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). 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.