Idea #1: Advertise Change
David Vogt wants to turn digital billboards into citizen media.
Bright ideas for 2008.
New Ideas for the New Year
- Idea #1: Advertise Change
- Idea #2: Mindful Sex
- Idea #3: Make Car Insurance Green and Fair
- Idea #4: Fruit Trees on City Streets
- Idea #5: Cheap Meds for the World's Poor
- Idea #6: Fix the Building Code
- Idea #7: Stick It to the Pine Beetle
- Idea #8: Reboot the Treaty Process
- Idea #9: Public Funds for Home Renos
- Idea #10: A Sea-to-Sky Greenbelt
- Idea #11: U-bike
- Idea #12: Zone for Affordable Housing
[Editor's note: Rather than look back over the year that was, the Tyee is offering its readers a dozen New Ideas for the New Year. We'll publish a new one every weekday from now through Jan. 1. They're textbook cases of thinking outside the box, all of them from people trying to make B.C. a better place to live. Later in January we'll be asking you to suggest your own new ideas for 2008, and publish a selection.]
David Vogt is looking at the billboard-sized TV screen outside Vancouver's Canada Place and thinking about a place where Wizard of Oz technologies meet citizen journalism.
The eight-metre-high screen -- its official name is Canada's Storyboard -- shows touristy views of the country and information about what's happening at Canada Place.
Vogt sees another use for such screens. What would happen, he wonders, if we used giant TV screens to give a voice to people whose stories don't normally get heard?
After all, says Vogt, big screens like the one at Canada Place will soon be all over.
"As we continue to move through this decade, we're going to see hundreds of displays like that coming online. Every SkyTrain station will have its own large public display -- there's three or four already that do."
They're sure to be used as high-tech billboards to push advertising, he says. But maybe they can be turned into something more: what Vogt calls "community portals."
"If we can rescue the commons from a pure billboard kind of approach," he says, "we've created a new kind of channel for communities to understand who they are and for people to navigate through them."
Mobile Muse
Vogt is the executive director of Mobile Muse, a non-profit that seeks to bring together governments, businesses, academics and community groups to develop innovative ideas for mobile media.
His resume is intriguing, to say the least:
"At different times I've been a cancer researcher, astronomer, observatory director, science museum director, and dot.com CEO. Beyond Muse, I currently champion a set of very exciting applied R&D projects in learning technologies at the University of British Columbia while leading a couple of start-up companies and contributing to a few public and private boards.
Last year, Mobile Muse invited proposals for projects that would involve mobile media and the community. Six were chosen for funding and will be developed in the coming year.
One of the six is the Fearless City project, which Vogt says will try to find an answer to the question: "What happens if we allow the Vancouver Downtown Eastside to find a way of voicing what it's about, rather than the external people coming in and telling their story?"
The idea is to allow people from the Downtown Eastside to use mobile media -- video equipment, cell phone cameras -- to tell stories about their neighbourhoods. The stories would be shown on giant screens like the one at Canada Place.
'Collective citizen journalism'
It hasn't been decided yet exactly who will be telling these stories, but Vogt says it will be people who "live there, they work there, they care about that and they want to tell a story. They are storytellers. So I think a lot of them will be artists, but it will probably move beyond that."
Vogt said Mobile Muse hopes to bring about "a real sense of what a community is all about. And that's what we're hoping that Fearless City can create: a unique, collective, real voice about what the Downtown Eastside is about and what its potentials are."
He describes it as "collective citizen journalism."
Big screens have been used to create a sense of community in the past, mostly at sporting events such as the soccer World Cup and the Turin Winter Olympics. They will also be part of the 2010 Olympics.
Such sites have consisted of a big TV screen showing games in a public square -- what Vogt calls "very much a television paradigm."
"You turn on the TV, and you control the TV and people watch. But they feel like they're together, like a family feels like they're together watching a TV in a living room."
Mobile Muse hopes to take Vancouver's giant screens out of the TV paradigm and into an interactive "Internet paradigm," Vogt says.
"We want to put these Wizard of Oz tools into the hands of the people who own these sites so they aren't required just to show television coming from somewhere else."
Related Tyee stories:
- Just Seeing Neighbourly
Residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside took cameras into their own hands to challenge perceptions. - 'Citizen Journalism' Grows Up
How to earn trust? asks new wave of news hounds. - Escape into the Downtown Eastside
'If this story applies to you, don't lose hope.'
