Another update on the RIT presidential search (I guess I’ve officially begun the participatory part of my study on citizen journalists):

Your Senators failed in their attempt to have the Senate hold a post-visit session to discuss the mood in their colleges and potentially take action on this matter. Two of the Senate’s Executive Committee voted against holding such a meeting. As Wade has noted, President Simone expressed that he felt such a meeting was a good idea.

I first heard about this on RIT’s AAUP discussion board, and this excerpt from an e-mail provides more details. I can’t articulate how frustrating this news is. Possible reasons for this could include that the Senate is concerned that they will have to work with whom ever wins and that they might end up supporting the wrong horse. Or, perhaps some felt that if the Senate backs Dr. Destler, it might lead to chilly relations with the current administration (the general opinion on campus is that Dr. Watters is President Simone’s pick for the position). Or there could be those on the executive committee that simply don’t want the voice of the campus heard.

If it is any of those reasons, what occurred was an act of cowardice, a distinct lack of spine. We are in the midst of a critical time in RIT’s history and leaders of our Academic Senate has shied away from the responsibilities of their positions. Its difficult to see how we as a campus can move forward when our leaders retreat from this most important of discussions.

Kudos to President Simone for encouraging that debate to take place. Kudos to everyone who has participated in the various surveys and written e-mails. Get involved in the debate, even if it isn’t going to take place in the Academic Senate! We have to lead, as our representatives have chosen not to.
Here are things you can do:

• RIT Faculty, complete the survey that the Academic Senate has provided. Note that you are able to express comments in this one.
• Alumni, e-mail RIT’s Board of Trustee’s with your thoughts on the candidates.
• Get the word out! Get the debate going on and off campus. Alum’s, we’ve maintained connections, send out the call to e-mail the Board to people in your cohort. Faculty, contact former students and get them involved!

——————-

Two parting points:

1. Why all the effort? One, I believe in RIT and want to see it continue to improve. Two, I believe in Rochester NY and want to see it improve as well. There’s a lot at stake here for both areas. As the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle puts it, what’s at stake is [t]he future of one of the area’s most important institutions. Rochester Institute of Technology is the area’s largest four-year higher education institution with nearly 13,000 undergraduates and 2,300 graduate students. It also is among the area’s 10 largest private-sector employers, with close to 3,000 full- and part-time faculty and staff.
2. There could be one more reading for the Academic Senate’s choice: they felt that if they decided for Destler it might hurt his chances. Even if this hypothesis were true, the choice is still wrong and acting out of fear. This needs to be discussed and regardless of candidate, we need to take a stand.

Thanks to the previous post on RIT’s search for a new president, I’ve had a noticeable jump in traffic. Thank you to everyone who e-mailed, left comments, or talked to me in person about the points I raised in the last post. More importantly, thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to send a note to RIT’s Board of Trustees.

For those new to the site, the short version is this: RIT is in the process of picking a new president. There are concerns that the Board of Trustees may lean towards Dr. James Watters, RIT’s CFO. He’s the wrong choice for all the reasons listed in my previous post. I am asking anyone connected with RIT, especially Alumni, to communicate to the board that they feel Dr. William Destler, Provost of the University of Maryland, is the correct man to lead RIT into the next stage of its development.

I truly believe that if enough alumni, student, faculty and community voices are raised, the right man will be offered the Presidency here at RIT.

In the meantime, if you are still unsure about the situation, or need to see more opinions as to why Dr. Destler is the right man for the job, take a look at the following:

