Must Read #1

Matthew Hindman: The Myth of Digital Democracy (2009, Princeton University Press).

Finally something like this. A political scientist takes a serious and systematic quantitative look on the question of the Internet and political participation.

His motivation: "Popular enthusiasm for technology has made sober appraisal of the Internet's complicated political effects more difficult." 

Couldn't agree with him more.  Ingrid Erickson & I recently mapped the close history of the concept "public sphere" within socsci and STS; see the blog entry and our working paper online @the Fordham University McGannon Center series. The optimistic undertone can be found in most articles discussing the Internet and its political potential. Still, the lack of empirical analyses is evident, especially of those looking beyond networked social movements as 'counter public spheres'.

Hindman quite rightly points out an important distinction about democratization (as a characteristics / potential of the Internet) as either normative or descriptive. It's incredible how often the normativeness lurks into research, without the researcher / author explicitly acknowledging it (having read through quite a few abstracts of related  recent research, I know now it's not only me committing this sin of opaqueness. I bet the Habermasian allure of normative ideas and ideals gives many of us a sense of purpose). But ideals can only be applied when we observe, describe and understand what's going on right now; what our starting point in the process towards that desired state of affairs is.

Hindman also notes several factors that should, at the outset, make any big thinkers of Internet utopias a little wary.  The digital divide is an undeniable fact, still.  Direct (political or any other) speech in the internet doesn't mean that the speaker is being heard (by peers, political elites). Gatekeepers of information -- that were thought to hinder plurality of voices heard via old media -- exist in online communication as well.

Hindman presents several cases through which he aims to gather understanding of the potential of Internet-based democratization, in descriptive terms. His operationalisation of the issue includes analyses of 'site visibility', search engines, online concentration, and the characteristics of political blogs.  

I can't claim I understand all methodological solutions (especially the metrix for link structures are beyond my current capabilities) but the takeaways are clear. An interesting and far reaching theory developed by Hindman & collaborators is 'Googlearchy', or, 'the rule of the  most heavily linked'. This means that the more links to a site, the more easy to find and thus visible the site; that there is a 'niche dominance' so that a small portion of sites of any online community dominate; and that this niche dominance is self-perpetuating (more links attract more links...) As for online concentration, Hindman observes that the main top 10 news sources are even more concentrated online than in traditional media (and, at the same time, certain tiny online outlets receive proportionally substantial attention) -- but the middle-class outlets have experienced decline. And those political bloggers? It seems that the 'ordinary citizen' as political blogger with a substantive following is an oxymoron. The scene seems to be somewhat dominated by those well-educated and established middle-class white males (have I heard this one before?)

Conclusion: Hindman parallels participation in politics to participation in e-commerce. The infrastructure of participation may alter the patterns of who's participating and how. Surely the fantastic examples of  political activities via online and mobile media are also clear. And Hindman is quick to note that the Internet has many positive applications and implications to us ordinary citizens, including fundraising and easy mobilising. At the same time, he clearly shows that many of the (academic) normative debates have gone too far ahead of empirical evidence.

Salute to Hindman. There is nothing wrong with normativeness and optimism, but it's a fixation of mine to resist the 'evident' discourses and slogans.  The next steps following Hiondman's intervention should include more analyses, and more qualitative studies, on people's experiences of the realities and expectations of political participation in today's multimedia environment. Politics, democratisation -- or participation, as I argue in this McGannon Center working paper -- can take many different forms.

Forever Young

A quick comment inspired by yesterday's (8/26) New York Times:

I read two fascinating articles. One was the column by Maureen Dowd about on-line celebrity gossip  and about a case involving a set of lawsuits that materialised after horrendous and initially anonymous  blog-bullying.  The other one discussed Twitter's popularity and who are driving it. 

The former text documented a vile fight between a 28-year old blogger and a 37-year fashion old model; the latter noted that both Facebook and Twitter are really forums of the middle class, middle-aged (and regarding Twitter, those doing business / marketing, too). Teenagers may send hundreds of texts a day but tend to consider Twitter and FB platforms that are too public for them.

Slightly scary: 40 is the new 14? It is as if certain forms of social media allow the kind of virtual yet public teenager / student socialising; as if to show off  that while we middle-aged can still lead somewhat adult lives off-line, the inner youth has not died. And as a consequence, it is as if -- as perhaps in the case of the beauty and the blogger -- the conventional limits / ethics / adult behaviour patterns can get totally mixed up virtually and in real life.

