Global TV History and MediaCommons

Building off of Kathleen’s last post on the digital publishing roundtable at the Flow conference, I wanted to express how incredibly gratifying an experience the conference as a whole turned out to be. There was a kind of energy rarely felt at academic conferences precisely because Flow was a conference in name only.

The roundtable format and open conversational approach to discussing the field, as well as the inclusion of non-academics on many panels generated the kinds of inspirational and frustrating conversations – frustrating in the positive sense of encouraging different voices to engage one another in open dialogue rather than speaking past each other -- that media studies scholars have clearly been hungry for.

It seemed like every roundtable, in addition to grappling with the specific question that inspired it, inevitably came around to discussions of the media studies field, what directions we ought to be heading in, what communities we ought to be engaging, and what roles the media studies scholar ought to seek out within those larger communities.

These questions are also central to the MediaCommons project, which seeks to build a community network of scholars and other media participants (whether producers, lobbyists, activists, fans, or consumers) through multimodal and multi-mediated projects that re-conceptualizes the forms and functions of publishing in the digital age. If Flow has revealed anything, it is that media scholars want more opportunities to engage with one another in conversations that are both closer to the pace that media practices occur and that they want these conversations to inspire new collaborative and interactive modes of scholarship.

So, now that the site is up, let's really start hashing things out. In large part, it's going to be up to the community to decide what types of interfaces need to be built, with MediaCommons providing flexibility and helping members find one another on the network. As I stated at the digital publishing roundtable, for MediaCommons to succeed, we need to create a space where community members are active producers and consumers; that each member has an ownership stake in extending the network in new directions.

That said, there are myriad possibilities that might be explored ranging from the “In Media Res” curatorial blogs currently being toyed with on this beta site to the development of multi-participant, multi-mediated projects such as the one suggested by my colleague, Jeff Jones, on the plane ride back to Norfolk. Jones proposed a global television history project that would involve scholars located at all axes of the globe who would design an interactive interface that used digitized clips, collaborative writing fuelled by wikis, opportunities for community commentaries through comment fields appearing alongside each clip, and a complex linking system to draw attention to the -- at times similar, at times different, but always mutually constitutive -- development of local, national, regional, and global television flows and practices.

Jones’ idea was itself inspired by conversations he had at the Flow conference with John Hartley and Joshua Green about “A People's History of Television in Australia,” a networked project funded by the Australian government focused on generating a multi-perspectival history of Australian TV engagement.

This is but one idea – though an excellent one – and still in the early conceptual stages. We’d love to hear about other types of projects that scholars would like to develop through a digital network like MediaCommons.

We’d also love to hear your thoughts about whether the history project proposed above is the type of project MediaCommons might seek to develop? While this blog entry has tended to veer towards the utopian (hell, it is launch day), we also encourage frank discussions of possible problems and shortcomings – whether theoretical or real – we might encounter and how to rise above them.