I wasn’t too concerned about missing the Opening Ceremonies from the Vancouver Winter Olympics, as I figured I could catch it online afterward.  NBC was keen to showcase its cool new Silverlight plug-in by streaming a considerable amount of the Beijing games in 2008.

But when I tried to watch Part 1 of the Opening Ceremonies, up came this message, along with a sign-in screen:

“You have selected a premium video (e.g. live stream or full-event replay).” Read more…

For years, I only knew of George Lucas’ 1977 cinematic sci-fi breakthrough as “Star Wars.”  Then I found out that it was part of a trilogy. But wait, Lucas had a plan all along; this tale of an oppressed rag-tag alliance looking to overturn a hierarchical, monopolistic political system (aka “The Empire”) was always meant to be “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.”

Of course, in a multi-part saga, if the good guys get their way initially, the Empire is always going to have to Strike Back to make it a good story. When I read Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff’s The Splinternet Means the End of the Web’s Golden Age, that’s what immediately came to mind.

We’ve been declaring an end to media monopolies for a while now, thanks to networked communities who no longer require institutional intermediaries to share, collaborate or take collective action.  This ability to produce and consume media for almost free threatened the very economic model that media moguls had taken to the bank for over a century. As I made my own transition from corporate media journalist to independent content creator, I took advantage of new, inexpensive tools that we saw as the great democratizer of production.

Apple was part of this rebellion, helping us to crash through the barriers to entry with the digital weaponry of firewire, USB, Final Cut Pro, iDVD — this filmmaker’s “secret plans to the Death Star,” so to speak.  As digital content proliferated, The Empire writhed in agony, from The New York Times to Conde Nast to NBC, desperately in search of new business models.  Now, with renewed focus on pay walls and walled gardens, Bernoff sees Apple’s new iPad as the turning point as we leave the Web’s hopeful first age of universality and openness:

…[M]ore and more of the interesting stuff on the Web is hidden behind a login and password. Take Facebook for example. Not only do its applications not work anywhere else, Google can’t see most of it. And News Corp. and the New York Times are talking about putting more and more content behind a login…Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines. Read more…

Watch the video of my entire Seattle Town Hall talk on January 13, 2010 (we’ll post the high-res version later). Here is my slide deck with notes (cross-posted from The Storyteller Uprising blog).  Special thanks to MCDM’er Jay Al-Hashal who provided the design concept for the deck and advised me on structure.  We covered everything last night — Iran, the Haiti Earthquake, Google’s stunning Chinese censorship decision, and as always, the future of journalism and the danger of echo chambers:

Last week, we cancelled our cable TV service.  In one fell swoop, we went from 60 to 0.  No more DVR, HBO in HD, nor movies-on-demand.  Also gone: the extraneous 700 other channels that I never looked at.  For the first time since I was a college student, I wasn’t tethered to a coaxial connection.

I told Comcast, no hard feelings.  We kept their broadband and voice services.  I said, we needed more “breathing room” so I could work on my book (presently entitled Trust Me: How to Tell Stories in a Credibility-Starved World).

I was being truthful.  That said, that I’m also saving $1000 a year.  I’m ingesting content specific to my interests (streaming Hulu and Netflix through my Playstation 3).  And I’m putting the savings to media that matters most to me: public radio (KUOW, KEXP), the Seattle Times Sunday paper, and a dead-tree subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

Image from zeropaid.com

Thanks to three recent articles in that same Wall Street Journal, I now also believe there’s a higher purpose to this decentralization of my media choices.  Because once again, large institutions with a vested interest in maintaining their power aren’t too pleased that people like me are making such choices.

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Here are my slides from our December 2 2009 info meeting.

The signs of info-exhaustion are abundantly clear.  I’ve been flashing them red in my status updates after all.

Hanson Hosein I’m tired of being in a perpetual state of communication (says the digital media journalist guy via Twitter and Facebook). [7 comments, 6 people liked this]

Hanson Hosein How to restore “contemplative balance” in an info-saturated world. Love that notion, wish I were in town to attend: http://is.gd/4NbSK [my wife liked this]

Graphic by Kim Rosen

I also joked on Twitter: I’m thinking of starting a Master of Communication in Analog Media.

Far too many people expressed interest, leading me to believe that all us tech-lovers secretly despair of our passion for all things digital.  I had mentioned as much during a Fireside Chat on Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW, which led to this article in the upcoming issue of Seattle Magazine, “Sound Off: Examining the Value of Tuning Out” (in fine analog style, the columnist Karen Johnson, interviewed me in September, a fact-checker contacted me about my quotes in October, and the dead-tree December issue has yet to hit news stands).

And now I’m up late on a Sunday night — having finished grading assignments, and attempted the Sisyphean e-mail push uphill — writing this blog post.  Overwhelmed, overloaded perhaps, but forever propelled by anxiety.

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Nearly five years ago, my wife and I set out on a road trip across America, armed with a couple of cameras, laptops, and a burning need to tell a story about a growing insurgency against big box stores.  What we didn’t have were jobs (I was determined never to work in TV news again), much money in the bank, or any clue what we were going to do with our footage when we got home — it was all “close, but no cigar” with networks like PBS and Discovery, which meant all our effort could conceivably lead to nothing.

But thanks to a pioneering social media strategy, grassroots interest in our film, and really good timing, a lot of people paid attention, and our documentary has been viewed around the world.  We continue to get requests to attend community screenings — from Hyannis MA to Port Townsend WA, even as some of the issues have evolved (Wal-Mart has turned over a new leaf, Starbucks is in slow retreat, many Americans now truly mistrust their powerful institutions and believe in “local first.”).  We’ve had broadcast deals, and we’ve sold DVD’s.  It was probably one of the main reasons why the University of Washington hired me to lead its graduate degree program in digital media.  So have we benefited enough? Is it now time to give it away, streaming it for free on Hulu, second only to YouTube when it comes to online video?  Isn’t that what you do with your content in the multimedia age?

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“You’re punk rock.”

That’s how a Microsoft staffer described our digital media Masters program at the conclusion of my recruiting presentation late last year.  Loud, brash, aggressive, simplistic, imperfect?

Actually, punk was a reaction to an old world order of music.  Just caught this passage in the liner notes to the first Cowboy Junkies CD, originally released in 1985:

One of punk’s lasting legacies perhaps the most dramatic of the changes that it brought about, was proving that you don’t need to be signed to a major label to make a major record.  In the early ’70’s, it seemed inconceivable that a band could literally “do it yourself.”…Punk had been a reaction to the 48 track studio system that had taken the means of making records away from new bands in the first place…

Despite my staid upbringing in law and TV journalism, I’m slightly subversive.  So I see opportunity in how digital media disrupts the concentrated power and high barriers to entry of traditional communication.  We named this site with that disruption in mind: flip the media.

And today, we’re rolling out the Media Space, our online collaborative platform — the front door to the community media lab we’re building here at the University of Washington.  Believe it or not, collaboration is not easy in higher education. Academics specialize in niche subject areas, research relies on funding for highly specific deliverables.  The “ivory tower” is actually a collection of silos.

Obviously, that won’t fly in a graduate program where we focus our attention on communication in a networked, interactive world.  And we had to ensure that we’re practicing some of what we’re studying, such as Shirky’s Holy Trinity: sharing, cooperation, collective action.  (My colleague, Kathy Gill’s Twitter book class is an example of how we work and the discussion we provoke)  So we needed an online platform to make that happen.  And it all begins with “Got an idea?”

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