Public Sphere and Web 2.0

Right now I'm working on a paper with a dear friend Ingrid Erickson (Social Science Research Council). Surrounded by terms like 'virtual public sphere', 'networked information economy', ' the communicative space', ' networked publics' we started to wonder how the idea and thematics of the public sphere (Habermas 1962/1989) has translated to the web 2.0 era. We know, after all, several recent and major cases of social media and user-generated content in general playing a crucial role in the US, Pakistan, Iran (see the previous blog on participation).

After searching numerous databases we noticed some broad trends:

• Conventional (especially non-US) communication studies us the PS framework to analyse old media. There are also quite a few of historical studies about television, radio and  news papers published in the past 5 years.
  
• The idea of a European PS has been very fashionable within comm studies. More broadly, the idea of transnational or global PS facilitated by the internet and other digital media is widely discussed.
• However, within comm studies, sociology or pol sci there is (yet) very little theoretical or empirical research to be found on web 2.0. Partly this may be due to the time-lag of the academic publishing process, partly perhaps because the development is rapid and the concepts and tools to study it are not up-to-date...

The main challenge, in a nutshell is this -- as Jostein Gripsrud has noted in the March 2009 special issue of the Javnost:

The discussion on how democracy is affected by the introduction and functioning of digital media and the Internet has been going on for at least two decades. (...) While there is no doubt digitisation of the public sphere adds new dimensions and new forms of discourse, the implications of these for the overall quality or health of democracy are still quite differently understood by scholars working in these issues. Consequently, further theoretical work is required, but, perhaps even more important, a variety of empirical studies.

I'm a believer in empirical work. I'm also a firm believer that the access to studies (databases) and forums addressing these issues should be even more interdisciplinary. A case in point: Ingrid, with a background in Science and Technology Studies, and vast knowledge of web 2.0 research noted how different the connotation of the term ' virtual public sphere' would be in that field -- virtual literally meaning virtual worlds. Our review of the term in the studies within 'conventional' comm studies and sociology indicated that it simply referred to the (potential) PS formed by other means than old forms of mass communication.

And I'm a firm believer that when any form of communication, involving some significant number of people, is popular, a formation of a public sphere is possible. We researchers need to show examples and options, to map good practices. 

Murdoch's Tune and its Finnish Remix

By this entry I end the short (cross-Atlantic) silence and join the chain of bloggers pondering about the pay-to-read plan of the Mogul Murdoch.

The recent Economist (the paper version, dated 8/8), summarises the matter in its fabulously concise manner:

[RM] said he expected that all of his websites would charge users for access within a year, despite his previous commitment (...) News Corporation's boss was speaking as the company revealed a quarterly loss, caused in part by its struggling MySpace social-networking site. The media mogul has sparked an intense debate about ending free access to online news content; many observers remain sceptical that such plan will work.

The Guardian's (UK) superb media blogger Roy Greenslade has posted a comment with a compilation of international reactions to the news. Somewhat ironically (given his affiliation) he remains amongst the sceptics. He summarises the discussions : "publishers across the world are dancing to Murdoch's tune" .

The tune in Finland is upbeat and celebratory. In the related story by the business paper Taloussanomat, the commercial media houses are noted to "greet the decision with joy". It will be a rocky road, but solutions for commercially viable net-based news operations will surely be found, is the main drift.

The issue here is that Murdoch's tune allows these Finnish companies, once more, to gather the complaints choir about the role of public service media company YLE.  Representatives of the two big media houses Alma Media and Sanoma are joined in unison, in stating that YLE's free news services hinder free competition. They demand that not all of the public service news services should be free; and even that YLE would become sort of pay-tv / pay-media content provider through licence fee.

The worry that lurks behind the complaint tune is more than understandable. Look at BBC's success online. Also, the UK and German debates and experiences on restricting public service media indicate that this line of argumentation is taken seriously. And a recent study about newspaper readership in Finland indicates that young people increasingly go to online only for the news. For instance, the State of the News Media study by PEW shows that the trend is exactly the same in the U.S..