• A two part interview with Dr. Destler conducted by an independent faculty publication at the University of Maryland (Part 1) (Part 2). You’ll find that while Destler may not always give the answer the interviewer wants to hear, he’s always open to discussion, willing to admit when he’s wrong, and honest about a number of University shortcomings.
• Comments from RIT’s American Association of University Professors public discussion board:
  • ProfRay: Dr. Destler is a well rounded and accomplished leader whose capacity to manage the interests of a large and diverse research institution make him eminently qualified to bring his vision, perspective and ability to our Institute. He will be able to grow this place financially and conceptually. I genuinely believe RIT is on the verge of achieving critical mass with regard to its unique attributes and its overall identity. Destler has the capacity to synergize RIT, leading us to greater prominence both nationally and globally.
  • longRITer: I greatly admire Dr. Watters - his vision, his business acumen and his abilty to bring together talent to get jobs done. A university president needs these skills. My concern is that RIT will move more towards business excellence while further losing sight of its academic mission. The colleges will become cost centers rather than centers of scholarship. That the physical plant will be beautiful while the campus slips further from its academic mission. It is clear to me that unless we reverse this trend, the campus will never move to great…. I went to Wednesday’s forum expecting Dr. Watters to be dynamic. He had the hometeam advantage - yet, his presentation and responses fell short…. The crowd was electric at Dr. Destler’s presentation. The crowd for Dr. Watters gave him every chance to pull it off. It didn’t work. It would be great to practice promoting from within the ranks of RIT. I am convinced that noble idea is too risky this time.Dr. Destler impressed me at the open forum. He comes closer to the kind of academic leader I believe RIT needs. Some of his ideas for RIT and some of the programs he has implemented at Maryland are moves in the right direction in my opinion.
  • TAD: Dr. Destler seems to me to be marvelous choice for the position that I see as that of university president. His background has allowed him to gain vast experience in the classroom, in research, in leadership and management of academic units from the department level up to the university level, as well as in fundraising. He would definitely bring an infusion ???fresh blood??? into an administration that seems to me to have become rather inbred with internal promotions, which many of us view as having become a bit of an ???old boy???s??? network (no gender issues implied)…. Having been on the faculty at RIT for almost a quarter century, I have always found it peculiar that we have never seen a person from technical field (science, math, engineering) appointed to any position in the tower. Need we be reminded of the ???T??? in RIT? Some may argue that RIT is not a traditional institution and therefore the traditional academic path to the top is anathema in a leader. Let us not make a decision here just to show the world that we are iconoclasts. In order to direct the course of RIT insofar as new directives and programs, the person at the helm will need to have more than a passing familiarity with the role of technology in our culture and society. It seems to me that the choice between these two candidates is an obvious one.

Again, if you’re interested about the future of RIT, join the conversation. We all need to be discussing this! Or take action. Make sure to complete the Academic Senate’s Survey (note: it’s a different survey than the one on the main RIT site and allows for comments) and e-mail your thoughts to our Board of Trustees!

Think about it, discuss it, and act!

Let me preface this by saying that I hope I’m wrong. I’m writing this to vent a concern and hope that in some little way it might help.

The Rochester Institute of Technology’s eighth president, Albert Simone is retiring at the end of this academic year. Over the last few days, the two candidates for his position, Dr. William Destler (curriculum vitae), currently the senior vice president of Academic Affairs and provost at the University of Maryland (College Park) and Dr. James Watters (curriculum vitae), RIT???s senior vice president for Finance and Administration and treasurer of the Institute, met on campus with students, faculty, staff, alumni and trustees.

One of these men is eminently qualified for the position. One isn’t.

Unfortunately a number of signs suggest that the better man will not get the presidency.

(Before I go on, if you know what I’m talking about and want to have an effect on the situation, e-mail your feelings to the RIT Board of Trustees - RITBOT@rit.edu- I’ll reproduce this link at the end too.)

I’m not mincing words, I support Destler. From what I can tell, so do a large amount of the faculty and students. In his two days on campus he showed himself to be a smart, straight shooter with a strong vision for RIT. We, including the most cynical of my fellow staff members, had the same reaction: He get’s it. We resepect him. We’re willing to work to his vision.

From an academic standpoint, Destler’s qualifications are solid. While his school is in the sciences, he comes from a family of humanities scholars. A mechanical engineer, his PhD and post doctorate work was conducted at Cornell. Drestler rose through the ranks at Maryland, starting as a professor and advancing to the role of Provost. He’s served as the head of PhD committees and authored and coauthored a large number of papers.

In administration and fundrasing, he’s no slouch either. He helped bring a significant number of endowments to Maryland (including negotiating the naming rights for the their sports arena with Comcast). He also spearheaded the development of a number of multidisicplinary programs at Maryland as well.

