Patricia Aufderheide's Posts

New sites for public media—far outside the realm of public broadcasting—are burgeoning. Now here comes the Iraq Veterans Memorial, which showcases videos made by the family, friends and comrades of fallen soldiers in the Iraq war. This non-partisan site honors the fallen in a way that takes advantage of participatory media technologies, and the site is a platform from which we as members of the public can begin and continued informed discussions about the meaning and cost of U.S. geopolitical strategies. What an excellent example of public media made by and for the public. Read more...

Public broadcasting has been a protected media zone that provides some higher-quality opportunities for people to learn about each other and their problems, and to share a common cultural experience of consuming the same media. But public broadcasting is still a stand-in for public communication, because it is a mass medium. The broadcasters speak to the many, who then talk to each other.

Can digital media change this? Can new technologies bring media made by, with and for the public? Read more...

The Beyond Broadcast conference last Saturday, held at MIT, featured a brilliant vision of public media as truly participatory media with a democratic heart, by Henry Jenkins. (He was drawing from his equally brilliant book Convergent Culture, which reminds us among other things that powerful democratic communications tools are often incubated in improbable environments such as fanzines.) Go to beyondbroadcast.net to catch up a little. Read more...

It was a thrill to participate in the workshop on media literacy and Fair Use at the Beyond Broadcast conference [beyondbroadcast.net] last weekend. Henry Jenkins (MIT), Bryan Baker (Temple U) and I brainstormed with about 25 creative media literacy teachers and makers--media arts center managers, profs, after-school programs leaders, filmmakers, bloggers and more. Bryan is part of a team led by Renee Hobbs [renee.hobbs@temple.edu] at Temple's Media Education Lab. They are exploring just what creative problems media literacy teachers and makers face, given what they understand of the law. Read more...

Now MediaPro has joined AIG as insurance companies using the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use as a guideline to accept Fair Use in its errors-and-omissions insurance policies for documentary filmmakers. MediaPro will depend on Stanford Law School's judgment that documentary filmmakers' uses are within the Statement's principles and conditions. This is great news for documentary filmmakers, and provides new opportunities for insurers as well.