Podcast • June 7, 2011

Joi Ito: How to Save the Internet from its Success

If the Internet dream could take human form, it might look and sound a lot like cheerful, boyish, 44-year-old Joi Ito, the new director of the fantasy factory known as the MIT Media Lab. Like ...

fl20061105x1aIf the Internet dream could take human form, it might look and sound a lot like cheerful, boyish, 44-year-old Joi Ito, the new director of the fantasy factory known as the MIT Media Lab. Like the Web, he’s everywhere and nowhere — often, in fact, 30,000 feet in the air, circumnavigating the planet every couple of weeks, but wrapped always in a digital cloud of conversation and omnidirectional exploration.

Joi Ito draws on Japanese roots and American experience. Born and continually tutored by his grandmother in the old cultural capital, Kyoto, he was raised also by his parents in surburban Detroit. But his air seems less East-West hybrid than a spirit of self-consciously detribalized human energy. His home airport now is Dubai, because he wanted to cultivate a Middle Eastern perspective on events, investments, social turmoil.

Joi Ito is as complexly “global” a citizen as Pico Iyer, the English-Indian writer who went to university in the States and now bases himself at TIME magazine and in Japan. But the effects, and the affect, are entirely different. Pico Iyer’s passions are literary; his oldest best friend is the Dalai Lama. Joi Ito’s issues — applied urgently to technology, culture, teaching and learning — are innovation, openness, connectedness. His passions — which seem to be engaged serially — have evolved from experimental “industrial” music, which he transported from Chicago to Tokyo, to start-up investments (early into Twitter, Kickstarter, Flickr). Then came on-line games, and scuba diving. In conversation, he might impel you to join his advanced World of Warcraft guild; but then he might make others scream “Only disconnect!” and go home to a Victorian novel.

Like the Web, Joi Ito is a natural-born connector — cherished by fellow futurists for giving them courage. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab 25 years ago and author of Being Digital says of his heir: “Joi got the job because he is the most selfless young person I know who has made his short life-time one of enablement. This is so key. The Media Lab is now much broader than I ever knew it, where the ‘media’ du jour is the mind.” Joi’s job, Negroponte adds, “is to make the Lab crazy again.”

We are talking about wrinkles in the Internet dream — about the self-cancelling possibility, for example, that digital tech has leveraged the surveillance state as much as it has linked up the social-justice crowds. I’m asking Joi Ito about Doc Searls‘ dread, that “our commons is being enclosed” by phone companies, the entertainment industry and regulators who see the Net essentially as “a better way to get TV on your mobile device, delivered for subscription and usage fees.” And I’m venting some of my own latter-day anxiety about the damage the Internet has done to the old-media institutions we miss more and more, and maybe didn’t cherish enough — the late great New York Times, to name just one.

Podcast • April 19, 2010

David Hoffman: A Running Tour of YouTube Nation

David Hoffman produced 88 PBS documentary features and five feature-length films over a forty-year career. But that was then. And this is a guy whose life keeps starting over. Always interestingly. We’ve shared before our ...

David Hoffman produced 88 PBS documentary features and five feature-length films over a forty-year career. But that was then. And this is a guy whose life keeps starting over. Always interestingly. We’ve shared before our adventures with the great sound-man Tony Schwartz

We’re in James Der Derian’s class on global media at Brown again, and David Hoffman is pushing through the cliche that we live in a screen culture and a YouTube world. We didn’t know the half of it. Today we’re taking his tour of YouTube nation, peopled by more 1 billion searches every day. Hoffman, who thought he’d been around the whole block, has stumbled on a sort of “Louisiana Purchase” of the media landscape. It’s homey, it’s cheap, it’s much much bigger than network television already, and it’s barely begun to chew up what we used to call media and spit it all out.

Documentary film-making was, and is, a rich person’s pursuit, as he tells us. But anyone can talk to a camera and post the result. He loves YouTube’s celebration of a messy, cheap aesthetic, helping viewers learn to love jump cuts and engage raw content. No one could be happier about this victory of moving image and spoken word: “It’s terrible to sit at your computer screen and read words,” he says, “It’s painful.”

For David Hoffman, this is just the beginning of a long-needed move away from censorship and big media control over information. But it’s a shift, he cautions, that demands a comprehensive new standard of media literacy.

Our conversation begins with this month’s release – by Wikileaks – and its viral penetration – through YouTube – of a classified US government video documenting the alleged “indiscriminate slaying of more than a dozen people” outside of Baghdad:

Podcast • April 2, 2010

Ted Bogosian: Confessions of a Truth Hound

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ted Bogosian. (28 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Ted Bogosian is one of those uncommon journalists and filmmakers for whom the stark truth of the matter is all that ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ted Bogosian. (28 minutes, 17 mb mp3)

Ted Bogosian is one of those uncommon journalists and filmmakers for whom the stark truth of the matter is all that counts. Truth at the far pole from truthiness. Emotional truth. Historical truth. Negotiable truth, which is to say: politically useful truth. Truth so awful sometimes that most of us — whether victims, perps or bystanders — would just as soon turn away.

In James Der Derian’s “global media” class at Brown, Ted Bogosian is speaking about the PBS documentary that made him famous in 1988: An Armenian Journey was the first, and almost the last, network television treatment in America of the Turkish slaughter of Armenians in 1915. We’re talking as well about the the suddenly hot pursuit of pedophile priests in the Catholic church. Also about Errol Morris’s “feel-bad masterpiece,” the almost unwatched S.O.P., a film search through interviews and reenactments for the truth of Abu Ghraib. And about Kathryn Bigelow’s best-picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker, yet another box-office bomb about the American war in Iraq.

