Starting Points…

In House | chris, April 8th, 2005

I am thinking out loud on this page and inviting comments, please, about a very different sort of radio conversation that producer Mary McGrath and I will launch this Spring. (Production at WGBH, Boston. Syndication by Public Radio International. Sponsorship from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.)

My own forehead-whacking “aha” moment came in Jamaica three years ago, and you can hear it yourself right here:

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Chris Lydon, wearing his intention

I was hosting a supercharged late-night talk show on RJR (“Real Jamaica Radio”) in Kingston — on smart topics across the board: prison reform to post-colonial sex, reggae literature to the Jamaican compound of African and British Empire identities. “Welcome to Jamaica, mon,” a caller began. “I’m calling from your town; I’m in New York City right now.” He was one of the 400,000 Jamaicans living in Brooklyn at that moment — many of them tuned every night to the live stream of their hometown radio. And he was calling on a toll-free phone to speak about his own several Caribbean and North American identities. Boltflash! We were at a brand-new omnidirectional intersection of local-global gab, with a Yankee talk jockey in Kingston and diaspora Jamaicans listening from scattered points on the globe and feeding back on emotional and political questions with some universal resonance. Aha, indeed. I saw a starburst of possibilities. So I took this movable intersection of broadcast and Internet radio talk to Ghana (topics: Highlife music, 20th Century slavery, foreign debt, contemporary Ghanaian poetry…) and then to Singapore (topics: the wealth and un-freedom of Singapore, its thriving satirical cinema, its brilliant Malayan, Indian and Chinese cuisines…). The phones never stopped ringing. For all the polarization after 9.11, there was unmistakably a border-crossing conversational culture out there, trying to happen.

Another key “aha” moment blew right past us nine years ago this Spring. Two friends and fans of our very hip and successful talk radio show, “The Connection,” Bernard Avishai and John Clippinger, d.b.a. Context Media, popped up in 1996 to say, in effect: “You have a brilliant Internet radio show. It just happens to be on the radio.” On the Web, they said, we could conquer the world, with a new hybrid they were calling “InterConnection.” Of our established Connection show, and its audience, these prophets wrote in their business proposal: “When callers say they love the program, they mean in part that they are pleased to discover that a community was there all along. The program has shown that members of this community look to each other for help in deciding what to learn, how to vote, what to eat, and what to do with the kids on Sunday. InterConnection will deepen and expand their mutual affinity by helping them do more of what they already want to do, and be more completely what they aready are.”

The Clippinger and Avishai foresight as of 1996 was spot-on, but the timing was wrong. Our host station at the time wasn’t interested in the Internet. So the moment passed, and we are just now catching up with the general idea — as so many others are. The New York Times will realize one of these days that it is an Internet news and opinion business that just happens to print a broadsheet every day.

Between radio gigs I have become a devout blogger, audio blogger and podcaster. When Dave Winer took up his Berkman fellowship at Harvard Law School two years ago, I emailed him: “Dear Dave: Yesterday I couldn’t spell blog. Tomorrow I want to be one.” He wrote right back: “cool.” In so many words Dave said: “You know radio content. I know RSS. Let’s get busy.” Dave says the first podcast in human history was the interview I recorded with him July, 2003 and posted on Bob Doyle’s server at skyBuilders.com. It was the stream of subsequent RSS-fed interviews on my blog that landed in Adam Curry’s iPod in Europe and fired the imagination that launched iPodder

But blogging is not about the ever-improving software. Blogging is about the expressive freedom (robustly personified in Dave Winer) among millions of bloggers who are reviving an old American brand of self-reliance and straight-talking individualism — just in time.

I. F. Stone, blogger

Thomas Paine was a blogger without the software. So was the weekly mail pamphleteer I. F. Stone, our anti-war hero of the 1960s and 70s and the only certifiable genius I ever encountered in journalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fount of sturdy values (father of “the American religion,” says Harold Bloom) was a proto-blogger. And Emerson’s magazine The Dial in the 1840s, with Thoreau, Fuller, Alcott among the Concord co-conspirators, was the original group blog. I can get tiresome on my hero Emerson, my “God for Bloggers.” So let it suffice to say here that the recent uprising of individual voices in the blogosphere against the haughty gatekeepers of mass opinion and mass media is anything but a novelty or a danger to the American way. Emerson’s best-read essay “Self-Reliance” is definitive on the problem (“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members…”) and on the solution (“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within… Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”)

The Lowell connection. We are blessed to be joined at the hip in this radio project with the University of Massachusetts visionaries in the rebounding city of Lowell. Chancellor William Hogan, exective vice chancellor Fred Sperounis, provost John Wooding and the catalytic politico Lou diNatale came to us originally with the thought of developing a modern media curriculum, and of transforming a student-run WUML into the community voice of the Merrimack Valley. We proposed to fuse their ambition with ours for a blogospheric radio show.

Jack Kerouac of Lowell

If our heads get sometimes lost in the Internet clouds, our feet will be planted on solid ground in historic Lowell — the onetime world textile capital and home of the industrial revolution in America; home also of Jack Kerouac and James McNeill Whistler; and of the late high-tech Democrat who made Lowell a Federal museum city, Paul Tsongas. About 30 miles north of Boston, Lowell is the spot where American dreams are ever being regenerated. Among the growth stocks in Lowell today are applied nanotechnology (spinning textile fibers, among other things); a now settled wave of Cambodian immigration; the Boston Red Sox A-level farm team, the Lowell Spinners, whose 2005 season is already sold out; and UMass Lowell itself.