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
Percy
17-12-2007
Just a hook for public dollars
There's nothing new about this idea except who is to pay. Nothing stops "artists" from "telling their stories" right now, with old media (or new), except ha ha someone else's cash.
I suspect that if "ordinary people" could put their messages on public media, they'd be saying something more direct.
Like:
"Use tax dollars wisely--taxes leave working people with less money for food and shelter".
Or:
"Tolerating antisocial behaviour in public is a form of privatization that drives ordinary people away."
The last time an "artist" "told his story" in Toronto, it was a cute stunt involving "this is not a bomb".
gaulois
17-12-2007
A new spin on the Adbusters media carta
As far as I know, artists or free thinkers cannot really tell "their stories unless they have deep pockets or access to some.
I would prefer if the visual pollution that we are being constantly inflicted by commercial advertisers in our public space had a better counterpart, as proposed by the adbusters.org folks on their Media Carta campaign.
Percy may wish to see an other conspiracy against taxpayers by freeloaders. But I really wonder who is really conspiring... Hehe.
Working Memory
17-12-2007
Let the billboard wars begin . . .
Don't be surprised if First Nations leaders like this idea too.
If you recall, they will soon start to erect their own billboards on either side of Lions's Gate, Burrard and Ironworkers bridges.
BC Business Magazine, in March (2007), printed a letter to the editor I wrote regarding "new uses for billboards."
Here's a condensed version . . . "Olympic organizations monopolize every square centimeter of billboard space in an effort to prevent companies from competing with official Olympic sponsors in the ramp up to and during the [2010] Games. They refer to it as proactively managing ambush marketing in what a growing number of Vancouverites now recognize as an oligopoly.
It is very likely that Pattison Outdoor Advertising already promised all their billboard space to VANOC respective of 2010, so any new outdoor advertising landscape introduced into the market at this late date provides anyone, including First Nations with incredible opportunity and leverage.
Corporations like Pepsi, Telus, or BMW for example, will clamor for 2010 billboard space considering that Coca-Cola, Bell, and GM are official Olympic sponsors.
As everyone in BC knows, Olympic facilities reside on traditional Native lands. It's also important to remember that mainstream news media recently reported, amid allegations of government foot-dragging and empty promises, that tribal talks aren't exactly playing out as Native leaders expected.
If Native leaders want to use their billboards to get a message out to the world about how they perceive they are being treated by governments, or by Olympic organizations, billboards adjacent to our city bridges will be perfect spots to connect with "anyone and everyone" who travels back and forth between Vancouver and Whistler --- especially international news media.
Thirteen well lit and placed billboards spread throughout the region on main thoroughfares are perfect political tools to leverage Olympic momentum. Maybe VANOC will be forced to transport Olympic crowds in transport trailers instead of big-windowed tour buses, or distract them with Karaoke as they drive across the bridges.
2010 will take on a whole new tone if Canadian Aboriginals do what Australian Aboriginals did in the ramp up to the 2000 Olympics, and promote their political views by printing domains like NativeRightsTrampled.com or OlympicWindowDressing.com on a few of their new hi-tech billboards."
I'm, looking forward to see what else The Tyee comes up with between now and January 1st.
It's time to think outside the box, and rings.
TTTT
17-12-2007
thuis would only work
if you had professional (like my currently unemployed self) designing these things.
there are principles of visual communications that go on with these billboards that would need to be adhered to in order for them to be effective.
I fear letting the unexperienced create the pieces would simply:
1. speak to the converted as it were and
2. turn off the people who you need to reach.
This is not a frivolous way to say no but a very real issue that I first saw many years ago in university.
there was an AIDS awareness campaign that spoke directly to the "pig-boys" about being safe, but some the self-proclaimed protectors of women thought the campaign was demeaning towards them and all women and so sought to end the campaign and effectively squelched it in the McGill Daily. So only those that agreed with them should live - the rest, go die of aids was the message of their actions, regretfully. Truthfully the ads offended the puritan in this thin slice of women.
I would fear something like this would happen - design by committee that would extinguish and neuter the good intentions behind the idea.
Now I know I'll get flack for this but as someone who loved adbusters when it came out all those years ago, today with it's shrill tone and hackneyed and amateurish present-day use of the visual language of ads, it renders mute to those who most need to see it's message.
gaulois
17-12-2007
Fear -vs- brainwashing
Odd that many always think that "non-experts" laymen will for sure mess things up. Like if we all have been brainwashed by something. Hehe.