Distributing with Abundance
Media distribution, and its quicksilver changeability over the last few years, dominated the conversation on a wide range of NAMAC panels at last month’s conference. It started the first morning, when Rick Linklater, asked by Janet Pierson to assess the state of affairs today, conceded that it’s both the best of times and the worst of times for independent makers. While technology has made things easier on the production side, Rick said that today’s challenge lies in distribution, which he defined as the disconnect between what’s being made and what’s being allowed to be seen.
You’d think the “Popular Aesthetics” panel might not cover distribution, but on the contrary! It turns out that form follows function here as well, and some innovative artists such as Anne E. Moore and Franklin Lopez made it clear that their choice of expression both comments on and reflects the challenges of distribution. Lopez (http://www.submedia.tv) uses corporate media clips to make hard-hitting short videos that challenge corporations and the Bush Administration. His primary methods of distributing his work are on his website and on Archive.org (through which 10,000 people view his videos every week. He commented that while he’d prefer to just showcase the work on these sites, his goal of getting broad exposure for his political work made him decide to also use the mainstream (corporate) distribution tool offered by YouTube, a concession to its ubiquity. Anne E. Moore also fights the man through books and tools/toys for kids, exposing corporate doublespeak and hypocrisy in marketing. The group then began to ask if it made sense to use corporate means of distribution to gain exposure for your subversive/political art? Is that hypocritical? Are we being co-opted? Are we making ourselves vulnerable by relying on corporate-owned platforms to communicate with each other?
Other panels also took a critical eye to our reliance on corporate-owned platforms for the online distribution of our films and ideas. True to its name, the “Reclaim The Commons” panel spoke adamantly about the need for expanding community media as well as harnessing the power of online participatory culture for independent ideas. Josh Levy, who blogs and edits sites such as the Personal Democracy Forum, took off where Frank Lopez had left off by acknowledging the necessity of finding ways to work with the Googles, and MySpaces of the world. He felt that Google had slightly more integrity than some of the other options, and noted that Google was on “our” side of the FCC fight, gently reminding us of a potential strong political ally there. Other members of the audience challenged the panel to question whether of not we could create our own publicly-owned platform to do the work of these entities.
NAMAC Co-director Helen DeMichiel had addressed this desire specifically in her opening remarks when she called for a New Deal-like technological works project for the public interest. The conference was peppered with groups who are innovatively addressing pieces of the puzzle, if not the whole enchilada. Many conference speakers highlighted Miro, the latest development from the Participatory Culture Foundation, as an alternative to iTunes’ video player (a representative from Miro says that they are looking to be the Firefox of online video.) Efforts like Miro and Archive.org could provide the Web 2.0 bricks and mortar to support the content that is being curated and aggregated by public interest services and sites (MainFrame, PRX, MediaRights.org, The Hub, among others). With a few more pieces in place, and the revenue model to support them, I felt that it was possible to imagine a kaleidoscopic effort that would allow independent media to utilize the tools and platforms available, without being entirely dependent on corporate-owned software and social networking sites to do it.
I think my favorite line from the conference was Alyce Myatt’s words to send off the crowd at the end of the Awards Luncheon, when she challenged all of us to work to change the atmosphere of independent media from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance. The coordinated online efforts of many NAMAC members could help to make this culture shift.
