceivable.

The fan who modified the image to begin with may have drawn wrong conclusions from Zeldman’s role as an advocate for using the open standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. Advocacy of open standards is often accompanied by advocacy of software that implements those standards well, which tends to be open source in nature, implying an advocacy of open source as a concept. In fact, many standards advocates explicitly support open source and Creative Commons licenses.

Even on a site that features a copyright statement on every page, as on A List Apart, users accustomed to the easy give and take of digital media and copyleft-derived sharing often make assumptions. Assuming belief B always accompanies belief A may not be wise, but it is an easy trap to fall into.

Even when users knows rights to something they want are held by a party with no interest in sharing, the assumption is that it’s possible to violate copyright as long as you fly under the radar. No company can manage to pursue every infringement, and most go unheeded. Instead, the pressure is put on lawmakers to keep adding complexity and granularity to the copyright laws in a reactionary cycle that adds stresses to the relationship between the creators and consumers of culture.

Illustration 1: The image used on TechCrunch.com

The Force is With You Until it Isn’t

Copyright laws set up potential conflicts when the owners of copyright decline to defend their work. This is a common situation with “fan fiction” in which amateurs creative works derived from the professional work they admire. The original Star Trek series spawned a vibrant fan fiction community, and today the genre produces work derived from franchises as notable as Harry Potter and Star Wars.

There is little doubt that these fans are violating copyright, but for their own reasons the copyright owners have chosen not to stop them from creating their derivative works – for the most part. While Star Trek and Harry Potter fan fiction has thus far been “anything goes,” the understood boundary for Star Wars fans is not to add explicit sex into the galaxy far, far away or risk being contacted by a lawyer.

These derivative works exist in a nebulous limbo, a place where the owners allow them to be created, but in truth have the power to make life very miserable without a moment’s notice for the fans who create them. There’s no reason to assume this will happen, but there’s no guarantee it won’t.

In the late 1990′s Paramount sent “cease and desist” letters to operators of Star Trek fan sites who had borrowed the look of some of the show’s set elements for their site navigation buttons. When it’s okay to post tales featuring Star Trek characters in homoerotic orgies to a website, as long as the website doesn’t look like the starship Enterprise ‘s transporter room control panel, it’s likely there is confusion on all sides.

The proponents of free licenses couch their argument in cultural terms. They believe that a greater benefit accrues to society when intellectual property is available to be adapted by users than when it is fixed and immutable except at the whim of copyright holder who charge for accessing it.

University of Southern California professor Henry Jenkins also sees fan fiction in cultural terms. He argues that fan fiction arises from a fundamental human need to tell stories, and that these stories derive from “a fundamental human need to tell stories, part of a ‘shared cultural tradition’ dating from Homer onward. According to Jenkins, the works on which fan fiction is based serve for fan communities the same purpose as myths and folklore served in earlier times, as a source of shared references having instant recognition in that community and a source of raw material for fans’ own creative works.” (Westcott, 2008)

The comparison of modern fan fiction with the ancient stories of Homer extends to their status under copyright law.

However historically unlikely, for the sake of argument let us assume there was a person named Homer who, before writing reached Ancient Greece, created from whole cloth stories about the Trojan War and the adventures of its heroes. Now consider how modern United States copyright statutes would apply to this Homer and his world. As “unfixed” creative works, the Homeric poems are not protected by copyright. Without any notation systems, stories, dances, musical works and the like can not be copyrighted because, unlike they other objects cited, they can not be “fixed.” Yet in Homer’s world our current notion of copyright implicitly attaches itself to things like paintings, sculptures, buildings and boat hulls.

Would the vibrancy of Ancient Greece, to which Western societies owe so much, have been lessened if the Copyright Act of 1976 was instead the Copyright Act of 900 B.C.E.? Jenkins would argue so.

The works of the creators of fan fiction – Jenkins’ modern-day Homers – are also not copyrighted. They may be “fixed” but as unauthorized derivative works not covered by the fair use defense, they exist outside the realm of copyright law, surviving by the good graces of the owners of the works from which they derive. But is this adequate protection if these works truly fill the same role for 21 st Century America that the Iliad did for Ancient Greece?

Real estate law has a principle of “adverse possession” in which the owner of a property may forfeit ownership of part or all of it by allowing others to use it. Likewise, in trademark law, an undefended trademark may become a part of the vernacular and no longer be protected. This was how Bayer’s trademarked “Aspirin” name entered the language as the lowercased “aspirin.” Copyright law has no similar principle – failure to defend Star Wars against unauthorized derivative works doesn’t mean LucasFilm is in any danger of losing control of the franchise, should it change its mind and crack down on derivative use.

Where do We go From Here?

The inexorable trend in copyright law is towards greater and greater protections for those who stand to financially benefit from copyright ownership. In the United States maximum copyright term has in stages risen from less than 30 years in the late 18 th Century to well more than 100 years today.

In recent years, licenses renouncing copyright protection have become increasingly common, based in a rejection of the trend towards stronger copyrights. The impact of work available under free licenses is far from trivial and in many areas it has competed very effectively with traditionally copyrighted works. The adoption of open source software instead of proprietary versions and the declining financial return of stock photography are just two examples of areas where the shift is away from copyrighted works.

The traditional statutory response to threats against the financial value of copyright protection has been to increase the strength of the protection. But it may be that we have reached diminishing returns. Perhaps the open license movement is less a response to the changing methods of authoring and distribution enabled by digital platforms, and more a response to the perceived impact on society of copyright terms that go beyond complete human lifespans and are applied by default, allowing copyright holders who had not been enforcing their copyright to change their minds decades in the future and squelch derivative works that had previously thrived as the copyright owner turned a blind eye.

A new generation has come of age acting with expectations borne from open licensing, even when dealing with works that copyright owners have every intention of protecting. Suits seeking massive damages from college students sharing music or movies have done more to make large media companies look draconian than dissuade illegal file sharing.

There is a chasm opening in approaches to copyright, separating individuals from corporations and becoming a pit of peril capable of swallowing actors on both sides. The United States Congress should act to reevaluate current copyright law in the light of what is best for society, and then take the lead in proposing changes to the Berne Convention that will lead to a better, more productive, approach to copyright internationally.

Among the changes worth considering are:

Decreasing the length of maximum copyright terms to something under the normal human lifespan so that derivative works may be created by succeeding generations while the original work still has value to society
Providing a short statute of limitations for implicit copyright, beyond which the maintenance of copyright requires explicit notation
Instituting an “adverse possession” principle, through which undefended copyright can become public domain

Regardless of specific changes that might be enacted, it is clear that copyright law is already deep into the sort of irrelevance to new media forms that the Act of 1976 hoped to address. A rethinking of Title 17 to provide guidance based less on regulating specific media forms and more on philosophical coherence applicable to media forms not yet envisioned would benefit parties on all sides.

References

NOTE: Much of the material on the history of United States copyright is based on readings from Wikipedia. While I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the information, fact-checking against more authoritative sources before citing it is recommended.

Copyright Act of 1976. (2010, April 8). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. (2010, July 13) from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Copyright_Act_of_1976&oldid=354807201

Copyright Term Extension Act. (2010, June 23). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved (2010, July 13) from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Copyright_Term_Extension_Act&oldid=369643562

Cringely, R. X. (Producer). (2005). Brewster Kahle: internet archive founder. [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/#4

Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (2010, June 30). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved (2010, July 13) from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act&oldid=370920990

Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. (2010, March 11). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved (2010, July 13) from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Family_Entertainment_and_Copyright_Act&oldid=349271338

Free Software Foundation, Inc. (2009, June 29). Overview of the gnu system. Retrieved from http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html

Gates, B, & Usher, S. (ed). (2009, October 8). Most of You steal your software. Retrieved from http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-software.html

Protection of Original Designs. (2009). Copyright law of the United States of America and related laws contained in title 17 of the United States code. Retrieved (2010, July 12) from http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap13.html#1301

Software copyright. (2010, June 19). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved (2010, July 13) from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software_copyright&oldid=368947074

Statement of Marybeth Peters The Register of Copyrights before the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property Committee on the Judiciary. (1997). Vessel hull design protection act of 1997. Retrieved (2010, July 12) from http://www.copyright.gov/docs/hr2696.html

Subject matter of copyright: In general. (2009). Copyright law of the United States of America and related laws contained in title 17 of the United States code. Retrieved (2010, July 12) from http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#102

Westcott, G. (2008, July 1). Friction over fan fiction. Literary Review of Canada, Retrieved from http://reviewcanada.ca/essays/2008/07/01/friction-over-fan-fiction/

Zeldman, J. (2010, June 30). Twitter / jeffrey zeldman: boo! techcrunch steals ill …. Retrieved from http://twitter.com/zeldman/status/17439652561

Zeldman, J. (2010, June 30). Twitter / jeffrey zeldman: A List Apart fan parodies …. Retrieved from http://twitter.com/zeldman/statuses/17442102973

Zeldman, J. (2010, June 30). Twitter / jeffrey zeldman: This kind of copyright clu …. Retrieved from http://twitter.com/zeldman/status/17442197256

KCTS Television: Public Media, New Media

2010-09-20T20:33:37Z

Case by Brook Ellingwood
Prepared for the University of Washington’s Master of Communication, Digital Media Program – COM 597, Transforming Business Strategies for the Digital Age: Cases from Media & Culture Industries
Instructor, Dr. Gina Neff
June 7, 2010

During the spring of 2010 managers at KCTS Television were very busy. Budget plans for the Seattle-based public television station’s next fiscal year were due. Simultaneously an outside consulting firm was working with executive management to craft a new five-year strategic plan, complicating the task of predicting financial and staffing needs.