Destler sees RIT as a place where he can make a difference. In an open discussion he explained that he had turned down a leadership position a “Big 10″ school for the chance at the RIT presidency. The reason why? He felt he really could make a profound difference here, something that wouldn’t be possible in the other setting. Destler believes that RIT can develop into a pragmatic research institution, focusing on the R&D needs of businesses that, due to the current economic climate, can no longer afford to conduct this work internally. He also emphasized the role of the humanities and arts play in this type of problem solving. He acknowledged that for all it’s bluster, RIT has a lot of “maturing” to do, and now is the time to do it. In short, he had a vision that got all of us excited.

But, like I said, I don’t think he’s going to get the job.

His competition is RIT’s CFO (in spirit, if not in title). Dr. Watters may be an excellent Treasurer, but he isn’t the leader we need (I’m still trying to figure out if he’s even a true leader). He isn’t an academic. By that, I don’t mean to infer that his PhD is in Higher Education Administration isn’t a legitimate degree. Rather, beyond a total lack of published scholarship, he’s never held a full time teaching position or gone through the tenure process (which we suspect is one of the reasons that the Board of Trustee’s likes him). His classroom experience is limited to adjuncting. While this might not seem like a big issue, the fact is that he is lacking an understanding of the life and pressures that a significant number of his employees lead. And while I am new to the teaching game, I cannot articulate how much my perspective on things has shifted as I’ve made the transition from adjunct to visiting professor. Nor can I think of any major university headed by someone who hasn’t gone through this process.

Watters lack of academic grounding isn’t the only issue. His talks to the campus were anything but inspiring. He regularly used the words “training” and “educating” interchangeably. While this might seem like a picky note, it concerns me deeply that he sees RIT’s role as training people. I’m sorry, vocational schools train. The job of the university is to educate. Does that mean that we shouldn’t prepare people to enter the sphere of industry? No. But given the choice, I’ll take education over training any day.

Watters also discussed that he felt the job of a university president is to be a CFO (which is troubling because his current job is to be the CFO). In his opinion it’s the provost who should oversee academics on campus. The problem with this naive view is that the Provost is ultimately beholden to the president. This is not a power sharing arrangement. As has been demonstrated by the often chilly relationship between our current provost and president, in matters academic the President’s word carries the day. For a presidential candidate to deny that will be the case seems ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst.

He also displayed a distinct lack of vision. Where Destler continually built upon a the idea of fostering innovation on campus, Watters vision was to “continue the 135 points of excellence plan.” I’ve been here for a year and have no idea what the “135 points of excellence plan” is. And any vision that is articulated across 135 points is, quite frankly, too unwieldy to execute anyway.

In the end, Destler’s message is RIT has come a long way, but to reach the next level we have a lot of work to do. Watter’s message was, we’re very close to our goal and our primary problem is that we are not marketing the school well enough.

Utimately, Watters is a “Carp.” Please note that this is a comparison between him and Kodak’s former CEO, not the fish. As a former Kodak employee, I see a number of comparisons between him and Dan Carp. Both were individuals who, while good in financial roles, were leaders without vision. They are “company men” through and through, chosen because they were known commodities. And at points where a bold vision was necessary, they were content to play caretaker and hope for the best. And I truly believe that as Kodak ultimately suffered under Carp’s lack of decisive vision (particularly in the digital space) so RIT will suffer under Watters. And much like Carp, given how young he is, I expect that Watters will stay in his post for far too long.

So the choice seems clear. But the problem is that I expect the board will go in the opposite direction and choose Watters. This is in part because Watters has been groomed for years as Simone’s heir apparent. At his open campus forum the board member who introduced Watters referred to him as “eminently qualified for the position” (an introduction that Destler did not receive). Much of Watters presentation was about how he would work with the board as opposed to the staff. He joked with board members during his talk. I couldn’t help but feel that we were all sitting in on a “boys club meeting.”

And that leads the crux of the issue. Over the last decade, intentionally done or not, an almost adversarial relationship has formed between the faculty and the board. The rumblings I hear is that the board would prefer a so-called “business straight shooter” as opposed to a “woolly academic.” Perversely, there is a strong chance that they would reverse the campus pick for these reasons (something that has happened a number of times during the last year).

