January is always a busy month for indieWIRE. Last week, we teamed up with New Line Cinema and Apple to bring filmmaker Michel Gondry to huge crowds at the San Francisco, Chicago and New York City Apple Stores, talking about his new film "Be Kind Rewind". This week, the editorial team is already embedded in the slopes of Park City to cover the 2008 Sundance & Slamdance Film Festivals (in part through the support of "Be Kind Rewind"), including interviews with each of the first-time filmmakers at Sundance (and there are a lot of them this year.) The latest news from Sundance & Slamdance can always be found at http://www.indiewire.com/parkcity/.
Eight years ago, GMD Studios was buried in online discussions about the Clinton impeachment. Working with our friends at Weblab, we were experimenting with how you could structure online dialogs in new ways designed to avoid the classic problems of "invisible man culture", a phrase coined by collaborator Barry Joseph (now of GlobalKids.org) as part of a MacArthur Foundation funded evaluation of the technique.
The Web still suffers from these same problems, maybe even more so; the deja vu of today's political climate and the shortcomings of blogging's contributions to that conversation is seems so similar to the issues we were grappling with in 1998. In the day, the idea of making civil discussions happen while the Clinton impeachment was still taking place seemed almost foolhardy -- grab the most dividing issue of the day and produce civil, meaningful opportunities for conversation and learning. When you boil that down to the core idea of "invisible man culture" you focus on the role of community versus privacy, and how you convince participants to risk a little bit more of themselves than they used to risking.
The "small group dialogues" process really broke down into three key practices: (1) participants self-select and commit to contribute, (2) the activities are in small enough groups that loud voices don't rule the day, (3) the process has starting and ending experiences that everyone goes through together. Volunteer. Intimate. Experiences. Metaphorically, these ideas are very different from, say, "users, massive and page views" or "customers, targeted and sales".
The difficult task was always in taking a bunch of these and figuring out how to help people discover the amazing stuff happening in all of these parallel discussions, but on the whole the tone and meaningfulness for the participants was radically different than "most Internet discussions".
Today, these questions are more familiar ground: in 1998, we were still trying to prove that media created by "real people" could be as compelling as the experiences created by "professionals". Now consumer generated media and social networking and swarmed content and the blogging revolution and alternate reality gaming and a host of other elements loosely associated with "Web 2.0" is becoming (from conference panel to conference panel) more and more obsessed with some of these same dilemmas of invisible man culture that we were pondering from a "public use" standpoint in 1998. We found no definitive answers, but we at least proved to ourselves that there was more flexibility in the models of community building than "what everyone is already doing."
Every January, we pick up the entire New York office of indieWIRE and relocate it for two weeks to a ski town in Utah for our in-depth coverage in Park City of the Sundance Film Festival, the Slamdance Film Festival and all the mayhem on the mountain.
We always try to mix up what we're doing in Park City each year (having done everything from daily video reports to daily print editions distributed there at the festivals), and this year is no different. In addition to news, rumors, and tons of pictures, we'll be interviewing more than 40 directors with films in competition and reviewing all 32 films in the U.S. competition.
Not enough reading? Well, there's 10 years of archvies of past Dances up there too (in case you're burning to know about the first digital feature ever shown at Sundance or why Sundance dropped "Kurt & Courtney" in 1998 for some future indie film trivia contest.)
Too much reading? Hop into our iW Video reports each day from the Festival for director interviews, rumors, predictions, clips from films and some of the best party shots. Meanwhile, if you're there in Park City, get involved with FestMob, an experiment by Lance Weiler in cellphone chatter about what's happening at the Festivals that we're supporting.
A special thanks to our friends at Fox Searchlight for sponsoring our Park City coverage this year (and you can check out indieWIRE's video coverage of Sundance in their special "State of Independent Film" section).
We make a joke of "not being good" at explaining what we do on our website, but that's never meant as flip. We're not speaking to just one audience: some of you collaborators, some of you are fans, some of you potential clients or advertisers. Today, we're in the process of launching a couple new ways to introduce ourselves: a glossary and a timeline. We're hoping that some of the phrases we use from different disciplines and some of the highlights of where we've been since 1994 will be another way for you to get to know us better. Now you'll be able to tell your Marteskoisms from your Fenwichings. Plus, between those and the blog, we have a good way now to document the little bits of rediscovery that float up every now and then.
Arriving in NYC for Independent Film Week, Brian Brooks roped me into moderating a panel on social networking for filmmakers at the IFP Filmmaker Conference. Stu VanAirsdale, Karina Longworth, Ingrid Kopp and David Dinerstein of iklipz carried the burden of it being a well-received, standing-room only affair (moderating can be fun) ... Doug Block, who I met at that exact conference 10 years prior, wandered in and later commented, "It's like 1998 all over again." Brooks ended up attending the panel and sneaked part of it into an article, an article that also connects Micah Green to Lonelygirl15! Sometimes it feels like a small, small world.
