Digital Revolution

Do you want to help tell the story of the internet? Digital Revolution - a working title for a BBC/Open University co-production - is described as "an open and collaborative documentary on the way the web is changing our lives." It will be broadcast in four one-hour programmes on BBC Two in 2010.

HOW TO GET INVOLVED

Digital Revolution launched on July 10th 2009 and is - in the modern idiom - an 'open source' or 'crowdsourced' documentary, (as distinct from a ready made production served up for your passive enjoyment). This means that there is a chance for everyone to contribute in some way to the making of the programme.

The BBC wants people to share their ideas, thoughts, impressions, stories, links and knowledge. You can tweet the team at @BBCDigRev, become a guest blogger, share your illustrations or suggest alternative names for the documentary.

Throughout the production process videos will be released onto the website which will offer insight into the way a documentary is put together.
  
The are 4 programme topics to contribute to, which will help give some shape to your ideas:

1. power on the web
2. the fate of nations
3. the cost of free
4. the web and us

The Digital Revolution blog is quiet at the moment, but then it is August. However, if further diatribes from former dotcom entrepreneur Andrew Keen are posted things might get more interesting. Keen is a refreshing voice, whose concerns about the death of the expert and the cult of the amateur can be lost in the great online scream about his reactionary support for a dead age of traditional media and cultural gatekeepers.

Keen has described the Web 2.0 movement as fusing '60s radicalism with the utopian eschatology of digital technology... one of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 future may well be that everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.' To the digital apostles this is clearly a heretical view. It deserves to be debated seriously.

Lee Siegal, an elegant and persuasive writer, shares Keen's refusal to celebrate. 'I would like a serious discussion, first of all, of the way a novel idea becomes a mental tic.' Siegel's questioning of the 'near-hysterical hymns to an ultimately pedestrian technology' is sensitive, spirited and consequent, and should form the basis of a less adolescent analysis of technological change.

WHO'S INVOLVED

So far, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Chris Anderson, Jimmy Wales and Susan Greenfield have all contributed to the project in some way, and not all of them have positive or merely celebratory things to say. Academic and journalist Aleks Krotoski will present the documentary, and if Stephen Fry is not involved at some point, a Twitter campaign will probably begin to make sure that he is. But the point of Digital Revolution is this: if the web is about interactivity, then interactivity should inform a documentary about the web. Go offer them your two-penneth ...

25th August 09