Preparing for a conference in Boston

Dave is preparing for an upcoming conference in Boston, where he plans to share his perspective on the changes in media and communication over the past 20-30 years. He reflects on his experiences trying to have open discussions about these changes, including with the music industry, the 2004 election, and a failed attempt at a discussion in Nashville. Dave expresses hope that national public radio can facilitate the kind of open discourse needed to understand differences and find common ground, rather than getting bogged down in arguments. Dave believes the current state of public discourse represents a loss of something important, and see an opportunity for public radio to lead the way in a “new kind of election” focused on shared goals rather than superficial factors.

Hey good morning everybody hit some morning coffee notes kind of Saturday evening morning coffee notes and well let’s see I’m getting ready to go to Boston later this well actually this coming week and we get the sound level here a little bit better and I ’ve been writing a bunch of stuff on scripting news to try to prepare for what I want to say at this conference but somehow the writing isn’t doing it and so I thought I would try doing it through a podcast and maybe stimulate a discussion on the web in advance of the talk at the the public media conference on Thursday for me it’s a it’s a it’s a pretty important event and also something I do you know with some amount of trepidation because the times that I’ve given this particular pitch it hasn’t generally gone over very well I think people misunderstand what where I’m coming from it so I’m but it’s very important to me to to not have that happen and because because I have something that I want to do and and I don’t want to get embro iled in an argument what I want to do is do the thing that I’m pitching and so we’ll see if if I can figure out how to do that the and there’s a story that goes with it because it’s kind of like the story of the media changes that have been happening steadily for 20 or 30 years at least that’s been in my experience maybe it’s been happening in other contexts and just I’m not aware of it or don’t understand how it works in those other contexts but but it’s it has been happening and what it is you can pick it up from so many different ways and most people professional media people when they pick it up pick it up from the very personal point of view it’s it’s it’s it reflects their concerns about their own personal role in the world how the their past will be interpreted probably and maybe even more importantly what is their future look like and and I think to really see where the opportunity lies you have to try to look at it from a different point of view and point of view is like everything in this it’s absolutely everything and so I never look at it from the point of view of well where have I done it the best example would be the media industry excuse me the the record industry sorry it’s all the media industry but the record industry in 2000 and I wasn’t looking at it from the point of view of a record producer nor should I be looking at it from point of view of a record producer because well I ’m not a record producer however of course if you want to talk to record producers it certainly helps to understand their point of view but in this case their point of view wasn’t going to lead us to the place that we need to get to and so I needed to stay very grounded and come at it from my point of view which was that of a music fan of somebody who gets a tremendous amount out of listening to music so I thought I’d go to this conference this music industry I went to a series of them actually and most of them went pretty well I don’t think people really they went pretty well in the sense that I didn’t get attacked I don’t think really the people who understood what I was talking about were the people who were predisposed to understand what I was talking about the other music fans people who were like just absolutely tripping out over how incredibly great it was to have all this music available and basically be able to program your own music was the thrill of 2000 it was the Napster experience and you know the question was does Napster lead to something wonderful well here it is 2007 seven years later almost and we know that it did lead to something wonderful I’ve got one sitting here on my desk it’s called an iPod you know did it lead to something was it going to lead to something yeah and will it lead to more places after this absolutely without a doubt is it this are we living in the same world that the music industry was rooted rooted in before this happened absolutely not but that was the cusp of the sea change you could have seen that change coming before that but of course nobody would have talked about it before that and then when it came time to talk about it you know we had to talk about it was the topic of the day well with the music industry wanted to talk about for the most part not all because like I met Chuck D the rapper and you know we could finish each other sentences it was wonderful but you know he was one in a million I mean then for every one of those there were 15 others that were like digging in and saying damn it we’re not going to do this we ’re gonna figure out how to protect our stuff so that we can keep selling it the way we have been selling it in the past and that ’s you know I understand that’s what they want to talk about but it is exciting I mean that’s not I would never go out of my way to go to a conference to talk about that that’s just to me sorry that’s not I know that it’s important to them but and I hate to invalid ate it but it’s not important to me it’s not it’s not you know any more than in the 80s it was important to my customers I ran a software company I had lots of people working for me payroll to meet every goddamn month I had to make pay every two weeks I had to make payroll I was always living right on the precipice of going out of business I fully get that I understand it and my customers well we put DRM we called it copy protection but same idea onto our software and these were really good people I mean my customers people who use my product were like really smart people you had to be really smart to get it to really understand why the product was so good so I was