Educate, inform, entertain

It's the eve of SuperBowl Sunday -- a unifying collective experience of sorts -- and the going has gotten even weirder of late. What a week: Britain under a deluge of whitewash (although surely high-quality whitewash isn't meant to be so transparent?), and Blair can barely conceal his glee as Auntie gets caught in the mangle.

Anyone growing up in Britain will have been profoundly influenced by the BBC, in its many and varied dimensions. As a young teenager, I remember Sunday car trips to Hoddesdon listening to the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy on Radio 4 (these were the days when transistor radios were neat). Radio Four was a fixture in my house; the soundtrack to breakfast, and The Archers at teatime. Television: Z Cars, The World About Us, Newsround, Blue Peter. Match of the Day. Radio One. John Peel! The World Service: "This is London" and the strains of the Lillibulero. Nowadays, http://news.bbc.co.uk/ is the homepage of my browser. I don't think Americans have anything remotely equivalent; it's probably hard to imagine growing up without ever seeing an advertisement on the box.

Some background, then. Wikipedia has a truly great article on the British Broadcasting Corporation: publicly funded, national broadcaster; radio, TV, and "new media"; important technical innovator and standard-bearer; cultural icon, with a deep legacy from Lord Reith: something of a patrician bent, and a mission to inform, educate and entertain.

The BBC is quite independent, and mostly funded by a very strange per-household tax on TV reception equipment. (Before TV, there was a purchase tax on radio receivers). There are plenty of good reasons to oppose the license fee, but I'd like to hope that public service broadcasting, with a reliable source of funding and editorial independence, will be part of the future as well as the past.

Reith wanted a national broadcaster to "make the nation as one man". To me, that's a statement of the central role of collective experience in "culture". It's a diverse world we inhabit, and experience is fragmented; yet everyone's outlook is influenced most powerfully by experiences in a social context. These collective experiences make "us" what "we" are.

What forms of collective experience can be created? What forms of mediated experience are "good"? These are the questions on which the BBC was founded. Some of my answers would mark me as an old hippy, and as a utopian groupware technologist. Some would surely make me seem a social conservative. There are central events which we experience together, and participate in together, in a range of environments from individual, to small group, to part of a "mass audience". Those events create a social context which is fundamentally important to the way we behave. Culture.

There's a long and interesting article -- 'The Tyranny of Copyright?' -- in last week's New Tork Times magazine. One piece points out that "media" is now clearly an interactive rather than purely broadcast function:

Benkler's belief in the importance of creating things in common rests on more than anecdotal evidence "Let's compare a few numbers," he said. "How much do people pay the recording industry to listen to music versus how much people pay the telephone industry to talk to their friends and family? The recording industry is a $12 billion a year business, compared with the telephone business, which is a more than $250 billion a year business. That is what economists call a 'revealed willingness to pay,' a clear preference for a technology that allows you to participate in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a packaged good."

Yet the only clear-cut dividing line between the participatory technologies and the broadcast technologies is when the number of participants exceeds two. Beyond groups of two people, interaction is social, and there's a spectrum of interaction modes (with "peer" and "couch potato" at the two ends) which is very analog, diverse, gradual. The whole spectrum of collective experience is up for grabs.

If those collective experiences are only mediated by commercial entities, or by agencies of government, then our broader "culture" will be fashioned according to what pays, or political interests. Look at Superbowl: it seems the adverts are at least as important as the game. Online, even the best advertising of the day is difficult: Tim Bray notes "Let's not sugar-coat this; running ads places my interests in direct conflict with my readers'".

So, I hope the Beeb comes out of this one alive and kicking.

While I'm watching the game (Patsies play the Panties, is it?), I'll join a part of this American culture - a strange land indeed. And at half-time I'll maybe read some more of Hunter Thompson on his arch-enemy's '72 election trail:

Nixon is a serious pro football freak. He and I are old buddies on this front: We once spent a long night together on the Thruway from Boston to Manchester, dissecting the pro & con strategy of the Oakland-Green Bay Super Bowl game. It was the only time I’ve ever seen the bugger relaxed—laughing, whacking me on the knee as he recalled Max McGee’s one-handed catch for the back-breaking touchdown...