One thing known with certainty was the station was embracing a broader mission. Under a new Chief Executive Officer, KCTS was expanding its focus after years of retrenchment and stabilization, following an earlier period of overreach and lax financial oversight.

The Three-Legged Stool

When describing the station’s direction to potential partners, executives used the phrase “on air, online and in the community” to illustrate a “three-legged stool” approach to content delivery. It was envisioned that each content area in the strategic plan would get thorough treatment on television, on the Internet and through direct engagement in the form of community events and educational materials supplied to schools.

Discussion had been ongoing for months with the staff of Quest, a regional science education program developed at San Francisco’s public broadcasting station, KQED. The Quest team had pioneered an innovative approach to developing content for all three platforms within the public media system. In the Quest model, interactive storytelling tools not only gave regional science partners a powerful media presence, but also had become central to the workflow of story development.

As KCTS planned for fiscal year 2011, and the major station content initiatives were being defined, core team members from the Quest project came to Seattle to demonstrate their work – and work methods – to KCTS staff. The two-day visit included an all-staff lunch presentation in KCTS’ main studio and smaller breakout sessions geared to to different KCTS departments and focused on specific aspects of Quest.

The Quest visit fed into an ongoing discussion of how to change KCTS’ organizational structure to meet new challenges. The departments corresponding to the three legs – Production, Interactive and Outreach – struggled with coordination issues, siloed efforts and resourcing disparities. Without even enough hours in the day to meet immediate needs, thinking about long-term challenges was a luxury few felt they could afford.

How could KCTS overcome financial constraints and organizational history to become a multi-platform public media storyteller? Could aspects of KQED’s Quest model be applied to KCTS’ own unique circumstances?

Public Media in America

The educational potential of broadcast media was recognized in the United States as early as 1912, when Iowa State College experimented with sending Morse code wirelessly. In 1925 The Association of College and University Broadcasting Stations formed, becoming a forerunner of the modern Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio (“History of public,” 2006). But just as educational broadcasting was establishing itself as a benefit to the public, it was overtaken by events outside its control.

In 1927 the federal government created the Federal Radio Commission to regulate the licensing and use of the broadcast spectrum. In its first annual report, the commission itself acknowledged uncertainty about what it was being asked to do.

The FRC’s confusion about what, exactly, it had authority over stemmed directly from the circumstances of its formation:

…the Radio Act of 1927 was emergency legislation, passed to bring order to the airwaves after a Federal judge had ruled in 1926 that the Department of Commerce’s licensing of stations was unconstitutional, thus leading to a period of chaos in the ether, as many stations disrespected the existing frequency and power assignments. (McChesney, 1992)

While the FRC concerned itself largely with regulating the technical aspects of radio and insuring stations had clear channels to broadcast on, even this level of regulation raised questions. In America, the radio spectrum is public property that may be licensed for use by enterprises, whether public, private, non-profit or governmental in nature.

On the surface, this bears some similarity to other public property management practices, such as licensing logging rights in national forests. But regulating a communication medium raises great constitutional issues. Any approach to the problem might be found an abridgment of the free speech rights of those not granted licenses.

In other countries, the problem was approached differently: 1927 also saw the granting of a Royal Charter to the British Broadcasting Corporation, giving the company a monopoly in the United Kingdom. In return the charter mandated the BBC operate in the public interest as determined by government-appointed trustees. (BBC, n.d.) American unease with mixing government, enterprise and individual rights precluded any similar solutions.

The following year the FRC presented its reallocation scheme, assigning most existing license holders new frequencies and power levels. 40 “clear” channels were created that would only be assigned to one station anywhere in the country. 37 of those channels were assigned to stations affiliated with either the NBC or CBS networks, while an additional 600 stations had to share 50 other channels by limiting the power of their signals to local broadcast. The dominance of national commercial broadcasting over either local or public broadcasting was established as government policy. Over the next few years, relegated to low-power channels, the number of non-profit broadcasters dropped from over 100 to less than a third of that number (McChesney, 1992).

With commercial “top down” networks favored by the government, educational broadcasters developed organic networks to share resources. Over time these grew to become the predecessors of the national public broadcast organizations that were well-established in 2010. The unique “member up” shape of public broadcasting networks in America is a direct result of the Radio Act of 1927.

In 1952 the FRC’s successor organization, the Federal Communications Commission, allocated 242 channels across the country for non-commercial educational television. In the wake of this allotment, educational TV stations, often run by colleges, were founded across the country. Ten years later, President Kennedy signed the Educational Television Facilities Act, which was the first significant federal funding for public television.

The 100th license for an educational television station was granted in 1964. In 1967, the Carnegie Corporation released a report on educational television that proposed Congress fund the creation of a “Corporation for Public Television” (Carnegie Commission…, 1999). Congress added radio to the mix and before year’s end President Johnson signed a bill authorizing the creation of the “Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” It was as a result of the Carnegie report and subsequent legislation that the word “public” as a mission description largely replaced the traditional, but more limiting, “educational” (Carnegie Commission…).

With CPB providing federal funds, public broadcasting advocates quickly organized to take advantage of the opportunity. In 1969 the Public Broadcast Service (PBS) incorporated to take over the network functions of the older National Educational Television, and shortly before the end of the year Sesame Street debuted, demonstrating the power and possibility of a nationally organized approach to public broadcasting. Early in 1970, National Public Radio (NPR) incorporated to connect non-profit radio stations into a countrywide network.

Even with federal funding, the fledgling notion of public broadcasting was not assured success. In 1971, the Nixon administration challenged the emerging power of PBS and the following year refused to authorize a two-year funding bill for CPB, forcing Congress to redraft the bill to only fund a single year. Ever since, funding for CPB was a disputed issue subject to steady calls from strict free market advocates to defund it.

Criticism of public broadcasting often was rooted in perceptions of bias in its coverage, and accusations of CPB promoting liberal political views often accompanied attempts to shut it down. In the aftermath of the 1994 elections, conservative members of congress actively sought to eliminate the CPB budget, citing as evidence of a hidden liberal agenda such examples as an interview with then-New York Governor Mario Cuomo for the multi-part documentary “Baseball” (“Gingrich wants,” 1994). This effort failed as did a 2005 recommendation by Congress’ House Appropriations Committee to cut $100 million from a $400 million CPB appropriation that had been approved two years previously (“House votes,” 2005).

Despite the focus paid to government funding, the primary source of money for PBS was not CPB or other direct federal sources, but dues paid by member stations such as KCTS (see Exhibit 1 for details on PBS’ funding sources). Some money from CPB was granted directly to stations, indirectly contributing to PBS dues, but most revenues at the station level came from individual donations (see Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2 for details on KCTS’ funding sources). The importance of the money from CPB was due more to its predictability than its amount.

The role of public broadcast media in the United States was seen in one white paper as a natural extension of the civic investment in education represented by the expanded charter of so-called “land grant” universities at the height of the American Civil War (Hartford Gunn Institute, 1995). Unlike the universities, which today are widely accepted as important institutions in civil society, debate continues about the appropriateness of the government funding public media at all.

Clouding the topic was the lack of a single defining definition of the mission of public media in America. In a country where societal value was often measured in relation to market value, non-profit media organizations relying on patronage from individuals, businesses and government struggled to find other measures of success. Beleaguered by criticism from all sides, the major public media organizations were mindful of perception as they tried to successfully guide their visions of public media through a cacophony of competing voices from inside and outside the public media world.

Outside of the United States, “top down” networks operating under a requirement of public good had evolved in a different direction. The royal charter granted to the British Broadcasting Corporation produced the largest, and arguably the most trusted, media organization in the world. Speaking with a single confident voice, the BBC was crystal clear about both its mission (“To enrich people’s lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain.”) and vision (“To be the most creative organisation in the world.”) (BBC, n.d.).

