I’m interviewing adults who help youth to make digital media (videos, podcasts, online newspapers)–and also some of the kids who actually do this work–to find out what kinds of audiences they want to reach and how satisfied they are with their impact. (Some background here.) Yesterday, I interviewed the leader of an important nonprofit that trains kids to make documentaries. She said that youth in her program are encouraged to think about their audience from the beginning of their projects. At first, they want to reach “everyone,” but then they “fine-tune” their goals to be more realistic and to enhance their impact on their communities. They are less concerned, she said, with the number of viewers than with “the kind of conversations” that they provoke.

The youth in this program are “very eager to get an audience” and to provoke “public discussions,” because showing their work makes it “real”; it provides “evidence to the kids themselves” that they have achieved something significant.

Left to their own devices, adult audiences usually ask unhelpful questions, such as: “Why did you choose this topic?” Or “Do you want to be a professional film-maker?” The youth have begun to circulate better questions in advance, such as: “What can we do about the problem that you have presented in your video?” Or, “What were the strongest and weakest parts of the documentary?” Adults like to be guided in this way.

Most of this discussion and feedback occurs in face-to-face settings. A good example was a public screening of a youth-made video about gentrification, attended by academic experts, activists, and some of the kids’ parents and friends. The discussion was very rich and rewarding for the young film-makers. Overall, my interviewee thought that youth were both satisfied and dissatisfied with their audience–glad for the feedback they receive, but not fully satisfied by their impact on their communities.

I am concerned that we are setting kids up for disappointment when we tell them that the Internet gives everyone the equivalent of a broadcast studio with which one can reach many people and change the world. Even if some kids are highly successful, most will not draw a significant audience.

Yochai Benkler’s excellent book the Strength of Networks (which is available free online with interactive features) is a useful starting point for considering this problem. In this post, I draw on Benkler’s Chapter 7.

Some early enthusiasts for the Internet assumed (with the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU) that everyone with a computer could become a “pamphleteer,” putting ideas into the public arena that would reach audiences simply in proportion to their relevance, value, or popularity. In that case, the popularity of websites would follow a bell curve, with more sites near the median than near the tails.

But Benkler rejects such “mid-1990s utopianism” (p. 260). A few sites are enormously more popular than the median, and there is a long tail in which sites show little evidence of an audience at all. For example, the median blog currently tracked by Truth Laid Bear (a popular ranking service) has two incoming links, whereas the top blog has 4,201.

Early papers that discovered this “power-law” (see graph, below) took a skeptical or critical line. The Internet was not a democracy or a meritocracy. Rather, people and search engines linked to sites that were already popular, thus making them more so. The rich got richer, regardless of merit.

But Benkler summarizes findings that are more optimistic than a pure power law-theory would imply. Mathematical models of the web suggest that unknown sites do rise in popularity and popular ones fall. There are many stories about innovations in tactics, techniques, or ideas that spread very rapidly. For instance, BoycottSBG–a response to the Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s alleged Republican bias–obtained enormous participation within a week. As Benkler says, “it was providing a solution that resonated with the political beliefs of many people and was useful to them for their expression and mobilization” (p. 247).

Benkler observes a “self-organizing principle” on the World Wide Web. People with strong mutual affinities find one another and link their websites or leave comments on each others’ pages. Within these affinity groups, some sites become more popular than others. But (a) there are many affinity groups, and (b) the popularity curve is not always steep within a group. “When the topically or organizationally related clusters become small enough–on the order of hundreds or even low thousands of Web pages–they no longer follow a pure power law distribution. Instead, they follow a distribution that still has a very long tail–these smaller clusters still have a few genuine ‘superstars’–but the body of the distribution is substantially more moderate: beyond the few superstars, the shape of the link distribution looks a little more like a normal distribution.” (p. 251)

Clusters of affinity groups then aggregate, often through sites that are or become “superstars.” We thus see a highly skewed distribution of popularity on the Internet as whole, yet the Web remains plural and open because of all the smaller groups. As Benkler says, “There is a big difference between a situation where no one is looking at any of the sites on the low end of the distribution, because everyone is looking only at the superstars, and a situation where dozens or hundreds of sites at the low end are looking at each other, as well as at the superstars” (p. 251). On Benkler’s model, “filtering for the network as a whole is done as a form of nested peer-review decisions, beginning with the speaker?s closest information affinity group” (p. 258). Lively dialogues begin “with communities of interest on smallish scales, practices of mutual pointing, and the fact that, with freedom to choose what to see and who to link to, with some codependence among the choices of individuals as to whom to link, highly connected points emerge even at small scales, and continue to be replicated with ever-larger visibility as the clusters grow” (p. 252).

Thus Benkler contends that the Internet is considerably more “democratic” (i.e., pluralist, open, and responsive to spontaneous popular opinion) than the traditional mass media, even if it is not utopian. I can share those views, yet I continue to worry about ordinary kids in ordinary settings who are asked to express themselves through the World Wide Web.

1. Most kids will not draw substantial audiences, because most websites remain in the tail of the distribution. If you have a less popular site, you get little feedback from your readers and viewers. Kids who create such sites may feel that they are failures, in a culture that prizes popularity.