The sad part is, such a choice would be so Rochester - choosing a known and safe commodity over a visionary (see the example of Carp). And while in the end Watters wouldn’t hurt RIT, I don’t think he will help it. I think that under his reign, we will remain what we are today: A solid regional university desperately trying to convince ourselves that we’re top tier — all the while shying away from the hard work that it takes to make those words a reality. In other words, the curse of smugtown continues.

Like I said, I hope I’m reading the tea leaves wrong. And even i I’m right, I wish I really felt like there was more that I could do about this decision.

Update: There is something that can be done. E-mail your feelings to our Board of Trustees - RITBOT@rit.edu!

This is a cautionary tale of curiosity gone awry.

If you’ve been following this , you know that I’m awaiting word on whether or not I have been accepted to a PhD program. To this date I’ve heard nothing. So, drawing a naive allusion to the famed cat, one might say that, as far as I know, I’m both accepted into and rejected from all of the programs. Seems simple enough.

However, thanks to the marvels of modern technology and my own tinkering nature, I’m now even more confused about my quantum status at Cornell University.

You see, a few days ago, I paid a visit to the Cornell site to see if they had any more information up about dates. There was nothing there to speak of. So I did some poking around on the graduate admissions page. One of the links there is “Accept an Offer of Admission Online.” Being the positive (and impatient) thinker I am, I figured “what the heck, might as well see what’s there.” A click or so later, I find myself at Embark, Cornell’s online application tool. This password protected website is how I submitted my application in the first place. And it’s requesting that I log in.

So I faced a decision: do I log in and possibly find out my status? Or do I wait to see if I get a big envelope or a skinny envelope?

Curiosity (or perhaps temptation) got the best of me, I logged in, and was asked if I want to accept the offer to attend Cornell.

This discovery has launched me into a existential/systems dilemma. Had I just gotten notification that I’ve been accepted to Cornell? Was the system “smart” enough to have that record on hand? Or had it been designed with the fundamental assumption that only people who had been accepted would follow that link? Did the programmers not envision someone like me?

As much as I wish this was confirmation of an offer, I tend to think it’s probably a “dumb” system.^[1] Considering that my notification note from Chicago was dated February 26th, there a good chance a final decision has yet to be made at any of the programs. And even if the decision has been made, typically computer systems are the last ones to know. But more than anything else, I don’t want to work myself up and then get crushed.

So, for the moment I remain both accepted into and rejected from all of the programs. Only I’m just a little more so at Cornell.

—-

^[1] - The irony that, once again, I’m twisting on the end of questions about Machine Intelligence isn’t lost on me. Just as with my work on bots, the crux of all of this is a question of whether or not the machine knows as much as I give it credit for knowing. Oh well, while these systems may be toying with my emotions, at least I didn’t give my credit card out this time.

Notice anything funny outside the office window?

A deer decided to bed down today outside the office of Professor Williams and Vogl. We’re not quite sure how long it was there for. It must have felt the row of small hedges gave it some protection from the elements (and the students). As for us professors, clearly aren’t perceived as a threat by anything — my students could have told you that.

As I was leaving the house this morning, and stepping outside into the sunny 2 degree weather, I grabbed a couple quick pictures of the aftermath of yesterday’s snows. This is the most snow we’ve had on the ground in quite a while. Again, nothing like to 10 feet + of snow currently burying northern New York. Still, it’s not an insignificant amount at all for Rochester. On the left side of the picture you can see the area where Dre made a snow angel last night.

Here’s a panoramic view of our little piece of Hampton Lane in Penfield. It doesn’t do the piles of snow at the end of our driveway any justice.

That’s it for now. Some more research blogs are coming. And still no word on Grad programs.