KCTS History

KCTS Television was established in 1954 by the University of Washington’s Board of Regents. It was the eighth non-commercial TV station founded in the United States. As a measure of the importance that educational broadcasting was seen to have, Dorothy Stimson Bullitt the owner of Seattle’s KING broadcasting and a prominent community leader donated KING’s used cameras and other equipment to the news station following a KING upgrade, despite the fact the stations would compete for market share.

The station became a well-regarded and well-supported community asset through the 1960′s, allowing it to increase its broadcast range and stay current with technological developments in television. KCTS joined PBS on its founding in 1969.

In 1972, KCTS adopted the membership funding model and attendant on-air pledge drives. Over the next decade, with more and more of its funding coming from this independent source, the station moved away from its relationship with the University of Washington. Eventually in the mid-1980′s KCTS built its current building with donated funds and ended its connection with UW entirely (UW, 1997).

The station was on a roll, and accrued budget surpluses each of the nine years between 1986 and 1995. Seven of those years, the surplus was over a million dollars. Promoted itself as a leader in technology as well as content, in 1994 KCTS became the first television station in the country to invest in High Definition Television (HDTV) equipment.

Under the leadership of CEO Burnill Clark, KCTS looked to become a national player, creating shows to enter the PBS network the way major market stations such as Boston’s WGBH or New York’s WNET did. This ambition led to the station’s partnering with Disney on producing the show “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”

While “Bill Nye” was a popular success, it was not a financial success for KCTS as the show’s producer. In no small part, this was due to the terms of the partnership which gave Disney the profits from ancillary product sales, including DVDs purchased for classroom use by science teachers who found educational value in the show. A budget shortfall in 1996 became larger the following year, and 1998 KCTS finished 1998 more than $1.5 million in the red.

In 1999, KCTS used a $1 million grant from the Commerce Department to acquire a digital transmitter. While this contributed to the year’s surplus of just under $200,000 it also meant the station had assumed the costs of powering and maintaining both analog and digital equipment. This additional expenditure continued for ten years until the final, FCC-ordered, cutover to digital television in summer 2009.

Budget deficits returned in 2000, and in 2001 KCTS was almost $3.5 million in the red. That year Anderson Consulting performed a free audit of the station’s budget, ultimately reporting “a lack of reality in the budgeting process.” That year station employees openly rebelled, sending a letter to the KCTS board complaining about Clark’s management.

The frustrations weren’t just acted on internally. After peaking at 153,212 in 1997, membership dropped to 129,094 in 2002, exacerbating the financial problems. In 2002, a year with an almost $2.5 million deficit, a consultant advised Clark to resign for the good of the station. Clark eventually retired from KCTS in 2003 (“The changing fortunes…”, 2003).

Clark’s replacement as CEO was Bill Mohler, the retired president of Bates Technical College in Tacoma, which holds the license for KBTC, KCTS’ public television competition in the Puget Sound region. Mohler instituted a “back to basics” policy at the station, focused on budget stabilization and community programming.

While the “Bill Nye” show had included interactive and educational materials, preceding Quest in extending the public broadcast mission, the new management cut back in these areas, effectively relegating the KCTS website to a limbo period as static “brochureware.” An eventual site redesign, delivered in 2008 by a California-based vendor that never actually visited the KCTS offices, went well over budget and past deadline. Despite the investment, the site produced was still organized largely to provide information about the station and poorly designed for interactive storytelling, reflecting a lack of clarity at the organization about website mission and ownership.

Mohler left in 2008 after the station achieved financial stability and a nationwide search brought in new CEO Maurice “Moss” Bresnahan, the former head of South Carolina’s statewide public broadcasting operations. In contrast to Mohler’s operational focus, Bresnahan was looking for new ways to expand the station’s mission and platforms.

The situation Bresnahan inherited may have been stabilized, but it still held plenty of challenges. Despite a highly-aggressive on-air pledge schedule the station’s Annual Report for 2009 cited ”more than 109,000 individual donors,” down from 2007′s “over 126,500 individual donors.” Membership remained the largest single source of revenue but it was down by 29% since 1997. The station’s budget had been balanced on the basis of reduced expense, not increased revenue.

Behind the numbers lay another type of challenge. During the years of financial crisis, layoffs had reduced full-time staff from around 250 to well under 100. As at many organizations that undergo downsizing, a “survivor mentality” had taken hold, and some in Senior Management admitted they struggled with it themselves. Given the disastrous toll that poor fiscal management had taken on the station during an era of grand ambitions, one emotional lesson from the period of austerity was that organizational ambition was to be avoided. Managing expectations in a way that made achievable ambition acceptable once again would be one measure of Moss Bresnahan’s success as a CEO.

PBS Looks to the Future

Addressing the PBS Annual Meeting in 2010, PBS CEO Paula A. Kerger presented an upbeat assessment of how PBS programming was faring:

“Even in these difficult. turbulent times, PBS and local PBS stations continue to succeed. Today, I’m proud to announce new research that shows – on average – PBS now draws 118 million viewers each month. This is the first time our monthly cume1 has risen in 5 years… So far this season, our prime-time ratings are up almost 10%. This is the first increase we’ve experienced in prime time in a decade. Together, PBS and local PBS stations reach more viewers in prime time than HBO, CNN, Discovery, History, and almost every other major cable channel… In April, PBS.org welcomed 12 million unique users – up 15% from one year ago.” (PBS, 2010).

Throughout public media there was a sense of anxiety about where future revenues could come from, but there was also among many public media veterans a sense that during a time of economic turmoil public media was poised to demonstrate its unique value to American society. “Public media is the future,” remarked Quest’s Executive Producer, Sue Ellen McCann, at a reception KCTS held during her visit, “They just don’t know it yet.”

The PBS revenue model relied heavily on the fees paid by its member stations, and those stations in turn relied heavily on individual donations. In 2009, individual donations accounted for 64.7% of KCTS’ revenue. About 10.8% was from corporate support, and roughly 10.8% from federal funding sources.

In the decades since the Radio Act of 1927, over-the-air broadcast had been joined by other communication platforms with a powerful reach into American’s lives, such and cable and the Internet. Unlike the broadcast spectrum, these new channels are not a naturally-occurring public resource, but a collection of man-made, privately-owned networks. Whether the government had a right, or a duty, to regulate them was an actively debated question.

The massive increase in communication bandwidth brought about by technology led to a state of crisis in many media organizations. Business models based on access to a scarce resource with a high technological barrier to entry struggled to adapt to a landscape of enormous bandwidth and low barriers to entry. Access to that scarce resource was hardly guaranteed, as the FCC examined the allocation of spectrum and considered whether channels underutilized by many broadcasters might be better used for increased mobile phone capacity. While a television station might see the proposal as a threat, a multi-platform storyteller might see a confusing mix of pros and cons to be sorted out.

Online, the linear, time-based, nature of television which held audiences captive to advertising (including PBS’ underwriting messages and pledge drives) was disrupted by the non-linear use protocol of the Internet. Even television had become non-linear in many households through the introduction of recorders such as TiVo that made skipping the ads easier even than it had been on linear video cassette recorders.

PBS and Interactive Technology

Technologically, PBS attempted to provide member stations with support for their Web sites through services such as its PBS Station Remote Control site, which offered access to prepackaged toolkits and “widgets.” Many of the offerings were designed to be let stations with the lowest levels of in-house technical skills add features to their websites, in much the same way that users of the social networking site MySpace could add widgets to their profiles.

In practice, since Interactive staffing levels typically corresponded to the clarity of a station’s web strategy, the use of PBS-supplied modules often provided functional utility at the expense of overall user experience. The effect could be as chaotic as MySpace, reinforcing impressions of PBS member stations being amateurs at online media creation. A “big stick” approach towards promoting PBS-developed online projects had similar effects, as grants often required them to direct traffic from their own sites to PBS-hosted “storytelling” sites to the detriment of the member station website’s own user experience.

The recently launched PBS COVE (Comprehensive Online Video Ecosystem) player provided a PBS-hosted platform for providing television on the Internet in an experience not unlike the Hulu site developed by a consortium of commercial television networks. This system allowed stations to “skin” a video player with its own branding elements, while presenting its local content alongside popular national programs such as Masterpiece, Frontline, NewsHour and others. Once in the system stations’ shows could also be viewed in other stations’ players, providing local shows the opportunity to reach far-flung online audiences using their own local stations’ websites.

While PBS had dedicated staff to supporting COVE, development work on the project was outsourced to an outside vendor. This was a common practice throughout the for-profit and non-profit business worlds and had much to recommend it. Even development of most of Quest’s online platform had been outsourced. But on considered observation, this practice raised questions about the meaning of being a “media organization” in 2010. A television station that outsourced the technical work would be a producing company, not a television station. What capabilities was it necessary for a multi-platform storyteller to have in-house in order to be a multi-platform storyteller? What boundaries defined the areas of core expertise and skills from the areas of supporting expertise and skills?