I’ve heard indirectly of some muttered complaints around WUML that the radio professionals from Boston are going to preempt the radio voice of students. But that is not the plan at all. No way, man. But I do have dreams for WUML — for example, that the UMass students will seize and master the new cheap and handy tools of media democracy and drive a hyper-local rediscovery of Lowell and the neighboring Merrimack towns on both sides of the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border. The river basin connecting Concord, Lowell, Nashua (NH), Lawrence, Haverhill and Newburyport is big enough, small enough, coherent enough and isolated enough from Boston to define its own diverse community voice through WUML. Maybe the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal World is a model for Lowell of fresh and intense, bottom-up multimedia coverage of a university town by its rising generation. I have another dream of watching UMass students descend with minidisc recorders on the 4000-student Lowell High School. There are 4000-plus stories behind the fortress walls, as Ira Glass demonstrated in his breakthrough NPR series on the Taft High School in Chicago a decade ago. Lowell in any event looks like fertile ground for the new media. There is no end of great work to be done there.

An epochal transformation is underway. Most of us are wary of sounding grandiose, but… I think sliced bread, even the Gutenberg revolution, maybe the wheel were little blips next to the Internet. The prophets I most nearly trust — Scott Heiferman, among them, and Stirling Newberry — argue that the change is under-hyped. I admire David Weinberger’s formulation in Small Pieces Loosely Joined that the Web is breaking up bedrock concepts like Space, Time, Knowledge and Self — that “the Web is a new world that we’re just beginning to inhabit.”

My version: one of the unspoken reasons we are drawn to the Internet is that it realizes so many of our primal old definitions of God. It’s invisible. It’s everywhere. It knows everything. Sing it now: It’s got the whole world in its hands. Its eye is on the sparrow, paraphrasing the Ethel Waters song, and I know it watches me. Why else do we keep Googling ourselves if not to be reminded that the Internet knows who I am, and who you are, too. The Internet — so closely resembling the “noosphere” that Teilhard de Chardin foresaw 50 years ago — marks a new stage of human evolution. We do not begin to see the dimensions of the new reality.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: American institutional journalism looks to me broken beyond repair. And when that neural network of the American mind goes down, our democracy is on the danger list, too. Terminal symptoms are everywhere: the wilful ignorance of and isolation from world opionion, the persistence of mis- and disinformation, the consensus that far the best coverage of our times is to be seen in the “fake news” of John Stewart’s Daily Show. It seemed almost comic, or parody, this week that The New York Times, so deeply embedded in the monstrous neo-con mythology of American Empire, was celebrating a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of railroad-crossing accidents. Where the hell have the media grown-ups gone? And now Peter Jennings has lung cancer.

At the same strange time, the redemptive energy of the new media seems suddenly to be gathering real force. “The terms of authority are changing in American journalism,” as Jay Rosen has been faithfully observing on his PressThink blog. The foreign examples are thrilling, in Hossein Derakshan’s network of Iranian bloggers and in South Korea’s reader-driven, reader-written OhMyNews. So is Dan Gillmor’s We the Media manifesto and Gillmor’s own plunge out of the print punditocracy into an experimental format of interactive news gathering.

Hugh Mcleod, Gaping Void

Dan Gillmor’s signature line — that “my readers know more than I do” — crystallizes the emergent wisdom of the new media. What if The New York Times used its Web edition to let its incomparably connected and influential readership feed back to the paper with something more than letters to the editor? For the remaining old institutions that don’t tap into an active audience, the boneyard is next.

As I lose faith in the Times’ vaguely sacramental ritual of distilling the news of the cosmos in a nightly page-one editorial conference, I am more and more fascinated by an alternative version of the daily miracle: Technorati.com. David Sifry’s tracking of Web metadata now follows the links of 8.5-million blogs. Here is broad measure of what energetic readers find important and interesting. It’s as close as anything we’ve ever imagined to an objective ongoing editorial meeting, without editors.

Mary and Chris, a noun unto itself

Mary McGrath and I fantasize sometimes about using Technorati’s top slice of the blogosphere as all the material we’d need for an Open Source news report. “Here’s what’s happening on the World Wide Web tonight…”

At Open Source, the radio show, we mean to stick like burrs to our Berkman colleagues Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca McKinnon and their Global Voices website. Their proclaimed mission is to surface the most provocative voices of politics and culture in the most egregiously under-covered corners of the world–and to “hack the mainstream media” by elevating lost issues and perspectives in the blogosphere. We like the thought that at Global Voices they will be scouting for writers who could be talkers on Open Source.

What about this 0pen-source name we have given our radio show? Have we earned our stripes inventing open-license applications for the Linux family of software? Or are we only ripping off a trendy phrase? To both questions the answer is emphatically: no. We are journalists, not programmers. I wouldn’t know source code if it bit me. But we are serious followers of the “social gospel” of open source. We believe in fact that the critical work ahead is to extend open-source ideas, so effective in computer world, deeper into politics, culture, media and the rebuilding of civil society.

Everything we do at Open Source will be “open to inspection, improvement, adoption and reuse,” in Doc Searls‘ neat formulation. We will make all the content of Open Source available under a Creative Commons license for non-commercial use, with the standard proviso that our work is credited and further use is open. (That is my voice on the Creative Commons flash video, Get Creative.) We will stay abreast of the technology for searching and excerpting our audio files and archives.

But all that is, in a sense, mechanics. The spirit of Open Source will be open source — open as to subject matter, open as to views and voices. Our favorite oft-times caller on the original Connection, the famous Amber, once remarked to me: “Chris, you treat your callers like guests and your guests like callers.” We will try to extend the same open manners to the new show, and to the new website that comes with it. We chose Open Source as a name to live up to.