Valentine’s day has come, and almost gone, here in Rochester and was marked with the first true “blizzard” we’ve had in quite a while. While we’ve gotten off light compared to places like Oswego, over the last 20+ hours almost a foot of snow has fallen on the immediate area (more in some places). RIT canceled night classes, effectively closing the campus at 6.00pm. Here’s a shot of my walk out to the car at 4.00pm today:

As far as my car itself, I found it partially buried by the snow that had fallen since I arrived on campus around 8.50am:

For Dre and myself our outside day ended in much the same way as it began: shovelling the driveway. And it was literally the same amount of snow at 5.40 (yes, it took me more than an hour to make a normally half-an-hour commute) as there was a 7 this morning. One big difference however was Dre’s decision to make a celebratory snow angel at the end of shoveling this evening. I opted not to join her.

Before I got home, I did make a stop off for supplies at the local Wegmans (it still took me about an hour to get from RIT to Penfield). Thankfully, that gave me one last chance to take a few pictures of the Valentine’s display there. Wegmans, well, went a little over the top this year. More than a little. A lot. While from the outside things look normal:

Once you got inside, things got crazy. The following panorama of the Valentines display doesn’t quite do it enough justice. The entire center island was all flowers with two florists pulling together last minute bouquets. To one side was candies, to the other side chocolate cakes. Yesterday, they actually had one of the chefs (yes, our supermarket has floor chefs), in a tux, passing out chocolate covered fruit.

But in my opinion the cat’s pajama’s was this ice sculpture:

Yup, Wegman’s Ultimate Chocolate Cake (which while quite good is no where near “ultimate”) was complimented by an ice sculpture “vase.” If there was any question before, it’s been laid to rest, Wegman’s is no longer a store, it’s a shopping experience. Take that Whole Foods!

But Dre and I were not swayed by this crass consumerism. We opted for a quiet dinner (we went out for our night on the town dinner last weekend). And, provided we’re dug out by the weekend, we’re planning a date for Saturday night.

Things here have been pretty dedicated to research postings for a while. There’s not a lot that I can say that’s really shareable right now. I haven’t heard back from Cornell, NYU, or Columbia. I learned today that Cornell’s deadline for accepting an offer is April 15th. Usually you’re given at least a month. So, assuming roughly the same timetable for all of my schools, I should know something by the beginning of March.

At RIT, we’re going into week 9 of our 11 week cycle. So things are rapidly approaching a close. There’s a lot of faculty business going on in the background. However, None of it is stuff that I can blog about.

At home things are, well, about the same. The cats continue their benevolant dictatorship over us (provided we keep the feedings coming). Dre and I continue to adjust to married life (meaning I have yet to get a frying pan in the back of the head). And in terms of martial arts, there’s not too much to say. Teaching at RIT has really overshadowed my martial arts practice for quite a bit. I don’t even want to think about what will happen next year.

Man, what a week. A ton of interesting developments in media and the online communities that I’m interested. Here’s a quick recounting (if for no other reason, so I can get it down).

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, becomes an “overnight” YouTube star with his brilliant little ethnographic film Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl=[/youtube]
He then takes it a step further and posts it to the Mojiti site where visitors can tag it with their own comments. While the Wesch’s video can be taken to task for what it doesn’t contain, it’s a great little peice and it will be interesting to see how this affects the production and distribution of ethnographic films.

Bloggers at the Libby Trial
As I mentioned in an earlier post, bloggers and citizen journalists got direct media access to the Lewis Scooter Libby trial. Their content is being syndicated by the AP. This has brought more attention to the field of Citizen Journalism.

New York Time Editor Talks About its Online Future
Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the New York Times dropped what seems to be a bombshell in an online interview:

I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.

Sulzberger went on to break down how the online model would actually be more cost effective for the times. It’s the first time that I’ve seen anyone acknowledge this.

Edwards campaign hires and sticks with bloggers
The gist is this: John Edwards campaign hired Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, two well known blogging pundits to help manage his online presence. A number of groups, most notably the Catholic League, protested the move noting that Marcotte and McEwan have made a range of inappropriate remarks about Christians and other groups on their personal blogs. Edwards ends up stuck between a rock and a hard place:

He could either keep the women and have to answer for the at-times vulgar and intemperate writings on their personal blogs or dismiss them and face a revolt by the left-wing blogosphere, which is playing an increasingly important role in Democratic politics.

