The BBC and technodemocracy


One of the things I learned at Wednesday night’s talk by Paula le Dieu was that among the rash of early 80s microcomputers was something called the BBC micro (an Acorn). BBC micro It came out of the BBC Education “BBC computer literacy project” – apparently, the Beeb wanted to build a microcomputer that could do everything demonstrated in their 1981 series “The Computer Program”, and make it accessible to the audience. They ended up selling over a million for (I think) around 300 quid each. As Paula said, what a strange business for a broadcaster to be in, but it makes just as little sense, really, for a broadcaster to be digitising their archives (60,000 hours of video footage and about a bezillion hours of radio, if memory serves) and making them freely available under (non-commerical) creative commons licenses. If we assume there’s some kind of a “production power in the hands of the people” ethos behind both of these initiatives, then it’s interesting that the technological tipping point has moved from hardware (machines) to raw content that can be remixed and reworked. The democratic potential of creative citizenship is no longer thought to be in the box, but in a shared pool of symbolic resources – yay for that.

I’m struck by the counter-intuitive and yet eminently sensible nature of this impulse on the part of the BBC – counter-intuitive because you would think a broadcaster would want to stem the tide of DIY media; eminently sensible because the BBC is a public service broadcaster that has long realised that the public has things to say; things that can be easily made to enrich the BBC itself.

However, the digitisation of the archives is a huge leap of faith – giving up control over their content and the way it is used in service of outcomes that are not yet known. And it’s a huge, expensive, technical and legal nightmare, mainly because of third-party rights in massive amounts of BBC content and the lack of clarity and records pertaining to those rights – which has pushed the launch back quite a bit.

Interestingly, the archive is in theory only going to be accessible from within the UK because of the whole public service/British taxpayers’ money thing – but if those same taxpayers help out with distribution costs by sharing the downloaded content using P2P networks, as in fact the BBC hopes will happen, so much the better.


3 responses to “The BBC and technodemocracy”

  1. The original BBC Micro become synonymous with DIY media – the computer you had “to do things with”, so the link seems very natural. That’s wonderful news about the BBC opening up the books, even if it takes ages and doesn’t work, there needs to be a symbolic push against the DVD mentality of media collectorship.

    I goddamned heart your blog this week.

    Look up the Goldie Lookin’ Chain song, “Half-Man, Half-Machine”, has the lines “Being a robot in my digital domain / Enter my world, feel my pain /
    I’m not like other people you might see or you might know / I made love to a BBC Micro / touch it on the disk drive / the monitor got hot / that’s when I knew I was a motherfucken robot”

  2. Thanks for sharing yr notes Jean. I really wanted to go! Is there any likelihood of archiving of this kind in Australia? I guess there wasn’t much talk about that? For my own future work I want to be able to access advertisements for media software and hardware in TV and print. It’s much different content, but maybe readers here would know if anything like that exists?

  3. Christian: will race to find that song, how fucking cool! thanks for hearting anything I write, I really need it at the moment.

    Mel: Well, there’s ACRA: http://www.uq.edu.au/acro/
    which takes stuff “off the cutting floor” e.g. surplus footage and makes it available using CC licenses; as for advertising, there’s the prelinger archive and other OS video at http://www.archive.org, and some commercial providers (e.g. catering to ad industry types who want to see what the competition’s been up to) but it’s damn hard to find australian stuff – I need some too for my PhD so yeah, if anyone out there knows…