A complete overhaul of the PBS website, codenamed “project Merlin,” had been delayed more than once. In announcing the latest projected release date, Jason Seiken, PBS’s Senior V.P. of Interactive/Product Development and Innovation chose a print media metaphor to explain the new website’s intended value to a target audience of member station executive managers:

Imagine a national newspaper that reached 12 million readers a month. Now imagine the newspaper’s publisher deciding to promote your station every day on every page of the edition that goes to your local residents.

Stop imagining. The publisher’s name is Merlin. The “newspaper” is PBS.org. (Seiken, 2010)

The existing PBS site already localized some functions to visitors’ stations, but had a reputation for inaccuracy. At KCTS, for example, employees had long noted that PBS.org was as likely to serve them content optimized for Philadelphia’s WHYY as for their own station. PBS’ historic inability to resolve issues such as these dampened enthusiasm for Seiken’s scenario.

Seiken further described in general terms PBS’ plans for APIs, or Application Programmer Interfaces. APIs are protocols that allow different software applications to communicate with each other. The adoption of publicly-accessible APIs talking across the Internet was what powered the Web 2.0 period of innovation that saw the rise of Google, Flickr and other groundbreaking companies. National Public Radio had a publicly-accessible API for its content which, among other uses, fed radio content to an iPhone app independently created at no charge by an NPR fan. PBS’ APIs however were not to be publicly-accessible, but would only be used to share information between applications hosted by member stations. By comparison with public radio, public television was holding content and innovation close to its chest.

In 2010, with longtime PBS journalist and commentator Bill Moyers retiring, PBS replaced filled his primetime slot with a new show called “Need to Know” billed as “Less noise. More news. Every Friday night nationwide and all week long on the Web.” While resembling some aspects of the Quest model in its interactive storytelling technologies, “Need to Know” got off to a very shaky start, both with audiences and media critics alike.

In short, for stations wrestling with how to create and sustain effective interactive storytelling, PBS offered little in the form of clear direction or direct support. The Quest model was a local initiative and if it was to be widely adopted as part of PBS’s mission, it would likely be because grassroots adoption led to national growth, reflecting the unique “member up” structure of public media in America.

PBS and the Future of Journalism

PBS had long seen its mission as encompassing both educational and journalistic programming. While education in America was felt to be at risk, the state of media in 2010 put an especially bright spotlight on the problems plaguing journalism.

In the print world, newspapers struggled to finance their journalistic work as their non-linear model became easier and cheaper to access online. Subscriptions plummeted and, more devastatingly, revenues from classified ads simply evaporated as advertisers posted to free online services instead. While the new media were providing plenty of opportunities for entertainment, less lucrative news and information content was proving economically unsustainable in the new model.

Some champions of technology supported a “free as in beer” interpretation of “freedom of information,” as touted in Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson’s book “Free.” But on the front lines at media organizations the tension wasn’t just about individual’s jobs – people who had chosen their careers in the conviction that professional journalism was a cornerstone of American society wondered aloud who, in a “Free” world, would pay for the months of toil that lay behind in-depth investigative reporting.

Many within the world of public media looked at the devastated economic landscape of journalism and asked themselves, “If not us, then who?” But with economic support negatively affected by economic conditions the exact form a broadly expansive public media journalism might take was unclear.

In their book “The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again,” Robert McChesney and John Nichols argued that, as a solution of last resort, only government patronage could maintain the American tradition of journalistic inquiry for the common good (McChesney & Nichols, 2010). Conceptually the BBC model seemed appealing but in America government regulation of a communication medium would raise profound questions of constitutionality, just as it had in 1927.

The public in the United Kingdom had accepted vans driving through their neighborhoods, electronically detecting unlicensed televisions, but that scenario was unthinkable to the American public, no matter what benefit they ultimately derived from the fees collected. Even less obtrusive models were sure to meet with strong objections from many political viewpoints.

The Quest Model

Early in 2010 a group of managers at KCTS had travelled to San Francisco to visit with and learn from KQED’s Quest project. Conceived from the ground up as a multi-platform storytelling initiative, Quest had been initially funded by the National Science Foundation to find new ways of promoting science literacy. After a startup period of several months creating a plan for how to proceed, Quest had partnered with multiple regional science organizations to produce original stories relevant to Northern California. In the wake of Quest’s visit to Seattle, KCTS management needed to determine what relevance the model held to them and how, or if, it should be applied at the station.

The common theme running through all the conversations was how the success of Quest stemmed, not just from using new digital media to communicate stories to viewers, but from using digital media to communicate internally as well. Quest’s approach was not only unlike the approach at KCTS, it was unlike the traditional approach at KQED, although some aspects of it were beginning to filter out to the rest of the station.

As a joint licensee KQED’s broadcast channels included both its PBS-affiliated TV station and its NPR-affiliated radio station, which gave it further reach than KCTS’ TV-only license could. Radio’s unmatched production speed at low cost also meant KQED had, if necessary, the ability to produce Quest-branded content in response to news events, with a rapidity that the project’s other platforms could not achieve.

The output of the Quest project was impressive. Most years of its existence it had produced 20 ½ hour TV shows, 50 six-minute radio spots and 10-20 web-only media segments. In addition the interactive platform support daily blog posts, some written by staff but most coming from its community partners. The education staff of Quest produced and distributed classroom material based on California state educational guidelines and hosted media creation workshops teaching partners and educators how to incorporate multi-platform storytelling into their own work.

At the center of the project was a focus on collaboration. This was manifested in a physical workspace in which television, interactive and education staff sat together, literally breaking down the walls between traditional departments. But it was also manifested in a web-tool based workflow, rather than one built around emails and documents stored on fileservers.

Quest’s open-source wiki collaboration tool was open to anyone at the station in the same way that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is open to anyone on the Internet. Anybody with a login to KQED’s internal network could add or edit any content on the wiki. Using the wiki, the development of a story would begin with an idea being submitted as a brief description, with supporting background information. The story would be marked for suggested platforms and topic areas. Consideration for production would only be given to stories submitted this way, ensuring that all platforms were considered and aware of work possibilities. Partners outside the KQED network submitted proposals via email to individuals at the station, who then would post them to the wiki.

Not to be downplayed in Quest’s success was the fundamental question of resources. During the KCTS lunch presentation, Quest’s Senior Interactive Producer, Craig Rosa, had mentioned “one of our web developers,” unintentionally underscoring the fact that KCTS had only one web developer in total, part of a three-person team responsible for all of the station’s Interactive output. With 16 people working on one multi-platform project, Quest had staffing depth roughly equivalent to KCTS’ production, interactive and outreach departments combined.

During the visit to KCTS, Quest team members led a number of sessions on specific areas of the project. But at the end of the second day a final session held for potential partners from local science organizations, should KCTS choose to follow the Quest content model. Quest’s presenters stressed how they had worked with many of the attendees’ counterparts in the Bay Area, helping them achieve their goals by providing them with the media expertise and exposure they lacked. During a question and answer session, the president of Pacific Science Center drew knowing laughs when he asked KCTS Executive Director of Content Development Randy Brinson when exactly he would be hearing the announcement that KCTS was hiring for 16 new positions.

KCTS Looks to the Future

In keeping with the trends and directions of public media at a national level, KCTS had embraced the concept of a multi-platform mission. The challenge the station faced was how to translate the concept into reality.

The promise of technological change was not only that it would alter how public media content was experienced by viewers, but also that the strategic, tactical and implementation phases of content creation could both aligned with multi-channel storytelling and streamlined for efficiency gains. The challenge in fulfilling this promise was the minimal investment historically made by the station in staff with necessary skills and experience. Like many public broadcasting organizations, KCTS had been slow to embrace new delivery channels and work methods that had begun changing for-profit media businesses some 15 years earlier.

Demographics were working against the broadcast model. In interviews for Web Production interns, it had become expected that candidates would answer the question “How do you watch video?” by answering “online.” Few who lived away from their parents had televisions in their homes. These trends reflected a broad shift in society.

As recently as 2007, none of KCTS’ locally-produced video content was available online. The following year, a vendor-managed redesign of the station’s website proved problematic, delivering a site compromised by competing internal interests and not well-suited for delivering the quality content product that was the foundational mission of public media. Extensive cost overruns complicated the picture, making it difficult to construct a case for more significant investment in the site.

The early results from KCTS’ COVE adoption were very promising, with weekly video views increasing fivefold from early March to a particularly successful week in the middle of May. The power of video sharing had demonstrated itself when right away KCTS’ half hour interview with punk rock icon Patti Smith had become the third most watched video on New York station WNET’s player, and a report on foreclosed mortgages had taken the same spot on Los Angeles’ KCET. Bolstered by these results, KCTS had been chosen by PBS’ technology team to be a first-round adopter of COVE’s new monetization functionality, incorporating the sort of underwriting messages familiar to the PBS broadcast audience into the online presentation of video content.