Edwards, via his official blog, announces that while the content of the posts in questions “offended” him, he keeping Marcotte and McEwab on his staff. Both Marcotte and McEwab post their own responses as well. This one has it all, clashing of speech communities, pundits, journalists, and politicians. I can’t claim to have my head wrapped around it yet. I expect were going to see a lot more cases like this in the weeks and months to come.

Yahoo launches Pipes
I’m not quite sure how to describe it. Pipes is a new visual programming tool from yahoo for combining data feeds. Like I said, I can’t quite explain why yet, but I think it’s important. If for no other reason its going to allow non-programmers to begin to create web applications mash-ups. I’m still not quite sure what I need to mash up. But if I can figure that out, I’ll let you know.

——-

I’m sure there’s more. There always is. I’ve fallen out of touch with things at YouTube. To my knowledge there still hasn’t been an official announcement about revenue sharing to the community. Still lots going on across the board.

Aldon of Orient Lodge responded to my last post on authenticity. In his post he problematized my apparent conflation of “professionalism” (or lack there of) with “authenticity” in online spaces like YouTube. Before I get to the crux of the issue, let me begin with the dual “big picture” lessons I took from this:

1. I really need to be careful with what I write. I realized at the time that my words could be taken that way, but published it anyway.
2. That said, seeing Aldon’s response really helped me continue to think about how to better frame things. So in that respect, I learned a lot from simply getting this out there. Thus this type of dialog

So returning to the issue at hand, across two posts Aldon raised a number of issues that need to be engaged. First was:

Matthew seems to suggest that the issue is either the roll of professionals in the production, or the use of techniques like having a script, having good filming and having it edited. … What is wrong with having a good script, good camera shots, or good editing? … Politicians are professional speakers. It would be foolish to expect them not to be professional speakers.

There’s definitely nothing wrong with any of that. I didn’t necessarily mean to link “professional” production with lack of authenticity, though that’s definitely the way my words played out. Based on this and prior research, it’s clear that authenticity is a complex, culturally negotiated notion between creator/performer and audience. That negotiation involves all apsects of the experience especially the performance and/or its content and the communications channels that facilitate the interactions.

That gets me back to my concerns about the comparison between Ask a Ninja, Hope is Emo, and Lonelygirl15 and the political videos produced by Edwards, Obama, and Clinton. For me the crux of the issue seems to be a question of audience and intent — entertainment versus political speech.

Let me take this in a different direction for a moment and consider the channel of YouTube. There are a number of ways of looking at it. For the moment let me break it up into the following “use” categories:

1. YouTube as a distribution tool. Put a video up on it and it can be easily aggregated across the internet. The actual interplay and response on YouTube isn’t of particular concern.
2. YouTube as an entertainment hub. When we look at traffic alone, this is by far the primary application. Much of the content has been pirated from traditional media outlets (note the Viacom crackdown as of late). Other pieces, like Ask a Ninja, Hope is Emo, and Lonelygirl15 are produced by a mix of amateur and professional creators.
3. YouTube as an interdiscursive community of Video Bloggers. These videos are a mix of self confession, commentary, debate and pundit-ism. While individual entries don’t typically get the traffic of the entertainment content, these v-Bloggers consider themselves to be the “true” backbone of YouTube (see my prior posts on this). Here especially, authenticity is critical (again see the prior posts).

Problems in authenticity arise when these boundaries begin to blur, especially between categories two and three. The controversy over Lonelygirl15 is an example. Its creators seemingly mastered the “language” (or at least a folk-formula) of the v-Blogger community. And that tension over “is she or isn’t she ‘real’ (or rather authentic)” played out for quite a while before the cat was let out of the bag. The results within much of the community was a feeling of betrayal, which would resurface in different forms in the LiveVideo discussions.

