The
following article appeared in CURRENT, The Newspaper
of Public Television, on September 20, 1999.
Two Way or Not Two Way?
By Evelyn Messinger
This is the question: suppose Hamlet could have created www.regicide.com
to reveal his mother's treachery, recorded his father's ghost on video, or exposed
the royal murderers to the slings and arrows of outrageous media coverage - would
he have found satisfaction short of the inevitable sword in the third act? And
more to the point, will these tools help us couch potatoes gain a modicum more
power over our own lives?
This article explores the possibility
that Public Television can take on a new civic role
by offering viewers the chance to become participants
in the public sphere - as it appears on television.
After all, for a long time now the only valid political
discourse has been in the media, the territory of
pundits, experts, the elected and the beautiful.
Regular people have mostly been excluded, relegated
to nasty slugfests on the lower wavelengths of the
electronic polity.
Public television is the only medium
that has tried to incorporate citizen discourse into
its programming, but with mixed results. Now the
Internet encourages Americans to expect a new level
of service from media - their own participation -
and advances in digital technology have opened avenues
for two-way media that could well serve these new
sensibilities. While interactivity via the Internet
has gotten most of the publicity, interactive television
technology has experienced comparable growth. The
lowly "videoconference" tools have grown
sleek on the outside while bulking up on cutting-edge
computer technology that allows a seamless interface
between this compressed video and true television.
But the technology has not yet played a significant
part in commercial broadcasting, which creates a
unique opportunity for Public Television stations
to define a new category of public service for the
digital age, by adapting interactive television to
civic needs.
For readers of this newspaper, the
new millennium will truly begin on that day in 2003
when all media are finally merged and converged,
the digital transition complete. At first blush,
this new age seems to be a paradise of empowering
tools, the likes of which Hamlet could only envy.
Yet the vast majority of media content will remain
slick and interchangeable, churned out by mammoth
conglomerates and interspersed with carefully-honed
messages that urge us to purchase. All the rest may
turn out to be too much information by half, rife
with inaccuracy, of poor visual quality and cheaply
produced.
Worried yet? If not, try this: convergence
is in actual fact divergence, the splitting up of
audiences into smaller and smaller groups of ever
narrower interests - virtual medieval fiefdoms, unconnected
and suspicious of each other, in a downward tailspin
of dwindling viewers and diminishing funds.
Any alternative to this gloomy scenario must include people taking a role, and
a responsibility, in shaping their own media landscape. This brings us back to
the question of Hamlet, the couch potatoes and two-way television. While the
Internet may give us data and opinions, few media other than television can provide
- well, the lure of being on television. Using an array of inexpensive and portable
two-way television tools, every Public Television station could create its own
interactive, local Citizens' Channel, reaching far into the community to draw
people into participating in interesting and useful programming. Citizens' Channel
programs could work on local problems, then link with sister stations near and
far to explore state, regional, and national issues. These Citizens' Channels
can become the place on the dial that enable people to come together, helping
citizens participate and politicians keep their promises.
Although we are convinced that many
television broadcasters will use this type of interactivity
in the future, Public TV is the one place where viewers
can invest their trust, and therefore their enthusiasm.
The PBS brand assures them quality, and respects
their intelligence. The goal of our non-profit company,
Internews Interactive (InterAct for short), is to
help Public Television stations take advantage of
the possibilities of two-way programming, and so
set a high level of viewer expectations, which they
alone can fulfill. Over the past dozen years, we
have explored the workability of interactive programming
on television. Our early programs used costly satellite
technology for programs like the Emmy Award-winning "Capital
To Capital," a transcontinental dialogue between
members of the U.S. and Soviet Congresses. A few
years later we used compressed video to produce the
critically acclaimed Vis à Vis series, broadcast
throughout Europe and on national PBS in 1998. Newly
available hardware costs dramatically less, setting
the technological stage for regularly broadcast spontaneous
citizen dialogue.
With the technology issues basically
solved (see below), three questions remain: Can it
be good television? If it can be good television,
why has there been so much bad "citizens" television
out there? And, as television careens towards its
next transformation, will democracy and entertainment
finally find a common house?
What Now?