blessed in that way that the people that use my product were good also very good at communicating they were good at explaining themselves and there was never any question in my mind what that they were coming from a good place and they were fed up and they didn’t I got discs sent back to me cut up discs and that really does get your attention when you respect your users which I did in general 99% of them were wonderful people and they were very upset and I had to listen I didn’t like it but eventually we had to take the copy protection off and did it hurt our business well who knows we didn ’t have a business without it let’s put it that way I mean we didn’t have a business with copy protection we could not have continued to go forward that way so to the extent that we continued to have a business and we did you know was I happy about it no I wasn’t happy about it but I didn’t I couldn’t get them to care about my reality and and also honestly everybody knew that the copy protection wasn’t working we could go deeply into this so I went to the music industry and my thing was I said look we gotta put our heads together and this is just so incredibly wonderful let’s figure out how to make the music business and the fans let’s all go trip out on music because music has become incredible where it was just great before actually it was kind of stagnating before here ’s all this wonderful body of music and now what I’ve always wanted to be was to be a DJ and I mostly I think I don’t know what it really I imagine DJs love being DJs because they get to program their own music well now we all get to be our own DJs and the people walking down the street listening to their iPod have their own soundtrack for their own life programmed by them and we all feel like movie stars when we’re walking down the street because we’ve got the soundtrack you know I like to say I was looking for the song I couldn’t find it well I mean I was looking for a video clip of you know John Travolta walking down the street in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever and the song playing in the background is staying live let ’s see if I can find it okay hold on I’d have to here I’ll plug in my iPod right plug in the iPod right as I know I probably have it on my iPod so I just plugged in my iPod see this is the demo of what I was talking about iPod is booting up now so it’s sort of a boot ing up process right there we go and let’s go for click here man it’s being slow here we go okay let’s just type in a live oh didn’t find it here it is cool here we go that kid can you you know there ’s John Travolta trucking down the street he’s looking cool that’s a soundtrack man yeah disco day okay you get the idea right it’s my I mean it’s we’re tri pping out alright so then fast fast forward to it was 2005 I guess it was and this was after the 2004 election I’ll just keep this playing in the background and after the 2004 election you can go back and read all the shit that I wrote and listen to the podcasts and what was the takeaway message takeaway message was the red state guys and I’m a blue state guy right like I like to live on the west coast in California I live in Berkeley which is about as blue as you can get and I lived over on the east coast in Cambridge mass and went to college grad school in Madison Wisconsin so you kind of get the idea that okay I’m a blue state guy and the 2004 election at least my takeaway from it was that wow we just got wrapped by the red state guys and what they’re saying is you blue state guys just fly over us and you pretend that we don’t exist and you don’t listen to us and we care about certain things and now you have to listen to us you know the 2000 election that was a total mass right if you were a blue state guy you could think well you know they kind of stole the election but in the 2004 alright it was close but it wasn’t a stolen election and the hype coming out of that was you guys need to listen to us so I got offered a position to lead a discussion according to Blaricon rules very clearly understood written up rules for discourse I got offered the opportunity to lead a discussion in Nashville Tennessee which is pretty red right I figure I ’ll go down there and what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna lead a discussion I’m gonna say what I got to say and then I’m gonna listen to what they all got to say back and it was a goddamn disaster it was kind of like what I was trying to do with the music industry was to lead a discussion as a fan and say what I have to say and not hold anything back be myself and you know thinking in a everybody good day if I were in the music industry I would want to know what the users are so excited about but they didn’t want to know and I went down there in Asheville and to give them the benefit of the doubt I’d have to say that they didn’t want to know either I think that there were some really mean ugly asshole type people there and well there were for sure there were also some great people there different opinions didn’t agree you know we could have had that discussion I would have been happy to hear you know where we differ but there were also a lot of people there who just wanted to make a mess and they succeeded in making a mess and and oh I net net is it failed and I think that you know if they’re I’m sure that some of this is gonna make it make their way make it back to those guys and you know let’s see if they have the the maturity to just leave it at it was a mess you know they have said some pretty horrible things about me personally which obviously tells you they came there with the kind of different agenda they weren’t there trying to communicate across a divide which really was the stated purpose of the discussion they came there with some other goal in mind and it it was ugly and I don’t have I don’t have good feelings about Nashville as a result of it although I do know plenty of people now who live in Nashville who I think are great people even though we don’t agree on some important political issues I would say we don’t disagree on the basics though and so that’s where I’m coming from now when I go to public radio by the way I was living in a red state at the time that I came to the Nashville conference I was really making a major commitment in my life to immer se myself in the in I had took that on as a mission and I’d say