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Participatory media: Korea's OhMyNewsby Peter DonovanAs Dan Yankelovich notes in the excerpt below, the assumptions of the "expert information model" continue to isolate people from the political process and from public decisions. The media have turned us into disgusted spectators, and we've gotten very good at that game. Many of us have learned that advocacy of new ideas in and of itself creates more resistance than change. What is needed is to change the context -- or to reveal or make transparent the changes that are occurring -- in the way economies function, and the ecosystem. Over the last three years, a participatory news website in South Korea (ohmynews.com) has apparently been able to begin doing this. It is a different kind of media. Twenty-six thousand people have signed up to become citizen reporters, and they submit 200 stories a day. Readership is enormous. Read an account by Wired magazine. With this kind of partipation, the potential exists for a media that can help us, together, to design the future, to navigate and find paths from where we are to where we want and need to be. As Bob Chadwick has pointed out, in the U.S. we are in the midst of a huge and conflict-ridden change from representative democracy to participatory democracy, and most of our media have been slow to adapt. I believe this new kind of media must be local. Only at the local level can we have the possibility of truly responsible participation. Only at the local level can most of us begin to understand where we are and where we want and need to be. The new media won't be driven by technology, although much will be web-based because of cost, and because of the possibilities for participation in overlapping wholes. But the core of it will be based ultimately on face to face interaction between people. Websites and other media may be the manifestations of that process, rather than the instigator or cause. Among the opportunities for new local media:
Can this kind of reflection/reframing be interesting to the readers? As I write this in July 2003, Wallowa.net, a month-old prototype in Wallowa County, is already getting 70 visits a day in a county of 7,000 people, about two-thirds of whom have access to the Internet on dialup at speeds of 24-56K. (South Korea has 70 percent broadband access.) Can this kind of activity be self-supporting? Stay tuned.
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