I asked some of my volunteer transcribers to tell me some of the reasons why they're helping with this project, and a lot of their responses shows that they are largely driven their concerns about the state of US politics and the mainstream media -- as well as a number of other personal reasons as well.
I originally started the film with an advocacy goal trying to convince people that they should adopt my progressive worldview after I laid all of the facts out on the table. I was really pissed off with everything that's going on in this country both with politics and the media and the war, and I just wanted to provide information so that people could think just like I did -- Then all the world's problems would be solved, right?
But then I went through quite an evolution after interviewing so many different perspectives last July. I decided to put my focus and energy on how I could use this documentary project to create more inclusive and collaborative journalistic paradigm that could help solve a lot of the problems with the press that were identified by these insiders.
I intend to help create a media that promotes dialogue and understanding and not one showcases people screaming ideology at each other for the sake having a dramatic debate that scores big ratings....
We interviewed Christopher Queen, a Buddhist scholar from Harvard, who makes a simple but profound statement:
If people were willing not to cling to fixed ideas about the way the world needs to be, and were willing to work together for a better world, and then to practice some of the simple teachings for sharing and caring for others -- I think that we would be able to change the world, and to produce a better outcome.
This is the direction I'd like to take The Echo Chamber Project -- We already have a media that forces people into Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative, Democratic/Republican boxes in order to preserve these fixed ideas and paradigms.
We need to loosen these paradigms on both sides of the aisle and broaden the dialogue by creating a completely different media that facilitates this.
Ani DiFranco has a phrase in one of here songs that keeps popping into my head:
Teach myself it's never really one or the other
There's a paradox in every paradigm
Indeed -- We're a diverse culture and we have a lot to learn from each other.
Right now we have a media that is waiting for permission from Congress before they report on debates on issues that ordinary Americans are concerned about. I have a lot of ideas for a different media that helps include a much broader range of voices and perspectives regardless of whether or not their views are officially sanctioned by a critical mass of politicians in US institutions.
There are some additional open source tools need to be developed to do it -- so some of the blog entries here may get a bit technical.
But I'm looking forward to getting an infrastructure built where I can assign more volunteers tasks and get more people involved with helping produce this ambitious documentary project -- Americans and people from around the world are really hungry to get more involved to make a real difference in our media and our society.
I'm standing on the shoulders of some great open media innovators, and I'm very excited about the how this project can help answer a lot of the unsolved problems with how the press can better serve our democracy.
