Archive for the 'culture' Category

The Open Source Media Manifesto

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

Sometime before 2004, I’m not sure exactly when, J.D. Lasica, working with the Internet Archive, published an Open Source Media Manifesto. It’s still an interesting read, especially with regards to some of the ways it’s gotten out-of-date.

We hold free expression and public commentary to be fundamental to living in a democracy. If we are going to have public education and free elections, then everyone must be able to express themselves and publicly critique each other’s views.

The manifesto unites the spirit of open source with that of grass-roots journalism. Lasica discusses it in some detail here. Unfortunately, I don’t think the project they envisioned really prospered, not in the way that Creative Commons has. But it’s not like the idea went away. For instance, Open Source is a PRI distributed radio show that works in the spirit of the Open Source Manifesto:

We designed the show to invert the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a public radio show with a web community, we’re a web community that produces a daily hour of radio.

The manifesto appeared prior to the explosion that was YouTube—founded in February of 2005. Suddenly “Broadcast Yourself” has become a slogan attached to a business model rather than the original and radical notion proposed by the manifesto. Among the goals that Lasica set out in the manifesto was to create tools for annotation and quotation via deep-linking to media. Tools for annotation are no longer needed because YouTube style videos can be embedded directly in your commentary. Tools for deep linking aren’t needed because quotation can be performed by digital copy at no greater expense (to the YouTube poster) than quotation by reference.

To a certain extent the idea of “open source media” is materializing as a lived reality. At the same time, we’re seeing the rise of “consumer generated content,” which is probably closer to the terminology used in boardrooms. The distinction, I think, is largely economic. Open source media is economically agnostic—money making certainly isn’t verboten. On the other hand, consumer generated media implies a capitalistic framework that maintains the traditional roles of sellers and purchasers, only now individuals can wear more than one hat. Lawrence Lessig recently gave a talk that articulates what is at stake.