TB: Being Armenian requires a different standard of truth telling. What’s in your DNA is this business of overcoming denial… The first thing in my life I remember is standing in my backyard in New Jersey, watching my grandmother, who was a survivor of the genocide, making a pile of rocks and telling me, in her broken English, that “nothing mattered.” And for her to be saying that to a 3-year-old boy, based on what she had witnessed, started my journey toward making that film 30 years later, which was about all the apocryphal stories and all the real stories I had heard growing up. I had to decide for myself which ones were true. And when I did, I had to figure out a way to relate those truths to the world. So I think it’s different for Armenians and for other ethnic groups trying to overcome similar denials.

CL: In other words, truth hounds don’t just happen.

TB: There has to be a powerful momentum, an irresistible force, pushing you in that direction. Otherwise it’s too easy to take the path of least resistance.

Ted Bogosian’s story of his own motivation could be construed as ethnic determinism or something stranger: a rationale for ethnic revenge by journalism. But I think we’re scratching at a subtler puzzle that popped up as a surprise here: what are the journalistic motives that seem to be bred in the bone, or in the family histories that drive a lifetime of the most urgent professional curiosity?

Podcast • February 12, 2010

Ghana Speaks (V): The Radio Voices of Cape Coast

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mike Serwornoo (15 min, 9 mb mp3) An underlying question through this experimental week in Ghana is: what more would it take to podcast conversations as direct as ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mike Serwornoo (15 min, 9 mb mp3)

An underlying question through this experimental week in Ghana is: what more would it take to podcast conversations as direct as these from India, or Israel, or the West Bank? Or China, or Congo, for that matter?

Mike Serwornoo, in our exchange here about radio in Ghana, strikes me as the sort of modern practitioner I’d want to engage with almost anywhere to enlist the Web’s boundary-jumping tools in service of “that fabulous instrument,” as Studs Terkel used to call it, the human voice.

Mike Serwornoo is the ambitious young general manager of ATL-FM, the multi-purpose radio voice of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. It’s one of the scores of community radio stations working like democratic yeast for a decade now in West Africa generally, not Ghana especially. Mike’s boast to me is that popular trust in radio is now so powerful that the rule in a street emergency is “don’t call the police, call the radio station.”

ATL-FM carries news, talk, music and the Voice of America. In the local politics of Cape Coast, my impression is that ATL-FM vents the views more of the mainstay fishermen (for public pensions, for example) than of college students and teachers. We’re talking — Mike Serwornoo and I — about ways to combine some flavors of their gab with some of ours.

One thing most of us in Ghana don’t want is Euro-centric or American-centric solutions to Afro-centric problems. We don’t want a solution brewed in the United States. We want solutions brewed in Ghana, in Africa, with the guidance of someone who has been through our experience… The dream here is that the great things we do in Ghana can get to the people in the diaspora… that we converse with the world at large, without boundary, without color.

Mike Serwornoo with Chris Lydon, at ATL-FM in Cape Coast, Ghana, January 27, 2010.

Sounds astonishingly like my dream, too.

Podcast • November 18, 2009

Thomas Balmes on Documentary Democracy

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Thomas Balmes (23 minutes, 11 mb mp3). Thomas Balmes is a global filmmaker from France who commits anthropology with his camera. He is coaching us here in how ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Thomas Balmes (23 minutes, 11 mb mp3).

Thomas Balmes is a global filmmaker from France who commits anthropology with his camera. He is coaching us here in how to make expressive use of the new video democracy on YouTube — how to adapt our own anthropological eyes to see and perhaps reveal what’s lurking in plain sight all around us.

I go by an amateur’s notion of anthropology, as the social science of spotting, as they say, what’s familiar in the strange … and what’s strange in the familiar. Thomas Balmes has improvised his way to mastery of the art all over the planet.

Damages is his rare American film, by turns grotesque, hilarious and perversely winsome, about lawyers in a litigate-or-die law firm in Bridgeport, Connecticut haggling over personal-injury and wrongful death claims.

You’ll feel a certain shock of recognition hearing Thomas Balmes say why the US is heaven for documentarians: because we Americans (unlike, say, Japanese or French folk) will talk openly on a stranger’s camera (or into a cellphone, on a bus) about anything, including dollars for death.

Most of the Balmes movies are made elsewhere: looking at the tribal wars in the Balkans, for example, through the eyes of tribal warriors from Kenya who went to Bosnia as peace keepers; or watching McDonalds market its burgers in India, the land of the Sacred Cow. The next big Balmes production will track four babies from birth to walking – in Namibia, Japan, Mongolia and San Francisco. Everywhere Balmes uses the fly-on-the-wall “direct cinema” technique. No shooting script, no voice-over commentaries: just looking, listening, and leaving viewers to make sense of whatever it is we catch – as in that Bridgeport law office:

My questions to Thomas Balmes have mainly to do with the lessons for journalism or anti-mass media: how might we all learn to shoot the scene outside the window with freshness, ambiguity, tolerance, humor and entertainment value? (His answer boils down to: Just do it.) What if in place of television “news” we could call on Thomas Balmes and his inspired imitators to show us what and who they’re looking at tonight?