2. Kids are unlikely to obtain a substantial audience through sheer talent or innovation or by “resonating” with public opinion. Some kids will, but the average won’t.

3. Kids may not belong to tight affinity groups, differentiated from the mass youth population. Benkler mentions “communities of interest on smallish scales” that conduct peer-review and create audiences by linking to one another. But adolescents do not automatically have such communities. The typical US high school is a massive and anonymous institution to which students do not feel attached. Kids have common concerns, but they tend to share them with millions of others. Mass media culture is profoundly homogenizing.

I suspect that the solutions to these problems do not lie primarily online. For example, the current movement to create small, “themed” high schools to replace large comprehensives would put kids in cohesive communities. Many students would care about shared local issues. They would then be interested in one another’s online products. But that change would begin with a “breaks-and-mortar” reform: building smaller schools. Likewise, when students throughout Hampton, VA, are recruited to sit on the city’s various boards, kids develop a common interest in their geographical community. But that interest starts with a policy change.

I’m still in Seattle for an academic conference on youth media. I’m struck by how essentially normative (value-laden) our definitions of “politics” and “civic engagement” are. Ask yourself whether the following behaviors are “political”? It depends on whether you think their goals are worthy:

Using the raw material of an advertisement to create an anti-corporate parody (“culture jamming”).

Providing free technical guidance to assist fellow users of proprietary software.

Organizing a petition to persuade a record label to give your favorite artist a new contract. (Does such a petition stake a claim of partial ownership to the music, therefore challenging corporate capitalism?)

Organizing a reform movement within a massive multiplayer game? (Is the virtual world of the game a public good worthy of such concern?)

(Seattle) Here’s a speech for a presidential candidate in ’08:

“American popular culture is hurting us. It subjects our children to explicit sexuality and violence. It’s relentlessly consumerist and materialist. It tells the rest of the world that we are a nation obsessed with violence, sex, and consumer goods, lacking spiritual depth. Our movies and music are popular, but people in other countries regard them as low pleasures.

“How did we let this happen to us? Have we not produced twelve Nobel laureates in literature, the world’s greatest research universities, inspiring religious and political leaders, and major movements in all the arts? Are we not the home to global religious denominations and the birthplace of the environmental movement? Why do we let media companies and celebrities define us?

“Censorship is not the answer. Broadcast media can be regulated to a degree, but most communications have already moved to cable, DVD, and the Internet. The courts–rightly, in my opinion–will block most efforts to regulate the content of these media.

“Censorship empowers the government to make decisions, and politicians can abuse that power. Besides, we don’t need to be babysat.

“We do need to control our own culture. We can do that, to a degree, through our own decisions. For example, we can turn off the TV. At the grassroots level, people can act together to change their media consumption–for instance, by scheduling community events for prime time, so that kids have alternatives.

“But the government also has a role.

“First, the United States must stop carrying Hollywood’s water. Other countries want to limit the amount of US media that’s shown on their broadcast channels. Our government fights tooth and nail to remove those limits. That stance may create a few jobs in Hollywood, but it also floods foreign countries with media that depicts us in a bad light. The US was defeated, 158-1, in a recent UNESCO vote on preserving cultural diversity. We need to drop that position until our media companies make products that serve us better.

“More important, people need help in creating alternative media that are more responsible, that reflect their best values. In public schools, we should teach all kids to make digital media: websites, movies, audio segments. Students will be supervised, so their products won’t be profane or violent or sexually explicit. The idea is to teach them how to make–and appreciate–responsible media. A public school teacher cannot lead a class in making religious videos. But students can use the skills and habits of media-creation that they learn in schools in other venues, including their religious communities.

“Finally, we need to create a new model for public broadcasting. PBS, NPR, and the rest of the public system was created after Newton Minow observed that television had become a “vast wasteland.” He said that in 1961; the situation is worse today. But the public system is obsolete. Most people won’t give money to sustain programs on one channel out of 80 or 95. Public broadcasting increasingly relies on corporate sponsorship: advertising by another name. And it has become a political football, because people are offended when their taxes support opinions that they dislike. With Jefferson, they believe that ‘to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.’

“In the future, public broadcasting should support a diverse range of voluntary citizens and groups to make high-quality content. It should supply facilities, broadcast spectrum, training, quality-control, and archives of raw material. Public broadcasters should not monopolize channels, but should empower citizens to produce their own media.

“Nowadays, whenever politicians want to make something sound important, they connect it to national security. Well, the way we present ourselves to the world really is a national-security issue, for today the great struggle is for the respect of a global population. But even if al-Qaeda and other enemies went away, it would still be crucial to take control of our own media. We are not a self-governing and free people if we allow a few corporations to define our fundamental character.”

[Note: There is much talk right now about where the Democrats should place themselves on a left-right ideological spectrum. But there are many critical issues that don’t fit anywhere along that line. Taking a hard line against corporate media is an example of a position that is neither to the left nor the right of the Democrats’ current mainstream; it takes us off in a different direction entirely. Republicans, too, ought to consider a positive response to cultural pollution.]

The New Voices project at J-Lab makes small grants to citizen groups to create news media. I’ve served on the selection committee. There is a nice 3-minute video about some of the grantees on the Knight Foundation website.