Let's get to the bottom line with another quote from the Economist in its recent lead on the future of the news (and let's remember its generally conservative market- and  business-oriented drift...):

[O]nly certainty about the future of news is that it will be different from the past. It will no longer be dominated by a few big titles whose front pages determine the story of the day. Public opinion will, rather, be shaped by thousands of different voices, with as many different focuses and points of view. As a result, people will have less in common to chat about around the water-cooler. Those who are not interested in political or economic news will be less likely to come across it; but those who are will be better equipped to hold their rulers to account. Which is, after all, what society needs news for.

To echo Greenslade, would Murdoch, Alma & Sanoma be happy serving these smaller, kind of elite news audiences that pay services might create?  Those who prefer to check out news online only are most likely not the core target segments that would want to pay for online services. Greenslade suspects, in fact, that if Murdoch's plan is not only a trick to stir up the market, he will look into combining on and offline subscription.

A broader question of public service, media and democracy: I seem to remember that a key part of the very mandate of public service is to inform. Public and scholarly memory tends to be short in these days of constant change in the media landscape, but remember: in the 1990s and early 2000s the Finnish commercial television channels have complained about the entertainment content produced by public service. As so much research in Europe indicates (re: Finland, Aslama, Hellman, Sauri 2004), in past public service has very much taken the role of filling in the gap in the expanding media markets. And, yet, a part of public service mission has traditionally been full service and universal access. A tough call. 

I suppose the commercial operators are arguing that given the fee / public funding public service is not free. Needless to say, their tune is based on the idea of media content being as any product, and media policy being about industrial policy. They surely want to guarantee diverse news supply, but ultimately save their business.

Well, another option would be to take an opposite approach, a model of online quality or 'accountability' journalism as emerging in the U.S.: newspapers / news services as non-profits (see, e.g., the article by the Christian Science Monitor summarising the trend, and Leonard Downie's analysis in British Journalism Review). Finland has a tradition of press subsidies, anyhow, so some sort of model could be set up... 

Utopian thinking aside, my point is, really: Murdoch's tune and other complaint choirs do not necessarily further and broaden the core content discussion about what news will and should be and who participate in the production and distribution. It's a little scary, since, as the Economist noted, the ultimate role of news is to inform, connect people, and enable political participation in democratic societies. 

NOTE: there is such a thing as a complaints choir: it's a Finnish invention but now an international avant garde phenomenon that was featured, for example, in the PS1/MoMA contemporary art exhibition in New York... Here's an example of academic complaints, sung by the choir of the University of Tampere, Finland.

TVless Life

Television used to be my life.

I decided that was what I wanted to research when I saw my first Oprah Winrey Show in Chicago in 1992. Those were the days of mothers who dated their daughters' transvestite boyfriends. That kind of anarchy on TV, the most official and powerful of all media! Afterwards, as if to balance this out, I got to calculate content diversity indices for annual studies of the Ministry of Communications of Finland. I realised that television systems and programming strategies could also 'create audiences' and be real sites of (media policy) power struggles. I spent some 10 years researching the small screen.

TV Disappears

But since January 2008 when I moved to New York I haven't had a TV. People talked about 30 Rock and enthused about the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. I had no clue.

I noticed that I didn't desire any of it. I read online from the New York Times that my favourite show ever, ER was about to have its season and series finale (what is it about all these grand finales in 2009?) and would log on to Hulu, to see it after the 'real time' broadcast.  I would also check some excerpts of old Finnish sitcoms, on YouTube, that someone would share in their Facebook profile. I read a lot at night.

TV = Less Life

Now, having spent 6 weeks in Finland this summer I realise that more TV equals less life. I was back being hooked.

Housesitting a friend's place with a nice HD wide screen TV, I started the mornings with the public service moning show.  Serious discussions about the necessity of biking helmets. Afterwards, I felt bored (but in a good way),  engaged (in a distanced way); in other words, ready to start my day as a citizen.

Then I stayed tuned in the PSB channel TV1 for the Canadian soap, set on the 19th century Nova Scotia. Road to Avonlea (remember, anyone?) .  My taste degraded as the day grew old: The enlightened Oprah and the spin-off favourite, Dr. Phil; followed by reruns of fashion-related reality shows (Australian Top Model) and B class romantic comedy series (the Ex List) in commercial channels.

TV is National and Nostalgic...

