Mind Numbing Conference

The We Media Conference is quite mind-numbing. At first I thought that what it needed was a break-out zone, where you could get away from the boring speakers and meet interesting people. Now, after hours and hours of this, I think it needs a darkened room where you can lie down with an ice-pack on your forehead, with an intravenous drip of some good whisky.

The main subject is how “We Media” - ie the BBC, Reuters, The Times, The Guardian, can “embrace” citizen journalism and use it to their own ends.

Far from being “We Media” it is “They Media” sitting up on the stage and talking without much knowledge about citizen journalism. For a moment it came alive when they had a blogger on the stage - Rachel North who was inspired to blog by being caught up in the London bombing. The rest has been open-ended and vague. The most cringe-worthy moment came when a “young” 31 year old BBC smarmy presenter introduced some “digital assassins” ie bloggers (some of whom work from the BBC), who sat down at the tables with the old fuddy-duddies so that they could talk to real bloggers. Oh God! That was the most embarrassing moment of any conference I have ever been to. Rightfully, it was heckled by an old Private Citizen in the Dad’s Army mode who somehow got into the conference.

Richard Dreyfuss did the Hollywood, “I’m not a typical star because I care” turn, with his tie loosely pulled to one side, telling us that the young can’t be trusted with “this technology” because they haven’t been properly educated in the meaning of Democracy. Then actors are always repulsive as themselves, even if they are wonderful being somebody else. (The Tin Men will always be one of my favourite films).

Even the survey which kicked off the conference was bogus. It was presented as saying that people don’t trust bloggers to tell the truth - but in fact it turns out that the question was whether people trust bloggers to have the good of society at heart. This is an entirely different question, and it’s a black mark against the BBC that they twisted this.

Helen Boaden, the BBC Head of news who decided to keep reporting that the London Bombs were a power surge on the tube got off lightly. Nobody asked her about it, even though an authentic victim/blogger was on the stage. Helen was asked what blogs she reads,and she named one by her boss and another by a BBC journalist.

There’s no sense here of the variety and liveliness, human warmth/spite, and sheer entertainment of grass roots media. All I can say is thank goodness I didn’t pay to get in. Actually, they could charge people to get out. I don’t think I’m going to be posting any nice thoughts about the BBC until I’ve got over this.

This entry was posted on May 03rd, 2006 and is filed under Blog Home, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.