that I succeeded in the mission and that I learned something that I was pretty sure of to begin with which is that there are there is enough in common between blue state and red state people to say that we could work together there are a lot of things basic things that we agree on to be an American means we have some basic agreements on some very very fundamental things and our differences can coexist within that framework and so I ’m optimistic I think things may have to get pretty bad before we we pull ourselves out but I think that right now we’re kind of going in the right direction and so feels like 2000 did in the music industry much the same way today on a political level in our country so before I bring it into the public media context let’s go back to 2003 and the lead-up to the election and the Howard Dean campaign and blogging in the context of politics and citizen journalism and all the rest of the two you know the two-way web and you know all the things that I think are kind of being misunderstood right now I think the wrong I don’t think we’re gonna get well let’s put it let’s look at it okay that all the candidates are using the internet now because that certainly happened there was certainly a major change between the last election and this election and that at that time it was sort of really fresh that a campaign the campaigns would use the tools of the blogosphere well in 2000 in the 2008 election lead up to the 2008 election there’s nothing no stone left unturned I mean Edwards came out the gate he was meeting with the bloggers he had Scoville on his airplane when he announced his candidacy they’ve all been uploading their videos to YouTube flicker they all have blogs Barack Obama has a social network you know okay there’s no stone left unturned in that but is that the change that the new media is going to bring about and emphatically that is not the change that the new media is going to bring about and Dean was not the revolution that so many people say that he was because Dean didn’t change the fundamental nature of the way elections work and if you if you’re disp assionate about it if you think about it from a dispassionate point standpoint or be dispassionate and how you think about it you realize that it he used the internet to raise money that he could then spend in to buy ads that ran on the major TV networks so it was a revolution in money raising but that’s not a revolution in politics that’s a revolution in money raising and when the change comes about and I have to say if the change comes about because I’m not sure that it will but I sort of hope that it will I have bet my career on the assumption that it will it will be I think far more profound and I think we need the new method in order to get past the difficulty that we’re facing right now and because it now this is the hearts this is the hard part this is where it gets hard because I’m not gonna blame anybody I don’t want anybody that listens to this to feel that there’s blame here because I don’t know who to blame exactly but we really we really screwed up and the screw-up is we went into what has turned into a horribly expensive war horribly expensive from a variety of different points of view it’s expensive in human life it’s expensive in the cost to our economy which we will eventually feel and it’s costly in terms of prestige of our country you know the people to talk about well we can’t afford to lose because where will that leave us in in the context of the world and you know my answer is look we’ve lost this thing already I don’t think we there’s a way to win it I don’t if you know if you’re gonna have that discussion then what we need to do is I need to ask you to tell me what winning is and I think you need to be really careful to explain and to yourself first if you believe that if you believe we have to win this then tell me what or tell yourself or tell all of us what is winning actually look like you hear people talk about the enemy in Iraq well tell me about the enemy who is the enemy I mean that seems very close to related to the question of whether or not we can win the war or is it even a war or is it just a drain is it just a way to waste ourselves you know these were had I said these things openly and publicly sought out a public place to say these things in the run-up to the war and that includes public radio in America not only wouldn’t people have listened but the subject would have changed it would have been about me we all felt that pressure and this everybody who had an inkling inside themselves that they wanted to say out loud but decided not to say it out loud knows what I’m talking about we lost something of what we as Americans should never ever give up and and I think that that we still don’t really understand exactly what it is that we did give up I listen to a and this is why I’m optimistic about the public radio discussion I’ve had a lot of people tell me as I’ve been writing about this leading up to this that you know you’re gonna hit the same walls here that you hit everywhere else that you hit inside the tech industry that you hit when you went to Nashville that you hit and going to the music industry that we hit when we went to the print media print media and bloggers I mean you know when the bloggers to the extent that we did raise the alarms about the going to war what came back was the issue of our legitimacy whether we were entitled to have this opinion or to express ourselves we’re still at war with the print media we still have always got to justify ourselves they they ridicule us they they they make it so that it are our professionalism is the wrong word but for lack of a better word our professionalism becomes the issue well you know you can’t really make the general statements about blog ging any more than one can make the general statements about you know print press there’s all levels of quality there’s all kinds of approaches to it I ’m pretty careful about the points of view that I express on my blog and and I try to write very high quality stuff and I think I’m intelligent and I’ve got a lot of experience so when people talk to me talk about my writing or talk about bloggers writing as if we ’re all you know stupid immature people well I think that it’s unfortunate that that’s the discussion that we have to have because there’s so much more important discussion that