This experience has taught me two things: how old habits such as media practices stick with us, and how broadcast TV is still very much a national construct. Although I don't miss American television, I feel attached and drawn to the kind of programming, on Finnish television, that resembles television culture that I grew up with (I'm 41).

But I also found out, as I bet many expats and fans of foreign TV shows before me, that no matter of all the webstreams and digi-TV-ready computers, the present copyright regime keeps the (free or low-cost) flow of television programming within national borders.

The Case of TV-Kaista

Professor Hannu Nieminen of the University of Helsinki has recently written a unique case study on a Finnish attempt to bypass national borders in television webstreaming (in print: Jostein Gripsrud and Hallvard Moe, eds.: The Digital Public Sphere: Challenges for Media Policy, Nordicom).

He tells a fascinating story: 

From summer 2006 TVkaista has offered a global service which allows anybody from anywhere in the world to have access to all Finnish free-to-air television broadcasts for a small fee. Only difference to watching live television is the time that it takes to record the programme before having access to the copy.  In autumn 2006 major Finnish television companies challenged TVkaista for breaching their copyright. The argument was that in effect, TVkaista was nothing but commercially motivated re-transmission of the TV-companies’ copyright-protected programmes, and as such it was plainly illegal. TVkaista, in turn, claims it only offers recording service, not the programming.

Nieminen concludes:

• TVkaista as a service-format is an exciting example of the hardships that today’s global copyright governance faces. There is an urgent need to study similar experimentations and their reception in other countries. Does the prevailing copyright regime offer any real solution to TVkaista’s challenge? 

• The case of TVkaista brings out interesting topics concerning cultural democracy in the digital era, especially regarding both the creation of comprehensive and publicly accessible national audiovisual archives, and the competencies of the ex-patriots to actively participate in the social and cultural life of their home countries. However, is this participatory potential is real or is it just wishful thinking? If it is real, what more is needed in order to make it stronger?

• From the viewpoint of the European public sphere, the case of TVkaista includes promising prospects: these kinds of services can be seen both to represent and to promote a new kind of European cosmopolitanism. Again, the problem is if this cosmopolitan promise is just our optimistic projection or do we have some concrete evidence of the democratising effects of such services?

Nieminen's article depicts a case par excellence of how TV could matter, precisely because it's national but its distribution is potentially global. At the same time, the discussion on the role and funding of Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) continues, e.g., online in yesterday's (8/19) biggest Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat. The core idea simplified: although people might not watch TV they are likely to follow content though some distribution channel. Consequently,  every household should pay a 'media fee' and that would be used to fund public service media. 

As noted in my last post, commercial media houses are in a mission to challenge YLE's existence in all possible ways. Not surprisingly, a new poll (commissioned, unsurprisingly, by the Finnish Association of Newspapers,  a major opponent of PSM) showing people's major discontent to the idea most comments to the news item seem to call for a narrowed mission for PSB, and budget-based funding. 

Long Live TV!

Television is no longer only the apparatus in the living room. Public service is no longer only broadcasting. And mainstream audiences are indeed getting more and more comfortable in watching content on their laptops,  as the New York Times recently reported:

By some estimates, one in four Internet customers now uses Hulu, an online home for NBC and Fox shows, every month. “Dancing With the Stars,” the popular ABC reality show, draws almost two million viewers on ABC.com, according to Nielsen. (...) While online video is not going to replace television anytime soon, it is now decidedly mainstream. About 150 million Internet users in the United States watch about 14.5 billion videos a month, according to the measurement firm comScore, or an average of 97 videos per viewer.

At the same time, TV still gathers biggest audiences, most ad money, and even changes the aesthetics and duration of the online video. From the aforementioned NYT article:

Production companies are now creating 10- and 20-minute shows for the Internet and writing story arcs for their characters — essentially acting more like television producers, while operating far outside the boundaries of a network schedule. (...)

Yet TV networks get much of the credit for the longer-length viewing behavior. In the past two TV seasons, nearly every broadcast show has been streamed free on the Internet, making users accustomed to watching TV online for 20-plus minutes at a time. 

To echo the scholar/media practitioner John Ellis, who set to write his book Seeing Things about the death of television, but had to change his mind: Television is not dead. Television did not kill cinema. Net/mobile video content will not kill television. There will be interaction, and mingling and mixing, and convergence. 