With COVE apparently providing a practical “television on the Internet” solution, KCTS’ Interactive department was anxious to operationalize it into an administrative function, freeing them to spend time developing tools and processes for interactive storytelling. But the Interactive staff found organizational challenges to less easily overcome than technical ones.

Decades of experience in the broadcast industry meant the station had a deep institutional understanding of resources and staffing necessary to produce television shows. The Production department was organized in a traditional vertical media production model with a producer for each show, coordinating the activities of a number of sub-producers, editors, and production staff. It was normal procedure to pay independent producers to create content, ranging in scope from a short segment on one of KCTS’ news and affairs shows to one-off special programs.

By contrast, KCTS historically had invested little in the Interactive and Outreach departments. They had much smaller staffs, and relied on individual autonomy in strategy, tactics and implementation. Below the Director level these departments were flat: Aside from short-term, part-time interns with limited skills there was no deeper reporting structure. In Interactive, budget that had been earmarked for projects like paying community bloggers to provide content was at risk of being lost because the department had lacked the resources to follow through on them.

The station’s executive team was taking steps to better coordinate its cross-departmental efforts. It had been announced that a new “Vice President of Content” position would be created to oversee and better coordinate these departments, but the need to plan for the future at the department level couldn’t wait for this role to be filled. Meanwhile, the practice of continually applying for small grants was being discouraged, as the requirements of those grants could scatter focus and resources. What exactly would fill the resulting funding gaps had to be determined.

A consultant had been retained to lead training in project management methodology. This was intended to provide a framework for improved cross-departmental cooperation, but also created additional concerns among staff unused to the project management approach. The goal was not to create an independent Project Management Office (PMO), as found in many organizations, but distribute project management skills by training individuals in the station’s many departments.

In 2009, out of the total station budget of $19,887,101, 49% had gone to Program Services which included Production and Outreach. Out of that total Program Services budget of $10,469,693, Programming and Production had received roughly half at $5,444,279, while Outreach had gotten $644,452.

Despite the executive-level focus on making Interactive a key driver of content creation and delivery, the online channel historically had been resourced as a way to provide information about the station, not as a content channel in its own right. In 2009, as in 2010, it was considered a Supporting Service and consolidated with Interactive Services as part of the $2,897,091 General and Administrative budget. The Information Services budget was 2% of the company total, or roughly $400,000 and Interactive’s share of that amount was what was left after capital expenditures for hardware, software and vendor support on top of the two-person IT support staff. (See Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2 for details on KCTS’ 2009 revenue and expenses.)

Both financially and conceptually, the On-Air leg of the three-legged stool was enormously longer than the Online or In the Community legs, making the station’s platform for the future lopsided. Interactive staffing had increased in fiscal year 2010, but organizing to make the best use of the staff was still a work in progress. Outreach had convened a cross-department lunch discussion as it tried to envision how its semi-autonomous operations would align with a new, shared, strategic mission based in unfamiliar project management methodologies.

Given the grassroots nature of public media in America, the highly local questions faced by KCTS tactical managers potentially had far-reaching implications in how the country would access quality information and journalism in the future, thereby shaping the very nature of government and society. The stakes were high, as were tensions on the second floor of the station’s building.

Throughout KCTS many managers and employees, deeply aware of financial, staffing and organizational constraints, were trying to envision a successful multi-platform storytelling future for public media, and identify the best path for getting there.

Exhibit 1: KCTS 2009 Financial Picture

Illustration 1: KCTS 9 Annual Report 2009 (excerpt). KCTS 9 Annual Reports. Retrieved (2010, May 31) from http://kcts9.org/about/annualreports

Exhibit 2: KCTS Consolidated Statement of Activities For the Year Ended June 30, 2009

Illustration 2: Consolidated Finanical Statements 2009 (excerpt). KCTS 9 Annual Reports. Retrieved (2010, May 31) from http://kcts9.org/about/annualreports

Exhibit 3: PBS Consolidated Financial Highlights

Illustration 3: PBS Financial Highlights 2008. Pbs financial reports. Retrieved (2010, May 31) from http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/aboutpbs_corp_financial.html

References

BBC. (n.d.). The bbc story – 1920s. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/resources/factsheets/1920s.pdf

BBC. (n.d.). Bbc mission and values. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/purpose/

Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, Summary, 1967. (1999, October 16). Public Broadcasting PolicyBase, Retrieved from http://www.current.org/pbpb/carnegie/CarnegieISummary.html

Gingrich wants to ‘zero-out’ federal funding to cpb. (1994, December 12). Current, Retrieved from http://www.current.org/mo423.html

House votes 2 to 1 to restore CPB aid. (2005, June 27). Current, Retrieved from http://www.current.org/cpb/cpb0512funding.shtml

Hartford Gunn Institute. (1995). Educational telecommunications: an electronic land grant for the 21st century. Public Broadcasting PolicyBase, Retrieved from http://www.current.org/pbpb/articles/morrillgunnpaper.html

History of public broadcasting in the united states – timeline: through 1940s. (2006, June 9). Current, Retrieved from http://www.current.org/history/timeline/timeline-through1940s.shtml

McChesney, R. W. (1992). Media and Democracy: The Emergence of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, 1927-1935. OAH Magazine of History. 6 (4), 34-40. Retrieved from http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/communication/mcchesney.html

McChesney, R. W., & Nichols, J. (2010). The Death and life of American journalism: the media revolution that will begin the world again. New York, N.Y.: Nation Books.

Messere, F. (1997, August 22). Welcome to the federal radio commission archives. Retrieved from http://www.oswego.edu/~messere/FRCpage.html

PBS. (2010, January). Pbs: an overview. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/aboutpbs_corp.html

PBS. (2010, May 18). Pbs president and ceo Paula A. Kerger address at pbs annual meeting in austin, texas. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/news/20100519_pkceoaddressannualmeeting.html

PBS Financial Highlights 2008. Pbs financial reports. Retrieved (2010, May 31) from http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/aboutpbs_corp_financial.html

Seiken, J. (2010, May 17). Cove is model for more magic up our lab-coat sleeves. Current, Retrieved from http://www.current.org/tech/tech1009seiken.shtml

The changing fortunes of KCTS. (2003). Seattle Times, Retrieved from http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/links/kctstimesline18.pdf

UW. (1997). Birth of a television station: kcts. Retrieved from http://www.washington.edu/research/showcase/1954a.htm

Have You (N)ever Been Experienced?

2010-06-27T21:08:19Z

Wherever You Go, There You Are

Illustration 1: The KCTS 9 television studio

From a remove of 12 years, it’s clear The Harvard Business Review article “Welcome to the Experience Economy” (Pine & Gilmore, 1998) offers an accurate prediction of things that were then yet to come. Although the authors focus primarily on physical world retail and dining business as staging grounds for experience, many of the concepts of experience have shaped the virtual worlds of media as well.

As has been happening so often in my recent readings, I can almost catch glimpses of myself in the pages, a ghostly figure peeking out from behind the words. The article tips its hat to the Walt Disney Corp.’s entertainment experience expertise, then in the next paragraph describes Recreational Equipment Incorporated’s experiential shopping approach. For me, these two companies are more then just interesting examples in support of a thesis.

Disney and REI are former employers where I helped turn the experiences they offered into something that could be delivered over the Internet. Now, at public TV station KCTS 9, I’m trying to do the same thing. What I’m coming to realize is that while much of television has moved towards experiential programming, public television’s brand identity is built around a premium presentational style that doesn’t lend itself easily to experiential remediation.

Voting Off Gilligan’s Island

Pine and Gilmore briefly touch on the Internet as an experiential medium, but they explicitly dismiss television:

The kinds of experiences most people think of as entertainment – watching television, attending a concert – tend to be those in which customers participate more passively than actively; their connection with the event is more likely one of absorption than of immersion.
(Pine & Gilmore)

While it may be that as a medium television is inherently passive, it too was transformed by the experience economy. Pine and Gilmore’s article was published on the cusp of the reality television era, as “Survivor” was about to lead the American commercial networks from “must-see” primetime sitcom blocks, and into a new age dominated by vicarious experience programming.

Reality TV has embraced interaction in a number of ways, most directly through tabulating audience votes to determine outcomes. Following suit, a new form of multichannel storytelling – NBC’s “Heroes” being an exemplar – has emerged, enhancing TV viewer experience with story extensions online or in comic books scheduled for release the day after the episode they reference is broadcast (SXSW, 2010). The cable news networks have increasingly turned from the traditional presentational style to incorporate experience, although when it manifests in form such as CNN’s Rick Sanchez showing essentially random comments on Twitter, media critics may find it cringeworthy.