Vusumi Zulu is Station Manager of
KMOJ-FM, the Twin Cities' African American-run public
radio station, and he is an organizer of the Public
Policy Forum, a group of civic activists in North
Minneapolis that meets each week at the city's famous
soul food restaurant, Lucille's Kitchen. They participated
in KTCA-TV's gubernatorial candidates debate via
compressed video link, along with Minnesotans in
Duluth and St. Paul, and a group of poor farmers
in Crookston. They all asked the candidates questions,
then stayed after the candidates left to discuss
who they would vote for, and why. "People who
are running for office need to know some of the real
concerns and issues facing us," Zulu told me, "and
they were far too willing to generalize about everyday
realities in our community." Zulu felt that
his community, comfotably gathered in their own neighborhood,
was able to supply its perspective during the debate.
KTCA continues to generate interesting
television programs by integrating citizen interaction
via videoconferencing with traditional television
techniques. They have installed compressed video
devices in their control room and can link to classrooms
and conference rooms around the state, as well as
to Lucille's and other public and private locations
that are "human-sized," as VP Bill
Hanley describes it. KTCA supported and
covered Lucille's ongoing links with a beleaguered
farm community in Crookston, Minnesota; and with
a gathering of black intellectuals in Johannesburg,
South Africa.
The Minnesota programs have been
noteworthy because they flew in the face of conventional
wisdom, which assumes that citizen participation
programs are usually boring and often amateurish.
Hanley has found novel uses for the technology, such
as creating head-on political dialogues between citizens
and elected officials. Brendan Henehan, Producer
of KTCA's popular political series "Almanac" has,
in partnership with Hanley, probably created more
two-way television programs than anyone else. His
favorite use of the technology so far placed compressed
video units in people's homes. It was, he says, a "much
more intimate model. I can see the future of getting
cameras on home PCs. We squeeze down the images into
side-by-side boxes and it felt right, a real videophone."
Why Not?
Perhaps the longest running citizen
participation series is Wisconsin PTV's "We
The People." The format defines one end of the
citizen dialogue spectrum, by inviting all comers
up to the microphone. Dave Iverson, the station's
Executive Editor, was an advocate of these types
of programs when they began years ago, but now worries
that they only attract "people who want to play
'angry citizen' on TV. We have to just find new ways
of listening," he says. "Not, 'I know,
let's do a town meeting!' " Iverson has been
watching the developments in Minnesota carefully,
and he intends to include two-way workshops on Citizen/Candidate
dialogue as part of the system-wide election-oriented
Best Practices project.
A second and more common type of
citizens' program, the form originally used in Minnesota
known as the "Citizens' Forum," selects
chooses participants found through polling to reflect
the demographic makeup of the populace. But this
format has its own problems. The "demographically
representative" participants, gathered in a
TV studio or a conference room as strangers, become
abstract versions of human beings. Television's greatest
power is its ability to reveal individual human lives,
but this advantage is left unexplored when the only
groups of people allowed to be "citizens" are
12% black, 75% white, and 13% "other."
So "We The People" creates
advocates pretending to be real people, and "Citizens'
Forum" creates real people pretending to be
representative. Either way, television is at odds
with the traditional "gathering" of citizens,
and here lies the conundrum that has plagued the
teledemocracy movement. But do these problems preclude
the appearance of citizens on television?
Bringing Lucille's Kitchen to TV
Town Hall political discussions introduced a third
way, the idea that a vibrant public gathering place
could be part of televised dialogue. The restaurant
setting, and the cheerfulness of a shared community
meal, makes for a much more relaxed group event than
at the traditional gathering places, where participants
are united only by demographic abstractions. More
importantly, the restaurant was in the heart of a
minority community, and its participants were comfortably "at
home" there. Citizens were able to express viewpoints
that may have been too bold if they'd had to drive
downtown to the TV studio.
Larry Werner is Reader Involvement
Editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and a prime
mover in the experiments which resulted in KTCA's
two-way programs. Werner was the one who first invited
Lucille's Kitchen to join the dialogue, because,
he says, the Forums were "struggling with very
white groups to reflect not-so-white perspectives." He
described this as a well-known problem of public
dialogue, called the Caucus Effect: participants
need what Werner calls "a critical mass" of
people like themselves around, to embolden them to
speak their minds. "By connecting a place like
Lucille's," he says, "people are able to
participate from their comfort zones." The Caucus
Effect problem was solved.
For political and social dialogue
to inhabit television's public sphere fulfills the
sense among Americans that ordinary citizens have
a right as well as an interest in being heard. By
including groups like the Crookston farmers and Lucille's
activists, as well as families in their living rooms
and shoppers at the mall, both the uneducated popular
opinion and the carefully-considered minority views
are allowed into the discussion in a lively and engaging
form. These viewpoints can be more incisive, more
informative, even more accurate than the larger community's
accepted perspective. In a democracy, everyone's
opinion, especially those of minorities, must be
expressed if the majority is to reach a well-informed
opinion. And if it is to be good TV.