As the case of my old habits and TVkaista show, the conventional, 'old-fashioned' characteristics and qualities of television (national-bound aspects, public service traditions,  'liveness' and simultaneous consumption) could be used to its advantage. In the times of Ipods, vinyl records became popular again. Rephrasing Ellis: the lone net surfer may increasingly begin to yearn the sense of common witnessing.

Much Ado about Participation

It seems to me that in today's public and scholarly discourses about the media the underlying issue is always about 'participation' .

To start with, there's the aspect of a kind of media (form & content). The term 'Participation Media' is frequently used to refer to cross / multimedia content production and products, as well as to interactive possibilities for consumers to take part in the production. Most often, the presumption still seems to be that the framework of participation media is provided by specific, conventional media institutions, and a great part of the content is produced by professionals -- such as in so called 'reality programming' where individual audience members vote by mobile and chat online.

At the same time, we know how 'informal' media outlets and social media tools facilitate informal new agency functions and serious political activism (here's an example of an interesting analysis on the US). Facebook and Twitter provide for the most current, and infamous, examples regarding Iran, but for instance professor Ullamaija Kivikuru has analysed the Tsunami news coverage in 2005 in Finland and noted the importance of Finnish diving sites in providing the most up-to-date information about Finns in Thailand.

Yet another mutation of the theme is a certain crowd-sourced encyclopedia (we know what I mean) or often short lived projects of crowd sourced online journalism (see also the PEW report), or Facebook-directed animation, or a collaborative translation service for TV shows... The central aim is the joint production, and while there is a hub that gathers the information, the production is not facilitated by and/or channelled through conventional , professional media production and distribution means.

Then there are the more scholarly, conceptual and abstract discussions about how audience members are addressed by the media and/or how they position themselves. The conventional dichotomy of citizens versus consumers still lurks in the background, but (as I noted in the previous post) some researchers have come up with new roles (or modes of address) such as that of a customer, player (Syvertsen), or 'enjoyer' (Costera Meier). To be sure, for example my analysis of Finnish television journalism some five years ago already revealed that within that relatively formatted genre (or generic programme family) there were several very different and distinct way to address the (imagined) recipients of journalistic contents.

In broader terms, some scholars want to bypass the idea of audiences and talk about 'audienceship' as referring to the very interface between audiences and texts (Li; as opposed to, I guess, the subject positions of audience members); while others note that the idea of mass communication and 'the work' of its audiences, are still valid concepts, when appropriately reconfigured (Napoli).

It is clear, however, that the slogan of 'participation' -- audiences as 'participants' in (or even 'in partnership' with) the media -- is a marketing strategy of both conventional commercial and public ('mass') media organizations. In terms of (internal and external) public service ethos, clients and prosumers have already a while ago bypassed the core idea of citizens (regarding the Finnish case, this is noted by researcher Johanna Jääsaari, in a forthcoming article by the research team of the project Media, Citizenship and Circuits of Power).

A White Paper on Public Media 2.0 by the Center for Social Media notes laconically that 'The people formerly known as the audience are now at the center of media'.

At the same time, it is curious that some recent surveys on the topic, in the US (PEW) and in Finland (the Circuits of Power project, by Karppinen & Jääsaari), seem to indicate audiences' criticism towards the media. The US/PEW survey on citizen-based media verified that citizens are mostly used as sources rather than given opportunities to really produce journalistic contents. The Finnish respondents felt that the least likely parties to have any influence on media contents were audiences.

Two things come to mind, one completely practical (and normative), the other theoretical (but to be operationalised in research, for instance).

While content, distribution and the related roles of those (formerly?) known as audience members are important in the participation discussion, there's yet another sphere which is becoming increasingly crucial, in terms of content and access. IMHO, participation in (or, just to begin with, the awareness of) media policy making is a crucial aspect of the entire participation process. And I mean real engagement.

The situation is analogous to participation in content-making. The ability to send an SMS comment to the current affairs TV show is not an incredibly radical solution. Some years ago, I did a brief analysis of the content of a website by the Ministry of Communication. The site was set up to allow citizens the possibility to comment on 'Radio and TV programming in 2010', read: how they think about the role of public service. What emerged, among other things, was a lot of resigned skepticism on decision-making processes.

