Trend/Countertrend

I'm writing tonight from the 34th floor of the Seattle Crowne Plaza, with a gorgeous nightlit view of the Space Needle and the harbor, so a certain Olympian perspective can be expected, I suppose. NPR station KPLU is providing the inspirational jazz, and the Integrated Media Association is providing the food for thought in its annual examination of the state of the online art. The morning's keyote sessions provided a disturbingly dystopian view of the media future, characterized by crumbling support models, diminishing attention span, abandonment of locality, fragmentation of audience, and a voracious appetite for all the information, all the time, everywhere. The future of public conversation, some say, will look more like Times Square, and less like the campfire.

But as the mainline trend in media leaves behind the communities people actually inhabit, to serve the notional communities of our desires, it creates a growing opportunity for public broadcasting to serve within the vacuum created when the spotlight of mass attention moves elsewhere. Our communities of residence retain the needs they have always had, for the information they need in order to function as citizens of a particular locale, for the cultural space that distinguishes one place from another. Our society has never needed to invest in the most popular forms of media--they always find a path to the deep part of the revenue stream--but we often find we have to invest in the most useful forms of media, those that serve to define and inform the institutions that enrich community life. Public broadcasting finds itself at another of the choosing points in its history--whether to follow the trend, or to help create the countertrend.