Everyone has a story to tell…
The Knight Foundation has informed me that I have made it to the second round for the Knight News Challenge. My proposal is to hand out 1,000 flipcams in Newark, NJ and put the results on a large video wall.
The notion of the video wall is as important to the project as the democratizing effect of distributing 1,000 Flipcams.
While each of the recipients will be trained and encouraged to cover stories that are of local importance to them, the product of their reporting will appear on a great public space.
The use of this great public space to display news is a departure from our conventional models of receiving the news, at least of late.
Most news today is either read, listened to or viewed in private. Â It is not a shared experience. Â We read newspapers in the privacy of our homes, watch TV news in our living rooms and listen to radio news in our cars or kitchens. Â While news may be gathered in public, it is received in private.
By putting our news stories on the video wall, we are pushing the reception and digestion of news from a private to a public and shared experience.
This is not new. In fact, for most of its history, news was received in public: the town crier, the King’s herald reading the latest edicts in the market square, Paul Revere shouting as he rode through Lexington and Concord. Â Since the first cavemen gathered around the communal fire to share their stories of the hunt, news has been a public and communal event. Â Only very recently have we made it private.
This is entirely a function of technology. Â The technology of distribution, from newspapers to radio to TV took our news watching from the public to the private place, and as a result, I think, truncated feedback and dialogue. Once, news was the initiator of public discussion, “here is what happened – what should we do?”
Now it has become an end.
The web, and places like Facebook and Twitter give us the opportunity to reawaken the notion of news as a public and communal activity.
There have been glimmerings of public news. Â In 1978, as China first stirred from years of Maoist control and oppression, there arose in Beijing a Democracy Wall.
The Wall was a kind of Internet before there was a web.  It was a place where news could be both published, but also shared in a public space.  The very nature of making it public as opposed to private changed the nature not of what was reported, but rather how it was perceived.  The act of posting the news made reading it a public act, a communal and shared experience.  Ironically, in  a Communist country, this very communal act was deeply subversive in itself.
Within our own country, where news quickly became private, those news stories that were perceived as public carried a different kind of weight and memory, largely because of the experience itself.
Roosevelt is elected President
Even now, in a news world dominated by television, we still take our most important news stories and turn them into quasi public events. Â National Convention halls filled with thousands to confirm the nomination of a Presidential candidate that is already a done deal. Â The very public inauguration of that candidate once elected. Â Even the dropping of the ball at Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Facebook and Twitter are halfway steps. They could make news more communal, but the act of participation still remains private. With the video wall, if we get the opportunity, we can return the act of receiving the news to the public place.
Maybe that’s where it really belongs.