I'm not an expert on contemporary political climate and participatory modalities -- this may be the case every time when citizens are asked to comment or participate in such informal manner. I'm just thinking, by the way of an illustration, the momentum when organizations like Prometheus Radio and the Free Press were able to mobilize millions of Americans to challenge the FCC regarding ownership regulations in 2003-4. And I'm thinking the hundreds of transnational advocacy and activist organizations that are interested in rethinking and challenging media policies, nationally and globally (see, e.g., the Resource Database of the Mediaresearchhub).

If I were employed by any European public media organization, I'd probably work on launching a mega campaign on behalf of PSM. I'd reach for grass roots allies of all kinds (from social justice NGOs to consumer organizations), I'd use all kinds of social media campaigning tools. And I'd work on media literacy so that people would understand the questions of diversity and access, net neutrality, and the like. And what PSM and related policy-making have to do with them.

Another point that I'd work on, as a scholar, would be how to assess participation. As Bridget Griffen-Foley has so humorously proven, 'audience participation' has existed at least over a century -- so what can be new and revolutionary? And don't give me new media platforms as the explanation. While all kinds of texting, chatting and blogging can be fun, I'm still an old-fashioned believer of the possibilities of mediated communication to build up and strengthen democratic societies.

The most sober, and ethical, and suitable for the foundation of PSM, and useful conceptualisation that I have come across (but I may be biased) is Peter Dahlgren's (2005) idea of Civic Cultures (see also this article). If it is claimed, as it seems to be, that participation is now the key to a democratic mediated communication (and perhaps even to related public sphere/s), then what kind of participation really counts? While scholars like Liesbet van Zoonen have celebrated the immense power of the engagement and participation fostered by reality shows, that format, and the kind of aspects it brings out in the participants, may not be transferable to all kinds of contents and purposes of communication.

I claim that the five circuits of what Dahlgren labels as civic cultures are quanti -or at least qualifiable, researchable concepts, that is:

Does participation (participatory possibilities) foster:
1) knowledge and competencies (related to democracy)
2) values (procedural and broader)
3) affinity and trust (providing 'minimal sense of commonality among citizens in heterogeneous late modern societies')
4) practices (those necessary for democracies), and/or
5) identities (as participants in a democracy).

Did I just set up a postdoc challenge to myself?

Second Lives. Rethinking Research on Public Service Media

Some time ago I attended an inspiring conference dealing with 'public service media (PSM), participation, partnership and media development'. It brought together scholars and some practitioners, too, mostly from Europe, to brainstorm about the future of PSM.

Sneaking into a working group well on its way, I entered just in time to hear the presenter say: "I need to begin by repeating what my distinguished colleagues have already said: I love PSB (public service broadcasting)!" He then went on dissecting dissecting the notion of the public sphere and suggesting several theoretical modifications.

United We Stand

As a European media scholar I recognize the discourse and the sense of camaraderie from numerous occasions. Such a sentiment of alliance between scholars and the institution of PSB has even said to have contributed to the academic popularity of hard core normative theoretical paradigm in Europe, as first laid out by Juergen Habermas (1962) in "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere". The idea of a necessity of a democratic public sphere was relevant in defending the public broadcasting ethos in the commercializing media markets in the late 1980s and 1990s.

I salute the principle above (demorcacy enhanced by a -- mediated -- public sphere). I honor any sense of true engagement in scholarship, as it's to rare indeed. I also understand that a scholarly commitment to the public service ideal is still going strong, prompted by the fierce competition for audiences, within a media market and across markets, both geographically speaking and in terms of different media.

As the former CEO of the Danish public broacaster (DR), Christian Nissen, has summed it up: mass markets do no longer exist; the socio-cultural climate is fragmented and individualised; and globalisation in the media landscape is a fact. (He talks about Europe but this surely applies to other parts of the world, too).

And, as for instance the Norwegian media scholar Trine Syvertsen has noted, audiences are no longer only citizens and consumers, but customers and players -- and content producers. The current economic situation has shown the fragility of commercial media, but hasn't freed more public money for public media. In this brave new word, PSB must radically rethink its mission when transforming itself into PSM.

In many (Western) European countries the PSB organisations have been in the forefront of digital development. While they led that bandwagon by developing infrastructure, that was all they got; there was little money left for proper, innovative content development. Also, the rights for old PSB institutions to be present in 'new' media platforms has been restricted in several countries, or at least fiercely debated in many others. (Such debate, initiated by commercial media, is going strong in Finland as we speak, coupled with the age old critique of the licence fee as the financing model, see a short example....)