we need to talk about we need to go back to the beginning and say okay what are our goals as a country what are we trying to accomplish what do we have in common when we talk about national public radio what is the nation it’s national right so it’s our nation should it just be national public radio for left-wing blue state people I don’t think so I think it’s got a unique opportunity and here we get to the point I think that national public radio has an opportunity to do something very revolutionary at this stage to become the place where we the nation discuss our future not moder ated not heavily moderated and the reason why we can now use it where we couldn ’t before is that something that used to be very scarce is now in infinite supply and that is I think we need a term for this but oh I guess it’s air time is the term for it it used to be that if you had let’s say we had X public radio stations in the United States and of course 24 hours every day and that meant that we had X times 24 hours of air in our nation on public radio but now that’s no longer true because the number of public radio stations I don’t even know how to count them I’m talking right now into a public medium and I’m using something that seems very much like radio the end result is going to be the same technology that fresh air uses to create their podcasts and the same technology that on the media uses the production values won’t be the same I’m not going to even I’m not even gonna do the slightest edit to this it will go straight from my hard drive onto the server and be downloaded by anybody who wants to listen to it so there will be a little bit of a difference well is the quality of the thinking fundamentally different I don’t know you be the judge of that I find that more and more the way I approach these questions is pretty much the same way that a show like on the media approaches it I find that when Brooke Gladstone is interviewing a reporter from the New York Times in the last installment of on the media the one that broadcast yesterday I find she presses him the way exactly the way I would want him pressed and the way I would aspire to handle myself in an interview I’m not sure at all that I could pull it off with the kind of restraint that she used but yet with the force fulness of the challenge yet I don’t think the reporter understood the question that she was asking it’s that good on the media has really is really that good so back to the question is this public radio or what is this so I guess what I’m asking and maybe now would be a good place if I were if I were giving a speech at the conference well I just talked for almost a half hour there were a little bit of music in there I think I’d be almost at the point where I would say this is kind of where I wanted to stop because I brought this question to this group of people because well and maybe that’s a good thing why did why this group because NPR has been remarkably has it has remarkably embraced this new technology of podcasting and it ’s it is remarkable remarkable is the right word it’s worthy of you know being a remark and congratulations and gratitude I mean radio has embraced this new technology through the embrace of NPR in so much better than the print media ever did and I don’t understand why but I’m believe me I’m not looking a gift worse in the mouth my life has made so much richer for the fact that so much of what national public radio produces and when I talk about NPR I’m thinking the broad picture I really don ’t as a user as a fan I don’t draw a distinction between PRI and Minnesota Public Radio and WNYC and WBUR WJCT is one WAMU KQED KCRW in Santa Monica what a great station that is just to name a few Diane Re em unbelievable as I mentioned on the media incredible stuff I get so much out of the news hour this I believe I think is a prototype of the kind of programming that we should be working on together there should be so much more of it and I think the role of the professional radio professionals is going to morph it’s going to change but maybe I’m not the person who should who should tell you about that because it could be so easily misunderstood as to appear to be my agenda could but it is not my agenda my agenda is I want to have a new kind of election in the United States one where the electorate sets goals first before we choose candidates in other words I don’t want to simply choose candidates based on my belief in their sincerity or the quality of their personality or what they look like or what their message is or whether I really believe that they will appoint Supreme Court justice who will turn down Roe v Wade these are all such superficial questions I want to get us out of Iraq and I think a lot of people I know a lot of other people want to get us out of Iraq we ’ve arrived at a place where we have a shopping list item and so many of us will not vote in 2008 for somebody who will not make a commitment but we also have to talk about how we’re going to enforce our will on these people I mean go back to the lead up to the 2000 election and realize that the current president said no nation building turns around and leads the whole story of his can of his incumbency is going to be about nation building so I guess the question is how can or do we want to work together to open up discourse in our country so that more people can participate and so we can understand our differences better and I think see that we are a country with common values that transcend our differences and I think that’s the opportunity that’s in front of us and that ’s what I’m going to Boston that’s what I hope to talk about in Boston next week so there you have it what song should I play on the way out how about this one oh didn’t work boy I’m looking for I’m trying to play don’t take me alive by stealing but I’m finding it all my links here broken I know let’s try this hold on don ’t go away this is an old favorite why isn’t this coming up and of course I’m gonna play this all the way through okay do do do do do do oh the memories that still linger I think you missed it and although I never smile into summer or to do oh yes one do remind me why I feel so do you know what I want to do I’m dreaming I’m always moving I’m not even sitting here beside me. You guys are no longer the same. I love you and all.
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