Mike Butcher - mbites

As we know, there’s a general trend towards the democratization of the media; public archives such as Wikipedia, the BBC’s World War 2 Archives, citizen journalism or ‘We Media’ (the optimistic view) and The Cult of the Amateur (the pessimistic view). The boundaries between professional content and amateur content are also blurring with publicly generated content sitting next to articles or video made by journalists and producers. The audience are getting in on the act, as it were.

Maybe this blurring started with the first painting which didn’t feature God at the top, a serpent at the bottom; man in the middle beginning to question the given order. Maybe it was the invention of the printing press which enabled ‘the common man’ to begin to read and write as much as anybody else.

Citizen media got a good push when The Well launched in March 1985. It’s one of the oldest online communities. For me, online communities are inhabited places where user-generated content or citizen media is produced to sustain a culture which develops in the shared space over time. The members come together to do something and there is a sense of shared purpose and evolving permanence about the ecosystem that exists there. They fail if there is no purpose, nothing to keep people interested. The existence of a shared and living culture is one of the litmus tests for a healthy society.

The Unofficial Tourists Guide to Second Life lists plenty of culture: Bruno Echegaray’s immersive sphere’s exhibition, of which Paul Carr and Graham Pond enthuse “Every so often something in Second Life makes you stop and think ‘wow’ as you realise you are witnessing something that couldn’t be accomplished in the real world”. Giant floating spheres contain 360 degree artwork you can view by hopping inside. Meteroa is ‘America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’, a museum which features a pseudo-Tsunami and hurricane. For festivals you could take a look at Burning Life which echoes the real life festival Burning Man taking place for one week only, ending on America’s Labour Day. There are acres of Second Life which are barren, where avatars drift aimlessly around doing not much, but there is growing evidence of living cultures developing; social structures, businesses and so on.

Broadcasters and publishers are also beginning to learn how to run shared space environments. Canny organisations will have been steadily building up knowledge and staff able to run these kinds of new participatory environments. The old ‘episodic’ relationship broadcast media used to have with a mass audience is breaking down, but re-forming in a different way. The way children engage with media is worth looking at. They are great media snackers, munching on Instant Messaging, TV, gaming and texting on mobile phones in a flocking pattern, following recommendations from friends.

The broadcast era may be defined in hindsight as the time when the audience were one side of the camera lens or microphone and the producers were at the other. The age of the newspaper may be defined as the time when the Editor set the agenda (or the advertisers). Media organisations now play host, facilitating shared spaces within which the public play, consume, compose, upload, download, solve, create, participate and co-create media.

The moment of broadcast or act of reading a newspaper will continue, of course, but that content will be consumed in different ways at different times. Broadcast time (Paddy Scannell) is now supplemented by ‘on demand time’ (downloads, The BBC’s iPlayer), and also beginning to be augmented by ‘inhabited time’ (virtual worlds).

We’re delighted to have Lizzie guest blogging for us this week; she set up and managed the BBC’s online community between 1997-2002, creating the management and training systems, leading a team of 22 producers and assistant producers and overseeing the devolution of the online community management to the production Divisions in 2002. She was responsible for the BBC’s Internet safety initiatives from 2003-2007, assisting BBC Children’s with the facilitation of their online communities and user-generated content and the development of editorial policy in that area.

As Editor, Communities, BBC, producers in her team created websites and services which were nominated for the Guardian Unlimited Race in the Media Award and The Internet Service Provider’s Association Award for Safety on the Internet. Lizzie was nominated as one of the 100 innovators of the UK Internet Decade by NOP World and e-consultancy.com in October, 2004.

Lizzie is completing the first BBC-sponsored PhD, on the facilitation of participatory media content. She is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Westminster, School of Media, Arts and Design.

Forterra Systems, which provides technology for private/corporate virtual worlds, has announced a strategic investment and technology deal with In-Q-Tel, an investment firm which works closely with the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Under the agreement Forterra will develop a set of new tools to be deployed on Forterra’s On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment software, which is used by its clients for collaboration and training.

A lot of the information about this deal is buried in long, technical language, but it does hint that “3-D content including scenery, avatars, buildings” are built in these worlds to help intelligence agents get a feel for a place they may well be visiting in the future.

Moscow or Baghdad, perhaps? All very interesting….

In 1997 the BBC took part in an interesting experiment in ‘inhabited television’ working with BT Laboratories, Illuminations Television, the BBC and Sony. ‘The Mirror’ as the service was called offered six virtual environments or ‘worlds’ for viewers who were able to log on to a URL, create an avatar and chat. The Mirror project accompanied a television programme called ‘The Net’ broadcast on BBC 2 television, late at night. The avatars moved irritatingly slowly and the chat was mundane and often functional but it was a bold and brave experiment and over 2,000 people took part.

BT built the worlds for The Mirror in VRML 2.0 and during the time the servers remained switched on participants could debate, take part in a quiz show, attend an opening for a virtual art exhibit and a mock wedding, and finally around 80 people simultaneously enjoyed an ‘end of the world’ party.

Instead of having presenters The Mirror offered hosts who “would greet new entrants, introduce people to each other, point out activities and generally help people around.” (John Wyver). These people became “the core of the community of the world, encouraging people to return and beginning to develop the particular language and culture of The Mirror”.

Nottingham University produced ‘Out of This World’ in 1998. An event combining ‘elements of virtual reality, performance television and audience participation’. The ‘audience’ were analysed as being of three types; performers, inhabitants and viewers, depending on their involvement.

In 2000, another experiment in inhabited television, ‘Avatar Farm’ offered both virtual worlds and entertainment. Four twenty minute episodes of a ‘semi-scripted, tightly plotted fable involving gods and tricksters, innocents abroad, lizards and purple tufts’ were created with professional actors and members of the public taking on the personae of avatars. In addition it was possible to trigger 3D playbacks of events which had taken place in the worlds within the four episodes; in this way mixing fictional narrative with ‘virtual everyday life’.

At the turn of the millennium John Wyver of Illuminations Television believed inhabited television “has real potential for collaborative learning, for new kinds of museum experiences, and even for the reinvention of one variant of true public service broadcasting.”

What happened to inhabited television and was anything learnt from it, or are we on a kind of never ending hamster wheel which forgets what it has learnt in the past? I offer these links; as the broadcaster and academic Brian Winston once said “you need to look back in order to analyse the future.”

We have another podcast - this time from Douglas Rushkoff, leading technology and popular culture thinker and open-sourcist – hear his thinking on virtual worlds and brands, the loss of play, and where he thinks it’s all going. You can listen to all our podcasts and other content here.

Some say there are no secrets on the internet; students at Arizona State University received a questionnaire that strongly hinted at Google’s plans.

Of course Google already has Google Earth, and the question is how “real” and how “virtual” is that, and where do you draw the line. In researching the VWFE, lots of people mentioned Google Earth to me, and then lots of people said, “well, that’s not really a virtual world, is it?”

Interesting to see how things will pan out.