In much the same way, based on the comments the videos receive, there are a number of YouTube posters who don’t realize that Hope is Emo is actually actress Crista Flanagan parodying emo culture. Hope’s producers have stated that they “made an effort to let people who cared know it was a show.” Note that responsibility was up the the viewer - “We still get lots of emails asking if [Hope] real. Which is cool, but if those folks really cared they could find out in a click or two.” I’ll stay away from PT Barnum discussions about fooling folks. What is clear is that the producers of Hope, like Lonelygirl, choose not to include “signs” within the video posts to clearly differentiate them as entertainment.^[1]

What’s the issue here? A variety of politicos have identified the internet as the new method to get to “the people” (a category worth unpacking at a different time). The question then becomes where to make their stump. For those that choose YouTube, we move onto “how should they address audiences?” And that’s the moment where all of these questions of authenticity and production come to bare.

I think there is another vector in there as well — the question of interaction. What does it mean to encounter “the people” and what is expected of a politician in doing so. Based on feedback from a survey of both Right and Left wing radio, there’s a general frustration with the “packaging of candidates.” Pundits on both sides lament how performance is linked to polling and media consultants versus the idea of seeing politicians engage in “meaningful dialog.”

That’s why, based on the time I’m spending watching the YouTube community, I wonder if working with someone like Beatbox Giant Productions (creators of Ninja and Hope) is a step in the wrong direction for politicians. It seems to me that would represent a move towards “how can we package X for YouTube?” and “what is the formula for winning the online vote.” Likewise, it seems a step away from some form of transparency, and a step towards an old media approach to new media.

The differentation of Old and New Media is what Aldon then went on to contemplate in his post:

One of the essential characteristics of new media, to me, is the ability for anyone to do it…

In his second posting Aldon explored this idea of empowerment:

Perhaps the old media gatekeepers are not disappearing. Perhaps they are being replaced by a different type of gatekeepers. After all, YouTube and the other videosharing services have their own gatekeeping rules about what can go on the site, how it can be shared, how it makes it to the front page, etc. Social networks serve as another part of the gatekeeping mechanism as popular and well liked videos rise to the top.

Are popularity and user ratings better gatekeepers than the producers, editors, and anchors in the traditional media? The fiercely democratic, as well as those interested in ideas like emergence and collective intelligence are likely to think so.

There are a couple notions bound up in there. In particular the often cited “anyone can do [insert social computing application here]” and the “end of gatekeepers.” In respect to the prior, provided someone has access to the necessary equipment, skills and time, the basics of the statement is true. However, just because someone can do something doesn’t mean they can do it well.

Which leads to Aldon’s posting about gatekeepers. I’m of the school of thought that the visible, old media gatekeepers of today are being replaced online by transparent gatekeepers, some of which Aldon aludes to above. And at least for the moment the net effect of this transition seems to be, well, not much of a change in the status quo. Again looking at Ninja and Hope as success stories, these were products of people in the entertainment business — bringing established old media tricks to a new media world.

Serendipitously, Grant McCracken chose to write on a similar subject at This Blog Sits At. In his examination of consumer created superbowl advertisements, I think he did a wonderful job at bringing us back down to reality regarding “online/consumer empowerment.” His concludes his look at consumer enfranchisement by stating:

[C]onsumers won’t be welcome to create content unless they have most, if not all of the properties of existing marketers. Rank amateurs need not apply. Even those consumers who are “pretty gifted” will not be included. The Doritos Super bowl experiment told us, I think, that pretty good is not nearly good enough.

Maybe I’m feeling extra cynical this morning, but I tend to believe the same is true for the “entertainment” space on YouTube (note the differentiation from the community space). I don’t see YouTube (or the elimination of previous gatekeepers) as changing the face of popular entertainment. Online and off that will, by and large, remain dominated by professionals. And there is nothing wrong with that.

But in the act of building the online public sphere, I’m just not sure if those professionals are the right people to turn to for getting out a political message. Or perhaps they are right to get out an effective, packaged message, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for creating a new form of political speech or a radically different channel for it.

References

Hynes, A. (2007) What is authenticity in this digital space?

Hynes, A. (2007) Social Network Media Gatekeeping

McCracken, G. What did we learn from the Doritos Super Bowl experiment?

^[1] - I want to note that part of the confusion is that much of the visual language of entertainment media (opening sequences in particular) have been coopted by v-Bloggers. So, for example, the presence of a title sequence isn’t, by itself, a designator anymore.