We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained than stimulated or informed. But your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. You are not only in show business; you are free to communicate ideas as well as relaxation. . . . It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims; you must also serve the nation’s needs. And I would add this: that if some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose your audience. Because, to paraphrase a great American who was recently my law partner, the people are wise, wiser than some of the broadcasters — and politicians — think.

(Full text of the speech, including audio recording)

To commemorate the event, Berkman brought Minow, along with Ann Marie Lapinski, Jonathan Alter, and Yochai Benkler for a panel moderated by Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey, with responses from Susan Crawford, Perry Hewitt, Ellen Goodman, Virginia Heffernan, Reed Hundt, Kevin Martin, Nicholas Negroponte, Ethan Zuckerman, Doris Kearns Goodwin (a surprise), and comments by Terry Fisher. (More info on all those folks)

Left to right: Jonathan Alter, Ann Marie Lipinski, Yochai Benkler, Newt Minow, Jonathan Zittrain (back to camera).

It was really a fantastic collection of smart people and the kind of event only the Berkman Center can pull off successfully. (Time for a redefinition of Cognitive Surplus? Interestingly, the ship on Gillgan’s Island, one of Clay Shirky’s examples of where the cognitive surplus used to go, was named the S.S. Minnow in reference to Minow and this speech!).

I only wish there’d been more time to explore the value that the diversity of media channels has brought since that speech – the value in the productive capability each of us now carries in our phones, laptops, and internet connections. There seemed to be a bit of nostalgia for the moment in which Minow really could “shake the lapels” of the assembled broadcasters and have his one voice carry so much weight. But is the loss of the bully pulpit such a bad thing when it is compensated for by multiple alternative avenues for the protection of the public interest, including some arguably commanded by “the public” themselves? I haven’t yet read Benkler’s newest book (The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Triumph of Cooperation over Self-Interest, though it is on my nightstand waiting) but it seems a missed opportunity that we didn’t hear more from him on the positive side of this shift away from 3 national broadcast media channels into a profileration of voices. Instead we got lots of pessimism about the Tower of Babel and broad references to the Arab Spring. I’d similarly love to have heard more from Ethan Zuckerman on global voices and the role of independent media. Maybe a few fewer celebrity respondents would have allowed the panel more time?

The most unexpected part of the evening was hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin learn that she too could edit wikipedia – I wonder if she’s made her first edit in the last week?

The video of the event is embedded below. Note that at roughly 4:33 yours truly interrupts the camera view just as Minow is being announced – coming in late. My 0.15 seconds of fame?)

Other coverage:

• Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged the event
• The ‘vast wasteland,’ reconsidered (Harvard Gazette)
• Harvard’s Berkman Center hosts star-studded forum on media and the “vast wasteland” (O’Reilly Radar)
• A Vast Wasteland, Five Decades Later (Josh Stearns on Storify)
• Harvard Law School coverage
• “A Vast Wasteland Revisited”: A Berkman Center discussion on the state of television and media (Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab)

The first half of the study results from qualitative interviews with “experts on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation”, specifically:

• Eric von Hippel
• Yochai Benkler
• Jimmy Wales
• Michel Bauwens
• Siva Vaidhyanathan
• John Howkins
• Mitch Kapor

The second half of the study focuses on Second Life as a case study or example of the impact of user-led innovation in actual practice.

I like the basic framing of the argument in the first section, which is that “user-generated content represents just the tip-of-the-iceberg”:

participatory culture . . . has the potential to reshape our economy and society. . . . user-led developments encompass a much wider field of collaborative practices and production processes. . . . other forms of ‘citizen product design’ are catering to people’s desire for personalised consumer goods.

They go on to suggest that “the blurring of producer and consumer roles is changing the way companies innovate and gives users a much greater say in product and service design.”

The most problematic part of the report for me is this description of Open Source:

One of the most important and successful forms of distributed capitalism in action is the Open Source software movement. The brainchild of Finnish university student Linus Torvalds, Open Source emerged out of his pioneering efforts to develop a sophisticated feedback system of network-enabled collaboration, culminating in the Linux operating system. Torvalds wrote the Linux code in conjunction with thousands of other keen codevelopers, laying the groundwork for future Open Source projects. This created an ingenious process for software development that utilised the ‘collective intelligence’ of other users, and harnessed the power of distributed knowledge production, transfer and exchange.

This wipes away with one rhetorical brush the Free Software Foundation and the GNU toolkit on which Linux relied and continues to rely, and basically credits Linus with inventing not just Linux but the whole movement. (Let alone any of the other precursors to Free software, among academics, in hobbyist communities, and so on – see the Wikipedia entry on the history of free software). A bit of editing and a footnote to the broader Free Software movement would go along way here.

The other issue with the report is that it is a bit like reading the condensed version of the thinkers identified above – which I guess is a by-product of the interview methodology.

But for those who have no intent of slogging through The Wealth of Networks or Democratizing Innovation (or, for that matter, the easier-going but still highly insightful Convergence Culture), the report does an excellent job of framing the major issues.