High levels of viewer engagement provide business justification for the shift to experiential television, but viewer engagement doesn’t just happen. Engagement comes from meeting some desire the viewers can’t get met elsewhere, and in the case of reality TV that desire was for the standards of the experience economy to be applied to the protocols of primetime. “Survivor,” “American Idol” and the other reality hits traffic in vicarious experience. Viewers watch because the premise – dubious as it may prove on close examination – is that the contestants may just as well be them.

This Is not a New Section

At the recent TEDx Seattle event, game designer Elan Lee built his talk around an interesting observation of the evolution of new media forms. While handling a first edition of Defoe’s “Robinson Cruse,” arguably the first novel published in English, Lee noticed that the introduction included the following paragraph:

The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch’d, that the Improvement of it, as well as the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.
(Pierre-Marteau.com, N.D.)

Defoe, Lee explained, felt it necessary to introduce a new medium – book-length fiction – by pretending it was something else that the public was already familiar with: Book-length fact. It made him realize he’d done the same thing a few years earlier when he’d introduced a new approach to gaming based on following clues through a serious of fictitious Web sites with the phrase “This Is not a Game.” In his talk, he further showed examples in which then-new media were presented as though they were older, familiar, media when they were first introduced (MCDM, 2010).

In media studies, the idea that every new medium contains within it the medium it is disrupting is both foundational and a path for new inquiry (McLuhan, 1964 & Gitelman, 2008). What Lee did was come to an understanding of how it is that media creators attempt to bridge the disruption for their audience, and present it in a context that has meaning to business strategists. His talk concluded with a warning that companies that pretend their new media forms are old, familiar media, in the way Defoe lied about the nature of his book, will fail. Defoe himself removed his disingenuous introduction in later editions.

What is surprising about television’s embrace of the vicariously experiential programing to which it seems so well-suited is that it took so long to happen. From the earliest mass TV entertainment, which was a broadcast repackaging of the Vaudeville variety format, commercial TV quickly progressed to short “fourth wall” plays packaged as sitcoms. Of course there were exceptions, but anyone who has considered the prescience of Ernie Kovaks’ work in the early ’60′s, which reworked the variety format to take advantage of the new medium’s unique protocols, is struck by how little impact outlying work had on mainstream programming in the decades to come. Only recently has television begun to feel comfortable not pretending that is isn’t television.

While the distance from “The Honeymooners” to “Seinfeld” may seem great, the underlying format protocols are virtual identical. It may have been the threat of TV itself being disrupted by a newer medium that finally forced the medium into a new level of maturity, even if the result reminds us that “maturity” is not necessarily a synonym for “artistry.”

Public media has had little use for the sitcom (unless the punchlines are spoken with a British accent) and even less for reality-based competition series. Primetime, non-pledge, programming is almost all news and public affairs, high-minded enactments of canonical literature, or documentary films. PBS doesn’t get down and dirty experiential with the muddy money-grubbers on “Survivor” – it prefers to polish its shows to a shine and place them on a pedestal. The non-profit media economy is the opposite of the experience economy, whether this from choice, inertia, resource constraints, or a combination of all three.

Of course, there is great risk in trying to embrace the new experiential protocols. This week PBS unveiled “Need to Know,” a new show promoted as “cross-media” replacing the retiring – and traditionally presentational – Bill Moyers in the lineup. Critic Tom Shales savaged it, and the whole cross-media approach:

PBS promises that this dreadful “Need to Know” show, which supplements vacuous televised drivel with fancily designed Web-page graphics, “empowers audiences to ‘tune in’ any time and any where.”

Meaning that you are free to supplement inadequate broadcast material with unsatisfying Internet material whenever you inexplicably get the urge. Oh boy, what a boon!
(Shales, 2010)

The Man Behind the Curtain

When I’m at work, I occasionally have opportunity to leave my desk and visit the main television studio. The visual cues that identify the room’s purpose are familiar to most people. In addition to the video cameras and lighting equipment, there are two stage sets built to resemble physical rooms when seen from the limited range of perspectives allowed to the cameras (see illustration 1). In Elan Lee’s formulation, television shows produced in the KCTS 9 studio scream “this is not a television show!” at their audiences.

On every episode of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert conducts an interview on a set similar to KCTS 9′s interview set. But in one of the show’s running bits, the cameras track him running from his anchor desk set to the interview set, mocking the convention while metaphorically screaming “this is just a television show!” Colbert’s audience is being welcomed into the joke, enhancing the experiential nature of the show, while reinforcing the real lesson in media literacy that underlies much of Colbert’s humor. While often talking the talk of media literacy, it seems to me that in any given year public television does less to educate its audience in it than one good week on Comedy Central can.

Public media, constrained by expectations that are often tied to funding, is institutionally conservative in use protocols. Changes that are economic imperatives at commercial stations are unthinkably risky are public ones. While the low production values of public television operating on a shoestring budget are recognizable enough to be the stuff of sketches on “Saturday Night Live,” the reality is that major market public television stations achieve professional results, and the quality of national productions is as good as any on television. But those professional results come with weights attached.

As a producer on the Internet – a primarily experiential medium which relies on user engagement, choice, and action – it is my job to further my employer’s goals in that medium. But turning the product of an organization that has deliberately clung to non-experiential protocols as a mark of quality into content that works as an experience is a definite challenge.

Money Changes Everything

Ecommerce has been one of the Web’s biggest success stories because the medium’s use protocols are inherently well-suited to transactional interactions as well as experiential ones. My time at REI was marked by considerable cross-department tension about the relationship between experience and monetization. Get it wrong, and you may not kill the goose, but it will lay fewer golden eggs for you.

At KCTS 9 monetization comes in many forms, often with conflicting goals, and the conflict plays out on the Web as degradation of the content experience that I would argue is the true public media mission.

The pledge team’s imperative to solicit individual donations sets up an expectation that the site can be built on an ecommerce model, structured as a funnel leading users through an array of product (in this case the product is content) and into a shopping cart/checkout conversion funnel. But the underwriting team is selling ad space that is measured by its success in taking users away from the site entirely. And the grant writer brings in money that pays for meeting the content mission but also carries with it a requirement that traffic is directed to specific sites for the benefit of the grantor. Meanwhile, back in pledge, there’s a struggle going on ensure that users interested in owning DVDs or other physical products obtain them as part of a high-markup pledge premium and don’t discover they could have bought them more cheaply from the low-markup commercial store that operates as a subsidiary of the non-profit television station.

The result is a fractured site that ostensibly exists to provide an experiential interactive dimension to the public media mission, but is nearly impossible to guide in that direction due to deep-seated and unexamined organizational goal conflicts. Real-world “experience shopping” stores let customers use products in a relaxed atmosphere separately from the expectation that they will buy them, gambling instead that after experiencing the product, the customer will convert by making a future purchase at a conventional store (Barbaro, 2007).

Experience shopping may have a dubious shelf-life for retailers – indeed, given the economic conditions since Barbaro’s article was written, the examples given may already be shuttered – but it seems a perfect model for understanding how public media’s experiential imperative should relate to its business need for monetization. Engaging experiences offering conversion opportunities that don’t compete with each other or with the public media mission is the challenge, and the opportunity.

It’s Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It)

Earlier this year, while attending the South by Southwest conference, I went to an event hosted by public television station KLRU. When I walked into their studio, spread before me were tables covered with tamales, beer, and margaritas. I’ve certainly never seen that in the studio at work.

Although the studio had seating risers, they were all filled by the time I got there. But that was fine. Because when the bands stepped onto the “Austin City Limits” stage where some of the most famous names in American roots music have performed over the past 34 years, I didn’t feel much like sitting down.

Pine and Gilmore dismiss concert going as a passive activity, but perhaps that reflects the concerts they go to. It was clear to me that night in Austin that public media can provide an experience in physical space and capture some of it for mediated distribution too (PBS, 2010). The trick for staying relevant in the future is to learn how to convey experience in mediated forms without surrendering to artlessness and destroying the premium value associated with the public media brand. And the trick for monetizing may be to let that premium value exist on its own as an experience that leads to future conversion.

References

Barbaro, M. (2007, March 18). In aisle three, couch potatoes trying the mp3s. The New York Times, Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/weekinreview/18barbaro.html

Gitelman, L. (2008). Always already New: media, history and the data of culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

MCDM. (Producer). (2010). Tedxseattle – elan lee – 4/16/10 . [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyyrW8bIk6M

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: the extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Pierre-Marteau.com. (N.D.). Daniel defoe, robinson crusoe, vol. 1 (london: w. taylor, 1719), e-text of the first edition. Retrieved from http://www.pierre-marteau.com/editions/1719-robinson-crusoe.html

PBS. (Producer). (2010). Pbs@sxsw. [Web]. Retrieved from http://video.kcts9.org/sxsw/

Pine, B., & Gilmore, J. (1998, July – August). Welcome to the Experience Economy. Harvard Business Review.