Headed off on Saturday morning to rediscover the SXSW Festival after missing it for a few years. I'm sitting on a panel about the seventh anniversery of The Cluetrain Manifesto (Monday, March 13th at 10:00 am in Room 17AB, if you care to drop by.) indieWIRE is covering the SXSW Film Festival in depth at the same time, which also makes it the perfect time to throw a party with some friends on Sunday night:
As our new site goes up, so has the need to rescue some favorite pieces here and there from the past. One of those is an article that we've had on our site for sometime from our dear collaborator Marc Weiss of WebLab (who will assuredly make several appearances in the tin) about why companies with a stake in the Internet should be contributing to the public good of the media. This concept -- the inherant value in fostering idealism -- is one that Marc made crystalize better than most. And while this was originally written during the "boom times," the advice seems just as crucial today.
Idealism and the Internet - Marc Weiss
"The Web is in a real way, a manifestation of what we all know -- that we are becoming more and more interdependent as a global family.... Our interest is not only in the power of the Web to hold and exchange information, but in the potential for transaction, for each of us to talk to one another, and trade... knowledge and insights."
Who spoke these idealistic words? Howard Rheingold, the virtual community guru? Stacy Horn, the founder of Echo? Al Gore? None of the above. It was David S. Pottruck, President and Co-CEO of The Charles Schwab Corporation, accepting this year's GII Award for innovation in Web commerce.
It doesn't matter if Pottruck is an idealist or a clear-eyed realist who understands the symbiotic relationship between business interest and public interest on the Web. I believe that companies doing business online not only benefit from, but should vigorously support the visionaries who are working to realize the potential of the Web as a medium which can build relationships and understanding between people.
We're in an interesting industry. While it's true that there are lots of people who've begun working in digital media to make big bucks, there are many more who got involved at least in part for more idealistic reasons. They want to play with this exciting new medium, push it forward and see what it can do.
But if you look at the landscape, money is the Continental Divide of the Web. On one side are literally millions of people who've created their own sites, neither spending money nor expecting to make any. At the other extreme are everything from the startups looking to become the next instant millionaires to the Disneys and Time-Warners and Microsofts who are busily trying to get a piece (as big a piece as possible, of course) of the money machine that the Net is someday supposed to become.
To be sure, there are a few players who care about quality and innovation and substance and are trying to carve out a niche in the vast echoing middle kingdom between the extremes. Some are not-for-profit, some are ostensibly for-profit, even if they're not yet in the black. Webzines like Feed, Word, and Salon. Internet counterparts of old media institutions like PBS Online, the New York Times, Mother Jones and the Utne Reader. You probably have a few of your own favorites to add to the list, but anybody's list is going to be painfully short.
Given how many people came into the field with high ideals, why are so few trying to create a Web presence where values are at least as much a guiding force as the profit motive? Why is there so little work that is as much in the public interest as it is in the self-interest of the home-page publisher on one hand, or managers, investors and stockholders on the other?
Several preconditions are missing. Money is the obvious one. Although the Web is a low-cost medium, developing a Web site of any scale, or maintaining one for any length of time, is hard to do without financial support. There should be multiple sources of funding for public interest Web sites. Unfortunately, at this critical moment in the formative phase of the medium, there are only a handful.
There are two other preconditions missing: public support and what I'd call major player support. First, there needs to be a critical mass of public support for the notion that there should be a vigorous public sector on the Internet. A few years ago, when the new Republican Congress threatened to "defund" public television, tens of thousands of citizens deluged their representatives with messages saying they wanted PBS to continue. Newt retreated. In 1998, just at the moment that the Internet is building a mass constituency, public interest models are becoming less and less visible. In addition, there's no single "villain" (like Newt or the Republicans) to target. The forces at work are as decentralized as the Web itself. So it's unlikely that there will be any mass outpouring of support for a vital "public sector" on the Web, unless it's given some context and some form by activists.
The possibility of major player support is intriguing. There are some companies whose very healthy profits rise directly from the explosive growth of the Internet (and computers in general) over the past few years. There are hardware manufacturers like Cisco, Intel, Compaq, and Dell. There are software companies like Microsoft. And there are companies like Schwab, the discount brokerage firm that handles $2 billion dollars worth of transactions on the Web every week. If those companies alone put aside 1% of their after-tax profits to fund public interest use of the Net, there would be $135 million to work with.
I would argue that it's in their self-interest for those companies to provide that kind of support on a continuing basis. There's an ecology of the Web no less than an ecology of organisms on the planet. Before there was commerce on the Net, there were thousands of micro-organisms (also known as Net heads) experimenting to find its uses. It's always the pioneers, the poets and the prophets who show the way for the rest of us. Far from outliving their usefulness, we need them now more than ever. Public spaces on the Internet are the fertile soil in which new ideas can take root and blossom.
In the early 1960's, before there was a public television, FCC chairman Newton Minnow called TV a "vast wasteland." Let's not stand by and allow the Internet to become a worldwide wasteland.
