Public Please

At the 2008 Democratic Convention, C-Span has started a Qik group to directly broadcast parts of the convention in the field via video on the Qik website. The C-Span Qik group appears to be private (I tried to join it without success so far.) Currently, the C-Span Qik group contains only two Qik cams. I looked through the videos produced by these cams, and am not very impressed. Many of the videos produced by C-Span videotape a scene, but many of them do not include any personal interviews. For example, consider the following C-Span Qik video entited “Demonstration outside the Pepsi Center”, which lacks any interviews with any of the protesters. While C-Span described the video “Protest outside the main media gate for the Democratic Convention”, it fails to ask a single question to any of the protestors.

So the question is raised: Is C-Span’s Qik group, like many other social media experiments, mainly a public relations gimmick for C-Span, or is it a serious attempt to gather and publish public information to the public? While showing largely silent scenes of the convention is better than nothing, it falls far short of the potential for the medium of online video.

For example, C-Span is not allowing the public to join their Qik group:

Link To the Video

The best they offer is providing a link to your Qik videos on their blog. It appears that C-Span does not want to open up the publishing process to the public because it does not want to allow the public to publish content under its label.

How hard would it be for C-Span to allow the public to join their Qik channel and moderate user-generated submissions? How hard would it be for C-Span to use their camera to interview a protestor outside of the convention, or invite the protestors to join the Qik group? How hard would it be for C-Span to carry a laptop around and invite the people they videotape to use it, and post their comments to the website?

It is not enough to simply advertise the use of a new technology, like Qik. C-Span must encourage new social norms of contributing public comments to their system. The policies surrounding public comment are extremely important for the credibility of C-Span and its social media consultants.

That C-Span is moving in the direction of public media is commendable, but intentional half-measures are not.