Shales, T. (2010, May 11). Tom Shales on PBS’s ‘Need to Know’. The Washington Post, Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/10/AR2010051005113.html

SXSW. (Producer). (2010). Multiplatform Storytelling: A Master Class with Tim Kring . [Live Event]. Description at http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/7255

YouTube. (Producer). (2010). Youtube – ernie kovacs. [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=ernie+kovacs&search_sort=relevance&search_category=0&page=

Creative Class Warfare

2010-06-28T12:50:40Z

Like The Who, I Sell Out

In 2002 Richard Florida’s concept of a “creative class” resonated with many readers. In his book “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” he had identified that in the latter decades of the 20th Century many of the more lucrative occupations in America did not fit existing economic classes. (Florida, 2002). I didn’t read it, and one of the reasons was certainly due to an aversion I had at the time to anything that carried with it any whiff of the dotcom era. While I’d hardly had to be dragged kicking and screaming into five years working at Internet startups, I’d always resisted the inflated rhetoric that came with them. I wasn’t looking to be part of any “new economy” or “new paradigm.” I was looking to do good solid work that returned profit on investment.

I do recall the book circulating among my then-peer group of dotcom survivors, long-term contractors, and aspiring startup founders. Many were perhaps drawn to the book because it seems to provide a matrix within which they could position the recent experiences we held in common.

10 years earlier I’d had a different peer group. My peers at that time were performing artists and arts technicians. They included actors and musicians, directors, and lighting, costume, and set designers. I was a sound designer and engineer, occasional director of photography, would-be screenwriter, and willing to do all sorts of manual labor to help pay the bills between gigs. I was part of a class that certainly did creative work, but was otherwise closer to “working class” than Florida’s “creative class.” And this class certainly wasn’t rising – it was falling. Opportunity to make a living in these purely creative endeavors, was becoming harder and harder to find, even as opportunities to do similar work for commercial endeavors became more common. Increasingly, my peers gave up art for art’s sake and took jobs with a new breed of company, focused on media, publishing, and technology.

When I took the plunge and became an Internet writer and producer, my own self-perception wasn’t that I’d bought into the creative class. It was that I’d sold out the creative class and joined the corporate class. It was a tolerable form of servitude, sweetened with perks and trappings of creativity, but still I had a sense I’d gone from being a independent creative agent to a cog in someone else’s machine, performing creative acts on command daily. It might have given the Human Resource department hives to hear me say it out loud, but what I understood was that the criteria for evaluating my creative work had shifted from high-craft/low-output to high-output/low-craft.

Pondering the concept of a Creative Class in the way that Florida sees it – as a central driver of innovation and change in business and society –- I find myself revisiting my previous perceptions. A decade and a half after the fact I wonder what, if anything, I gave up when I “went corporate” by choosing a Floridian Creative Class path instead of a Creative Working Class path? Maybe it’s just a matter of semantics, but is the Creative Class really as creative as it thinks it? What are the implications to creativity as part of our societal fabric of creativity going corporate?

Man in the Sharkskin Suit

A primary question is whether the Creative Class even exists. Could it be that, in the same way sharkskin suits, cigarettes, and martinis at lunch were the faddish emblems of Madison Avenue movers during the “Mad Men” era, but weren’t actually essential to the definition or output of the work they did, the trappings of late 20th Century bohemian artists and youth subcultures are the faddish emblems of Florida’s Creative Class, unrelated to the core nature of the work being done?

While I may cringe at the term “Creative Class,” Florida’s description of a historic shift in the nature of work does ring true. The work exists, and its emblems are the emblems of creativity. But does the work justify itself? What is the real return on investment from Creative Class jobs? Does the worldwide economic instability of the past decade stem from a change in emphasis from output to creativity?

A Vocation or Avocation?

One of my undergraduate theatre teachers, Ed Trujillo, used to stress to his students that creative fulfillment doesn’t have to come from one’s job. “You can have a vocation and an avocation,” he said. This was sage advice to a group of idealistic young people in an acting class at a state-run liberal arts college.

What we see in fan fiction is an exercise in creative avocation. The authors of works derived from popular copyrighted material are cogs in nobody’s machine. They create on their own time and, at least for the most part, have not had any expectation of payment. Attempts to monetize fan fiction have been made, although to date none have succeeded to any notable extent (De Kosnik, 2009).

The avocational nature of fiction has created, as De Kosnik describes, a gift culture. She argues both that it is this essential nature that has prevented monetization, and that the culture is at risk of corruption if monetization is driven by companies that aren’t rooted in it. Commercial and amateur versions of art forms can, and do, coexist, and that this often leads to a meritocractic process in which talented amateurs move on to professional work.

De Kosnik’s concern is whether the culture of what Becker describes as an Art World can survive the appropriation of that Art World’s output for commercial gain. But a mirror image of this concern could be whether the output of an Art World can survive the appropriation of that Art World’s culture.

It could be argued what Florida describes as the emergence of the Creative Class is not the creation of new types of work, but the appropriation of longstanding norms of creative culture by outsiders looking to aggrandize the nature of the work they need done. Compared to the drudgery of assembly line work, or the buttoned-down environment of mid-20th century corporations, Creative Class jobs seem to offer more opportunities for creative thinking. But compared to the purely creative output of jobs in the arts, what Creative Class jobs seem to offer in creativity is actually reduced in scale.

Overthrow of the Meritocracy?

A potentially more disruptive effect of the appropriation of the Creative Working Class culture might be the end of the creative meritocracies that feed notable talents in various art worlds from the ranks of the amateurs to professional careers. The allure of a job that promises creativity in return for economic stability – something the Creative Working Class positions often lack – is a hard thing to pass up. Florida’s conception of Creative Class work as blurring the boundaries between being on the clock and off it also disrupts the vocation/avocation model.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, unions struggled to establish an eight-hour day/40-hour week as the norm. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” went one variation on a common slogan. Florida says these new Creative Class jobs lack such boundaries because creative work happens on its own timeframe. But is it actually that by focusing on “creative” jobs, he has missed the bigger picture in which working hours for all types of work have been steadily increasing again (Early & Gordon, 2007)?

Since these Creative Class jobs often stress output over craft, it may be that the truly talented never have a chance to nurture their talent. Of course, the definition of talent changes as circumstances change over time, but are we ready to accept a world in which the most creative writers are those who best perform to spec, within deadline and within budget?

In this doomsday scenario, the Creative Class turns out to be a way business can syphon away immature creative talent and lump it together in such a way that it produces a consistent product. Not only does this obscure the output of the real talents, it also tends to take away their off time when they might otherwise have been honing their skills as amateurs.

If Jenkins is right in his assessment that fan fiction serves the same role in our society that the retelling of Homeric epics did for the Ancient Greeks (Westcott, 2008), then is there a chance the creative impulse itself could become subsumed to the commercial impulse? What impact on society would that total appropriation have?

Hindsight Isn’t Always 20/20

I can’t answer my own question about what, if anything, I gave up when I left the Creative Working Class. Nor can I answer any of the other questions I left hanging, at least in a paper as short as this one.

All I know is that there’s always been something about Florida’s premise that seems both too facile and too derivative to take at face value. It’s certainly unfair of me to so harshly judge a book that I only know in excerpt, but every time I try to map the concept of an emerging Creative Class transforming the way we work onto any familiar territory, I start smelling the smoke of cognitive dissonance and it smells like dotcom hyperbole.

References

De Kosnik, A. (2009). Should Fan fiction be free?. Cinema Journal, 48(4), 118 – 124.

Early, S., & Gordon, S. (2007, October 23). Whatever happened to the eight-hour day? . The Nation, Retrieved from http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/early_gordon

Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class: and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. 1 – 17. New York: Basic Books.

Westcott, G. (2008, July 1). Friction over fan fiction. Literary Review of Canada, Retrieved from http://reviewcanada.ca/essays/2008/07/01/friction-over-fan-fiction

Risk, Reward, Royalty

2010-06-27T17:41:25Z

Introduction

There are many ways to approach studying the business of mass market entertainment. Approaches in material I’ve recently read ranged in focus from a business history of American movie studios written for a popular audience (Epstein, 2005), to sociological perspectives on the culturally transformative nature of creative work (Peterson, & Anand, 2004), to business case studies of prominent entertainment companies (Pisano, & Wagonfeld; Rivkin, & Meier, 2005).

