On not being invited to the We Media party

The slogan, motto or whatever it was of Banyan Limited, the pioneering television production company I was lucky to work for near the end of its golden age back in the late 1980s (my first real job) was, “Inside the People TV”.

That was a double-entendre, of course, with currency in both standard and Trinidadian English. On the one hand it referred to Banyan’s grassroots–”insider”–approach to making television. Translated from Trindadian English, however, the phrase also meant “Inside the People’s TV,” in which the People meant “the Man”, the folks in power who considered us upstarts. Indeed, it was all a bit hippyish: we were full of righteous indignation about a lot of things; our hearts bled daily; the country was in the throes of a recession. In many ways, however, things then were hardly as bad as they are today. Banyan was for me a deeply formative experience and in many ways shaped the attitudes I have come to hold about the world, about this place I live in.

In a way, I suppose, Global Voices is my new Banyan. And it’s largely on account of their involvement with the We Media Global Forum that I’m struggling (via an internet connection that TSTT calls ADSL but would be more aptly called “enhanced dialup”) to keep up with the goings-on in London. I’m going to give up shortly, however, as not only do I have to step out to a meeting, but also because it’s just so damn frustrating. The only live feed being offered is video, which I managed to get to work about an hour ago, in fits and starts, before it sputtered to a halt. For some reason there’s no live audio feed, which to me is beyond astonishing, as the BBC is one of the two main co-sponsors (Reuters is the other). Marconi must be rolling in his grave. As I wrote to the Global Voices Regional Editors group, “The Beeb should be ashamed of eschewing their radio roots in favour of bells and whistles. . .”. And speaking of bells and whistles, the live chat room I gave such an enthusiastic thumbs-up to  yesterday is barely populated at the moment.

I also remarked yesterday on the fact that there’s no mention of the Caribbean on the We Media programme. That’s partly our fault, as the ideas being discussed at We Media aren’t on the agenda of most countries in the region (which is not to say that there are not individual citizens who engage them). But we are part of the “world”, and yesterday David Sasaki pointed out an even graver omission: Latin America. I’m not pointing fingers as I have no idea of what goes/went on behind the scenes, but a discussion of this sort is really not complete without the involvement of the other half of the western hemisphere.

It was David, in fact, who kicked off the discussion on the GV Regional Editors group, with an “observation” on the commercial slant the event seemed to be taking (the subject line of the e-mail thread we’ve been drawing out is called “Re: nokia phones”). Neha, who is very much present at BBC Television Centre, is blogging it; her latest entry addresses with what seems to be a persistent bloggers vs. mainstream media bias in the discussions.

They’re promising live audio tomorrow, and they better have it or else. And Rachel Rawlins just announced that there’s an IRC node at irc freenode.net #wemedia.

And here’s the Flickr photostream.

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