What Next?
The "videophone" is essentially
a video compression device with a microphone, a monitor
and a robot camera controlled by a keypad. The subject
must be well-lighted, although professional lights
are not usually necessary.
These devices are placed in public
or private locations, such as a shopping mall, a
restaurant, the Mayor's office or a teenager's bedroom.
The participants see each other live on-screen, in
color and in motion, and they soon forget that there
is an electronic bridge joining them. The cameras
zoom and pan by remote control, via a keypad in the
control room. The signals from the various remote
sites are received in the studio on companion devices,
then fed into the switcher and subject to the full
complement of television techniques. A site coordinator
in the control room, on a telephone conference call
with people at each site, works with the director.
High-quality devices start at $10,000
and the price is tumbling. Low-end web-based devices
are very cheap if you already have a PC, but the
high-end systems have better video quality and are
more reliable when connected by high-speed digital
ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) lines.
Three ISDN lines combine to provide a 384 kilobit
signal, resulting in digital images of comparable
quality to a VHS tape.
Two-way television, like all television, will be great if it has great production
values, pertinent topics, fascinating people and compelling formats. If it is
to serve citizens as well, it will have to fulfill the following expectations.
1. POPULAR PROGRAMS, MANY VOICES.
Programs can use multiple "videophones," with
callers in public (malls, restaurants) and private
(living rooms, fire stations); random (street, disaster
scene) and focused (debates, investigations) locations.
Seeing the faces of the callers allows more of them
to be onscreen at once than on phone call-in programs.
So they can be grouped, and groups can be changed
often, with participants joining and dropping away.
Discussants who are too boring or too strident can
be shunted off to hold conversations among themselves.
With so many people taking part, some of them can
be "demographically representative" after
all, and some can be advocates playing angry citizens.
The whole thing will move very fast.
Great television makes the human
condition visible, and when it comes to public policy,
human lives are where the rubber meets the road.
Absorbing videotaped human stories must be included
in discussion programs much more often than has been
the case, illustrating the lives of people who are
affected by the issues.
ZDTV, a cable/satellite channel
focused on technology, has experimented extensively
with webcam calls. Surveying its viewer/participants,
ZD discovered that they feel a deep sense of ownership,
seeing it as 'our' channel. We expect that viewer/participants
in entertaining programs aimed specifically at citizen
participation will develop this sense, once viewers
feel comfortable communicating from both private
and public locations.
2. LOW COST. -way compressed video
can be transmitted from a wide variety of locations
and display a broad range of image quality, for costs
that would be considered incidental under today's
production budgets. In 2003, we expect that people
will have access to a range of video transmission
devices at home and at the office. These will span
the range of video quality: low-end video email images
from cellphones and computers, two-way webcams, high-end
compressed video signals, and full bandwidth two-way,
from offices and professional settings.
Once you invest in the small and
portable hardware, install it on location, create
a set for the grand interactive circus and start
transmitting live, you discover that the longer you
stay on, the less it costs. Because compressed video
transmission charges are so low, the most economical
way to conduct live, interactive programming, is
to keep rolling.
3. INFORMED CITIZENS. There's no
point in simply adding more ignorant screamers to
the airwaves. Citizens dialogue programs can link
up with Study Circles and other well-known deliberative
structures, informing the participants -- without
putting the informing process on television. As for
minorities with specific interests, they are participating
specifically because they have a point of view and
so have no need to feel neglected. The more perspectives
given a voice the better.
4. SPONSORSHIP. From somewhere between
Kinko's copy shops (with 150 videoconference units
world wide) and ZDTV's webcam network, from somewhere
in the mall where people stop to talk when they go
shopping and the vast vaults of digital commerce,
will come the funding from sponsors eager to associate
with the one legitimate citizens' soapbox. An entire
channel - a Citizens' Channel - would be even more
effective in giving people a reliable place where
they know they can go to be part of the ongoing dialogue,
and giving supporters a way to be associated with
this popular pastime.
Until there are many citizen participation
programs on television, there is no way to know how
well they will work. If people know that can be on
television by engaging in intelligent public discourse,
will they be more likely to speak, to think, to engage
in public life? Will they want to tune in to "our" channel?
Once the airwaves are full of the opinions of the
less heard, will Americans become more tolerant and
more humane? Will politicians be more likely to keep
their word if it was given to a citizen in full view
of an eagerly watching public? Good questions. Let's
find out.
