Evolution

I aggregated the timelines for the Pre-Production, Production and Post-Production Phases of The Echo Chamber Project for a paper that Dr. Cline's is working on.

Below is an overview of how the film came about and where it has been so far. It also traces the evolution of the collaborative aspects of the post-production.

More details about the pre-production phases can be found in The Origins of The Echo Chamber Project as well in the Baltimore City Paper cover story written by Charles Cohen.

More details about the actual production can be found by reading the interviews that have been transcribed.

There are links to blog entries covering the big post-production highlights in the timeline, and more details can be found by sifting through the blog archives...

Using the tagging technique in Final Cut Pro described here, I was able to come up with a number of major themes from the interviews that I conducted with 13 leaders of the new media movement at the Personal Democracy Forum.

* Internet revolution was in the Demand Side and not just the Supply Side.
* Audience are not just consumers, they're now producers
* Audiences can now supply their own demand.
* Audience wants more choice and control
* Markets are conversations
* Journalism is becoming more of a conversation than a lecture.

JD Lasica links to an interview from Lost Remote talking about the rise of stand-alone video journalists.

LOST REMOTE: What is a video journalist?
ROSENBLUM: A Videojournalist is a television reporter who works alone with a small digital camera and laptop edit the way a print journalist works with a pad and pencil or a laptop. This is about reporting and authorship. As anyone can pick up a pencil and paper and try to write (or a typewriter or a wordprocessor), so we also encourage anyone with the urge and a vision to pick up a camera and an edit system and see that they can make. This is, after all, how most writers get started. TV should be the same.

In the spirit of "Personal Democracy," I created my own virtual conference at the Personal Democracy Forum 2005. After attending the opening talk and two morning break-out sessions, I pulled aside the following 13 conference speakers and interviewed them about emerging new media trends:

UPDATE 2/8/06: Click on the names below to listen to the interview -- or use this Interview Audio feed to download all of the interviews.

	Markos Moulitsas	DailyKos
	Jeff Jarvis	Buzzmachine.com
	Hugh Hewitt	HughHewitt.com
	Dan Gillmor	Grassroots Media Inc. Author of We the Media UPDATE: Center for Citizen Media
	Chris Nolan	ChrisNolan.com UPDATE:Spot-On.com
	Halley Suitt	Halley's Comment Blog
	Rebecca MacKinnon	RConversation & Global Voices Online
	Doc Searls	Doc Searls Weblog
	Mindy Finn	Republican National Committee Deputy eCampaign Director
	Sheldon Rampton	PRWatch.org & SourceWatch
	Christopher Rabb	Afro-Netizen
	Scott Heiferman	Co-Founder and CEO of Meetup.com
	Hossein Derakhshan	Hoder.com

I captured about 2.25 hours of interview footage by lurking around outside the conference rooms from noon until 7 p.m. I definitely had a unique conference experience, and I plan on cutting together some highlights and open-sourcing the audio of the interviews soon.

With so many new media luminaries at one place and one time, I thought that it'd be a shame to pass up the opportunity to get their predictions on the record for how they see the evolution of media, politics and culture.

Nearly everyone seemed to agree that things are changing so fast that it's really hard to predict exactly what is going to happen.

The emergence of blogs and podcasts have already made lightening quick impacts on politics and culture.

There are even more changes afoot with the technological infrastructure and tools such as CivicSpace & Drupal that have the potential to really empower the grassroots. The public will soon become a powerful institution in it's own right.

I pretty much talked with everyone that I targeted except for two:

Josh Marshall wanted to do an interview but was swamped with all of the irons he has in his fire. He said to e-mail him to try to do a quick interview on Tuesday, but he evidently was too swamped since I never heard back from him.

Arianna Huffington also seemed willing to do an interview, but I couldn't pin her down between running between her panel, Reuters, CNN, personal meetings, phone calls, etc.

pdf2005

What is the best way to manage personal knowledge when you're in the middle of a project that is rapidly evolving? I'm trying to solidify my lessons learned from the SxSW Interactive Conference while still moving the project forward.

I'm am going to experiment by recording some of my thoughts into a audio file, save it as a MP3 and try using Ourmedia.org to save it to archive.org and link it to my site as a podcast. Not sure if I'll have time to figure out all of the nuances of a RSS enclosure to make it a full-blown syndicated podcast, but I hope to figure out how to utilize the free bandwidth of the Internet Archive.

I thought that I would pass along and give a brief overview of Adam Leonard's Master's Level Thesis called "Integral Communication." Leonard builds off of Ken Wilber's Integral Philosophy to provide a framework for integrating the seven major branches of communication theories.

From my perspective, Wilber's ideas are providing the theoretical glue for tying so many different concepts together and helping catalyze my learning curve.

The taxonomy of Values and Worldviews listed in Appendices A, B, C & D is an interesting perspective from Don Beck's Spiral Dynamics integral.

My high school picked me as an alumni of the month for Feburary, and they are setting up a display case where they want me to send some awards and other things about me. But instead of doing this, I've decided to write an open letter directly to the students -- It's very influenced by the types of things that I've been reading for my open-source documentary, including Dan Gillmor's We The Media

TO THE STUDENTS OF BEECH GROVE HIGH SCHOOL:

My name is Kent Bye and I'm working on a documentary about the media.

As I reflect on how this documentary started and where it has ended up, I notice how much it has evolved. I have been writing up synopses and talking to a number of people about the project, and I realize that there is some confusion about the motivations and intentions of The Echo Chamber.

Is the film is going to criticize the politics of the selling the war to the American people and serve as a thinly-veiled attack on President Bush? Or is this a serious academic investigation of the downfalls of objective mainstream journalism?

ORIGINAL MOTIVATIONS

Addressing the market demand in the previous post, here is what I tentatively see as what The Echo Chamber can provide to the market:

* The Echo Chamber explores the sociology of the media and brings a deeper understanding to the media's role of creating meaning and shaping the cultural consciousness.
* Provides an opportunity to investigate the media bias culture wars in the context of the build-up to the war in Iraq.
* Can be used as an outreach tool for individuals to bridge the polarized culture gap -- Grievances with the mainstream media provides a common ground for conservatives and liberals to come together and have further political discussions that bring a deeper understanding to each other's perspectives.

The increasing rate of natural resource consumption seems to be a "vital issue of the day" that is often ignored by the elite political leadership and therefore the mainstream media. The sustainability issue is still an unanswered question, and many would argue that it is the biggest challenge facing everyone on the planet today.

It is probably safe to assume that in the context of US "National Security Interests," that oil at least played into the equation of going to war with Iraq. It also probably safe to assume that access to water and oil are going to cause many future conflicts.