At the same time, Karol Jakubowicz (one of the most prominent European public service scholar-practitioners) and other scholars and PSB practitioners have strongly argued that in order to survive, public service media need to mean public service broadcasting plus all the relevant platforms plus web2.0 (social media).

In the current stormy weather for PSM, a survival strategy, or two, is thus very much needed (whether in terms of policy support, popular support, content mission, other special remits...), and scholars can surely help in suggesting scenarios and providing empirical evidence (or counter-evidence) of related and affecting trends. But given the complexity of the challenges, I'm not sure that 'loving public service broadcasting' is the most fruitful starting point.

Love Needs Not to Be Blind

Loving public service is like loving democracy: the theories are plentiful, mostly beautiful (and necessary) but the reality is always more messy and contradictory. And it's those latter, concrete, empirical aspects (such as policy or financing questions; or institutional practices) that receive relatively little attention from European scholars, compared to the re-theorisation of the core idea.

(Although just learned about a conference addressing mainly the financing part, in CAMRI, University of Westminster, this Oct).

It might be useful for policy-oriented scholars or organisational analysts to expand the interesting research done so far about European regulatory models and approaches to PSB and new media, to map concrete explorations, experiences and innovative solutions outside the Fortress Europe.

But even more poignantly, the meager academic contribution is evident regarding the very re-definition of what we mean by public media. There are only very few truly alternative visions to the existing traditional, nation-bound, centralised, all-around, full-service institution. In other words, I have never heard one European scholar date to suggest that perhaps nation-bound, conventional PS model could at least partly be substituted with something else.

I had to move from Finland to the US to see this. I had always thought that the public media in the States (PBS, NPR) was a caricature of the European model; maybe alternative to commercial networks but exclusive and elitist. Ignorant me.

Despite the the immense commercialisation and concentration of the markets there are many, many interesting and vibrant examples of community and local old and new media. Some NYC-based journalists, working for one of the big weekly newsmagazines, recently told me they get their real news from their neighbourghood weekly newspaper. And as for the bigger institutions, especially NPR has been able to hang on and provide alternatives, also online.

It has be also understood that some media are no longer nation-bound but either local, or, issue-driven, or, transnational, borderless. BBC World or the regional Finnish YLE radio news are great endeavours but do not exactly cater represent diverse voices or new approaches for diverse audiences.

I have begun to think that maybe European big and stiff PSMs could learn something from the grassroots. And, to my surprise, I seem not to be the only one, as the European Parliament has begun to see the potential, wanting to revive community media to support European civil society (see also the summary of their study on the state of the art of community media in Europe). Now we need scholars for independent analyses and innovative suggestions (or at least, taking part in them).

Second Lives of Public Media Scholars

In sum: The idea endorsed by most by public media scholars and practitioners (and some policy makers) in Europe seem to be that public service organisations should become like the virtual world Second Life: a state-of-the-art, open source, (greatly) user-generated forum that entertains but educates and informs (and serves educational organisations, governments, non-profits), even may do some business.

But at the same time, the dominant discourses seem to indicate, this kind of PSM would still be a kind of an avatar to the existing PSB system, remit, policies, institutional structures, and so on.

Now it's the high time that public media scholars create new avatars, descend their ivory towers, leave the Habermasian bourgeois cafes and BBC fan clubs, and start to take roles of public intellectuals. Not only as lovers of PSB, but lovers of diverse 'counter-commercial' media. The adoration for public service cannot entail institutions but their mandates -- can those mandates be spread out, shared, networked and 'crowd-sourced' somehow? Or how to ensure true sustainability of the PS values of access to, and diversity of, mediated contents, and their unifying, engaging aspects?

The task will not be easy: As a prominent British PS scholar Georgina Born has demonstrated in her recent essay, there exists a certain declassement of academics vis-a-vis think tanks and consultancy businesses. In my mind, the only way to gain legitimacy is to provide fresh, new ideas and true (researched) alternatives. Some may even be wild scenarios. The important thing is, as my heroes the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu & Zygmunt Bauman have noted about the role of social sciences: it is already a great deed to show that alternatives exist to things that seem inevitable. In this case, both to the fully commercial media, and to the PSB as we knew it in Europe last century.