Theory

Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales was at the Harvard Blogging Conference this weekend, and he spoke about the Neutral Point of View Policy (aka NPOV) and how it might apply to Wiki News.

Wales said that the NPOV policy works best as a means to get a lot of people to collaborate and synthesize news from other primary news sources, but that it would be probably difficult for WikiNews to do much original reporting. They have high standards of neutrality and verifiability, and they also don't accept original reporting unless it is from a known and trusted wikipedian.

I've been listening to the live webcast of the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference at Harvard.

I'm actually trying to implement some of the theories that the participants are talking about by combining independent investigative documentary filmmaking with open source techniques of content development.

It is really exciting to listen to it because I think that The Echo Chamber addresses many of the hot topics that came up during the conference -- issues that I've been writing about a lot of them over the last couple of months such as:

There's a big "Blogging, Journalism & Credibility" conference at Harvard that starts tomorrow. A lot of bloggers and journalists with institutional affiliations are going to be talking about a lot of concepts that I'm trying to implement for The Echo Chamber documentary.

For example, this post from BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis talks about open sourcing interviews.

In age of transparency, how do we become fully transparent to regain our credibility and trust? Let's reveal our full interviews (see Jay Rosen's and my posts). Let's reveal our process, our news judgment, the backgrounds and perspectives (and voting records) of reporters and editors.

I'm interested in trying to apply the principles of open source development to the process of producing The Echo Chamber documentary. So far, I've been using EchoChamberProject.com and its blog as the primary mediums to facilitate this integration.

I'd like share my thoughts for how the integration of the Internet and Filmmaking mediums could leverage the power of open source to find new methods to:

* Recruit volunteer help for post-production tasks
* Develop film content throughout the post-production process
* Recruit post-production expertise
* Market independent documentary films
* Create new economic competitive advantages through meaning creation
* Handle complexity and defy media logic
* Integrate objectivity and subjective judgments
* Reach new audiences

The concept of Integral Filmmaking combined with the principles of Open Source could introduce new methods for how meaning is created.

Traditionally, the Mainstream Media or documentary filmmakers had the most power in determining what meaning was created through their editing judgments.

But combining the Internet, Blogging and documentary filmmaking mediums could allow the audience to create their own meaning from information instead of relying upon the "objective" mainstream media, partisan press or closed-source documentary films.

The Open Source tactics of the The Echo Chamber documentary and website could create up to four distinct phases of meaning creation that could provide a unique economic competitive advantage.

EXISTING PROCESS OF MEANING CREATION
INFLUENCE OF CONFIRMATION BIAS
INTEGRAL PROCESS OF MEANING CREATION
FOUR PHASES OF MEANING CREATION

There are flaws with a purely "objective" press as well as a purely partisan press.

Objective mainstream journalism relies upon the government institutions and other official government sources -- but the two-party system has a virtually monopoly on the spectrum of debate.

Partisan journalists allows their political biases to disproportionately present a set of facts so that their position will win the argument every time.

Integral Journalism is a new paradigm that could potentially provide the framework to integrate objective facts with a set of possible subjective interpretations of those facts (i.e. competing partisan, non-partisan and transpartisan hypotheses).

There have been acknowledged failures of the mainstream media leading up to the war in Iraq.

My Echo Chamber Hypothesis proposes that the "He Said/She Said" objectivity constraints of journalistic production broke down after there was a consensus within the political leadership in Congress to authorize military intervention in Iraq.

After October 2002, the media served as an uncritical Echo Chamber to the Executive Branch's countdown towards war.

* How can this dichotomous objectivity constraint be overcome without resorting to a partisan press?
* Is there a new paradigm of journalistic production that can more comprehensively cover the complex issues of the day?

I have been noticing that there are a number of articles questioning the relevance of network news since tonight is Tom Brokaw’s last broadcast as the NBC Nightly News anchor.

The Echo Chamber documentary focuses on the network news because of the influence that the media logic of the electronic medium of news has on the national political discourse...

Grievances with the mainstream media are often framed in terms of the supply rather than the demand. Most analyses focus either on the field of journalism, corporate ownership, commercialization or government regulation.

But what about our culture that demands to see mindless infotainment?

I would like The Echo Chamber documentary to provide a catalyst for the process of cultural evolution based upon the insights of the dynamic nature of our culture and various theories of human development.

The following sections explore the question of how ‘the public institution’ interacts with other institutional powers of influence...

I have been struggling with how to incorporate the methodological flaws of the Media Research Center into my documentary film. For the first time, I have organized my thoughts as clearly and succinctly as I can in this blog post.

But the medium of web writing and the medium of film are completely different, and it will be very difficult to make the same caliber of an argument within The Echo Chamber documentary.

A writer has more freedom to use complex words and phrases that carry very specific meanings, and adding a hypertext link allows the reader to learn more about the difference between an inductive and hypothetico-deductive method of scientific inquiry.