All of these readings have focused on the unique aspects of culture industry. To be sure, as a business culture production sits in a unique spot in society. The mechanisms of creating and distributing cultural goods at any given time and place have not only been similar to, but sometimes have been identical with, the mechanisms for creating and distributing political and religious power. They all deal in display and performance, content creation and content distribution. This contributes to the enormous stature culture production holds in our society.

What I wonder is if sometimes we take this exceptional aspect of culture production too seriously and expect that since it is a unique type of business, the business practices at successful companies in the industry must also be unique. This thought cropped up a number of times during my reading.

The Know Nothings

Consider the use of the term “risk” to describe the business practices of movie studios. It shows up repeatedly in the readings. Epstein in particular uses the word frequently in his early chapters as he describes the sums of money involved in Hollywood deals – they are large in movie production, but enormous when it comes to mergers and acquisitions or launching new distribution channels.

Gladwell, building on a study by Villette and Vuillermot, looked at the steps Ted Turner took in creating his media empire. While the common perception of Turner’s rise is that he frequently gambled it all on high risk deals, Gladwell concludes that at every step of the way Turner was in truth highly risk-averse. Why he succeeded was that he was able to see how little actual risk there actually was in his maneuvers, which gave him an advantage of asymmetrical information. (Gladwell, 2010). While Gladwell uses the term “entrepreneurs” to describe the subjects of his article, they actually began with a considerable advantage of capital over a bootstrapping startup (Robles, 2010), making their situation more closely match the head of an established culture producer.

At the beginning of his career, when Turner purchased a money-losing TV station, his advisors were opposed to the move even though Turner structured the deal in such a way it cost him no money down. Turner recognized that unused stock in the billboard company he had inherited could provide low-cost promotion for his new TV property. So, not only did the deal not deplete his cash, it also gave him a low-risk use for wasted resources that carried with it the possibility of a high payout.

The managers of culture production have to balance these sorts of cross-channel deals all the time. What they, and Turner, understand is that “high risk” is not necessarily synonymous with “high stakes.” By spreading the risk around, they can mitigate the damage of any particular investment going poorly. The considerations that factor into this mitigation are beyond complex.

For example, in chapter 5 of The Big Picture, Epstein looks at the financial statement of the Walt Disney Company in 2000. This was of personal interest to me as in August 1999 I had left my job at a Disney Internet subsidiary. Epstein describes how Disney “… managed to remove from its books the massive losses incurred by its Internet operations by spinning them off as separate businesses and issuing a new class of stock for them to its shareholders.”

(While there’s undoubtedly truth to Epstein’s take, there’s also truth that when my employer, Starwave Corp., was purchased by Disney and then used to purchase Infoseek, Disney found itself with a lot of employees holding stock options as part of their compensation. At Disney itself, stock was only granted to Vice Presidents and above, which had unintentionally resulted in a proliferation of Vice Presidents. When I found myself a Disney employee, the company could not take away my options in Starwave and expect me to stay, nor could they convert them to options in DIS without reworking their entire corporate compensation plan. Unfortunately, promoting me from Senior Associate Producer to Vice President wasn’t even considered, but they did create a separate business holding to which my option grant was transferred.)

In the assigned readings, both Epstein and Goldman (1983) describe the social aspects of Hollywood mogul culture. Goldman’s description of United Artists optioning the book Thy Neighbor’s Wife, not because they intended to make it into a movie, but to bolster their prestige as players stands out. But the game Gladwell describes Turner and other entrepreneurs playing is perhaps far shrewder. By downplaying the low risk of his high stakes deals and bolstering his image as a risk taker, Turner executed a sleight of hand that multiplied his asymmetrical advantage by discouraging others from examining his real motives and spotting what he saw.

While Goldman is certainly right that when it comes to individual culture products “nobody knows anything,” the business of culture production succeeds or fails in the aggregate. If in any given year a studio releases six movies to theaters, it does so in the expectation that not all will succeed and the hope that a couple of them will be runaway successes that can absorb the sunk costs in the others. For any given movie, the risks are indeed very high, but if the executives have read the market right the aggregate risks are actually more contained than we might think at first look.

Factor in the advantages to be gained from encouraging a perception of risk-taking, and now the social aspects of Hollywood deal-making begin to look as deliberately obfuscated as Disney’s accounting. Maybe the real reason nobody knows anything is because everyone is working very hard to not know anything. The lack of information is not purely due to the vagaries of the entertainment audience, it’s the prestige currency on which the industry itself depends.

Vive Le Roi (Dans Le Chateau)

Arguing by analogy can sometimes be an effective way to make a point It’s not clear that arguing with an analogy is equally as useful, but as a side thought I’d like to try. I’ve long been exposed to managers of media properties quoting Redstone’s “Content is King” formulation (found in Epstein, but also inescapable in the media business zeitgeist). But identifying the King didn’t seem to help these managers come up any actionable content strategy.

A king by himself has no power. Murdoch touched on that when he crowned Distribution queen (Epstein). But he didn’t get the relationship quite right.

Content is King, Distribution is the Castle.

The Castle is the seat of power and whoever possesses the seat of power is by definition King. Like the reign of a king, the audience experience of content is temporally bounded. During the experience, a single piece of content holds the castle of distribution, and for that time that content is King. Whether it is a good king or a bad king makes no difference – what matters is that by sitting in the castle it wears the crown. If it is a bad king, then it will be deposed and some other content will take possession of the castle.

The digital age brought about the end of the feudal age. The castles have lost their importance and cities no longer cluster inside the shelter of their walls. The power of the king has been greatly diminished and much of it is now wielded through a form of representative democracy in which elections run constantly and terms of office can end at any time.

The major players in the culture industry struggle to play an influencing role in the democracy, without relinquishing the trappings of power. As always, the stakes are high and therefore the risk is as distributed as possible. But now the reward is distributed too. The only logical way to maintain power in this age is to step out of the castle and try to dazzle as many cities, towns, and hamlets as possible into joining a confederation with a mogul at its head.

References

Epstein, E. J. (2005). The big picture : the new logic of money and power in Hollywood / by Edward Jay Epstein Random House, New York

Gladwell M., The Sure Thing, The New Yorker, January 18, 2010, 24-29

Goldman, W. (1983). Adventures in the screen trade. New York: Warner Books.

Peterson, R, & Anand, A. (2004, March 17). The Production of culture perspective. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 311-334.

Pisano, G., & Wagonfeld, A. B., (2009). Warner Bros. Entertainment [case study]. Boston: Harvard Business Publishing.

Rivkin, J. W., & Meier, G., (2005). BMG Entertainment [case study]. Boston: Harvard Business Publishing.

Robles, P. (2010, January 14). Gladwell: entrepreneurs are predators, not risk-takers. Econsultancy: Digital Marketing Blog, Retrieved from http://econsultancy.com/blog/5245-gladwell-entrepreneurs-are-predators-not-risk-takers

Blue Collar Rocket Science

Democracy and Psychopathology on Facebook and Google+

FtM + SEO

Physician, Curate Thyself

Who’s in the Driver’s Seat, Social Media or People?

Iceberg Right Ahead: Net Neutrality from Titanic to Today

Introduction

Defining Net Neutrality

Fire Hydrants, Data Protocols and Metered Mail

Test Case: Choking the Torrents

Looking Forward by Looking Back

Shroedinger’s ISP: Quantum Utilities and Services

Communication, Regulation, History

Events Leading to the Formation of the Federal Radio Commission

The FRC Becomes the FCC

The Cusp of a New Millennium, the Passage of a New Act

Patterns in the Legislative Record

The Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal

A Full Cycle

References

Copyright: A Growing Chasm Between Law and Culture

General Position Statement

The Law Today

The Left Hand Knows What the Right Hand Is Doing

When Are Violations not Violations?

A Minor Tragedy of the Creative Commons

The Force is With You Until it Isn’t

Where do We go From Here?

References

KCTS Television: Public Media, New Media

The Three-Legged Stool

Public Media in America

KCTS History

PBS Looks to the Future

PBS and Interactive Technology

PBS and the Future of Journalism

The Quest Model

KCTS Looks to the Future

Exhibit 1: KCTS 2009 Financial Picture

Exhibit 2: KCTS Consolidated Statement of Activities For the Year Ended June 30, 2009

Exhibit 3: PBS Consolidated Financial Highlights

References

Further Reading

Have You (N)ever Been Experienced?

Wherever You Go, There You Are

Voting Off Gilligan’s Island

This Is not a New Section

The Man Behind the Curtain

Money Changes Everything

It’s Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It)

References

Creative Class Warfare

Like The Who, I Sell Out

Man in the Sharkskin Suit

A Vocation or Avocation?

Overthrow of the Meritocracy?

Hindsight Isn’t Always 20/20

References

Risk, Reward, Royalty

Introduction

The Know Nothings

Vive Le Roi (Dans Le Chateau)

Content is King, Distribution is the Castle.

References