Lessons of Ourmedia

Today WorldChanging has an excellent writeup on, and analysis of the potentials of, Ourmedia.

By promising permanent free hosting and almost no restrictions on media, Ourmedia has the potential to become the cornerstone of an alternative media system. It’s also suggestive of where activism may go in the months and years to come. …

Ourmedia is still in alpha, with many features yet to be implemented; nonetheless, it currently has over 34,000 publishers uploading material to the site. It’s easy to find fault with the current version — and not so easy to get a good connection for some of the content — but it’s not hard to see the potential this system contains. Given a good tagging, searching and rating system (imagine a Technorati model on top of the content, for example), Ourmedia could provide a powerful alternative to traditional media, both for news and information as well as entertainment.

But what struck me about Ourmedia was the model it suggests for future activism. I’ve written before about the “green panopticon,” the notion that abundant networked video capture tools (e.g., cameraphones) would enable a kind of information sharing about both problems and solutions. Previous discussion of such a system focused on the tools for creating the video stories; this, then, is the other end of that system, the mechanism for sharing the material. The same logic — distributed collection, archival publication — would apply to other kinds of political or activist media. I would expect to see, for example, a nascent online archive of personal videos of campaign rallies and candidate meetings by the 2006 election in the US, and a widely-used system by 2008. Just as savvy political figures in 2004 saw the utility of blogs and “meetup” groups, cutting-edge candidates in 2008 will be taking advantage of a distribution method for interviews and conversations with voters that is both more personal and able to bypass the gatekeepers at the cable news media.

That assumes, of course, that Americans embrace the system. But there are good reasons to believe that, despite its US origins, Ourmedia could come to be dominated by voices from outside of North America. The first is the slower use of cameraphones and the like in the US (PDF); the more widespread use of mobile networked video devices (as well as faster mobile networks) in Europe and Asia means more potential source material. The second is the slower broadband growth in the US; it’s simply easier (and, in most cases, cheaper) for people in much of Europe and Asia to upload and download larger media files. …

I’ll be talking with Zack Rosen and Sean over at the grassroots civic action site CivicSpace (another Drupal site) about a closer working relationship in the months to come. We’ll also be talking with Brewster at the Internet Archive about a broader global role for Ourmedia and Archive.

But we can’t do this alone. We need some institutional support for our (so far wildly successful) efforts.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.