Recording has started

Interviewer:	Uh, we’re talking to Gloria Pan and she is the communications director of the Media Center.  Welcome to Politics Online, Gloria.

Gloria Pan:	Well, thank you for inviting me.

Interviewer:	Yeah.  Tell us a little bit about the Media Center and what y’all do.

Gloria Pan:	Well, the Media Center is a non-profit ________ committed to building a better informed society and a connected world.  We focus on trends and development at the intersection of media technology and society; how the internet and other new communications tools like mobile phones, are changing people’s expectations and behavior.  And how that in turn, is changing media, business, government, and every other manifestation in society.

Interviewer:	Well, it sounds interesting.  If you just substitute the word media for politics for media, you’d have sort of a perfect overlap between what y’all do and what we’re interested in.  So, tell me a little bit about the project Digital Think.

Gloria Pan:	Okay, Digital Think begins with our conviction that story tellers are everywhere.  I think story-telling is human nature.  And in the digital age, the tools are now available for everyone to tell their story.  

	And let me paraphrase Andrew ________, who is director of the Media Center, he says that Digital Think is about the many possibilities and pathways that are now available to more enriching forms of communication.  What can you do online to tell your story in a visual, as well as – I’m not expressing it very well – use visual tools and also audio tools to create something that’s totally you.  And that’s something that hasn’t been available before and it’s in the hands of every person.  

	We gathered for Digital Think an eclectic group of visual media designers, editors, artists, producers from areas like journalism, art, activism, games and design to share their ideas on conceptualizing digital content and they wrote them in a series of essays which we collected at Digital Think.  And anybody can take a look at it on the Media Center website for free and the web address is mediacenter.org/digitalthink.  And we’re very excited about this.  I think we’re seeing a lot of interest in it.  For example a lot of educators in design communication are bulk ordering it to use it in their classrooms.

Interviewer:	________.  Talk about sort of the ramifications of these trends and developments for politics and public affairs issues as you see it.

Gloria Pan:	Are you talking about Digital Think because that seems to be separate?

Interviewer:	Well no, just the whole sort of citizen involvement, citizen journalism opening up in media to other voices, kinds of developments.  And sort of how does that apply?  I mean for example I’m into the Howard Dean campaign, I’m just going to say I’m just very much sort of a bottom-up thousand voices campaign.  You know, do you see political people understanding and using these sorts of techniques and tools beyond just sort of a limited few.  Where do you see it going?

Gloria Pan:	I think that this is a revolution.  Okay, with all of the terrible news we hear about every day about the war in Iraq, about the bird flu, about all of these terrible things; I think that the one area where there is so much hope and promise is the internet and communications and how it’s impacting our democracy.  I have tremendous faith that the internet is going to be the means by which democracy is going to fulfill its potential as the voice of the many.  

	Newsmakers are being held accountable to the average citizens in cyberspace and that is starting to take the velocity out of political spin and has –

Interviewer:	That’s a great phrase by the way.  Taking the velocity out of political spin.  I love that.

Gloria Pan:	Thank you.  And without that velocity, it gives people the validity to rise above political noise to give them the ability to find out what they really feel and allow them to make better informed decisions on Election Day.  

	And then furthermore, I think that if you spend a lot of time on the internet, it’s interactive.  That’s the most important thing.  It has the power to politicize people to draw them into issues and make them more likely to exercise their vote.  

	I think this is especially true among young people who are notoriously under-represented at the polls.  They’re growing up with the internet.  They’re expectations are different.  They expect to have their concerns answered.  They expect to be able to express their opinion, to debate, and to be able to have the means to change people’s minds.  

	And I don’t know if we’re going to see it in the next election, but I think certainly in the next 5 years or so, it’s going to transform the way politics is being conducted in this country.

Interviewer:	You know, it’s interesting that the media, the traditional main-stream media has been such an arbiter and gate-keeper and sort of status designator of politics.  In terms of:  this is a good candidate; this is a bad candidate; he’s got no chance; he’s got great ideas.  

	And it’s interesting to weigh if truly the media itself is opening up to so many voices and then the campaigns themselves are doing the same thing, I’m wondering how there can be crossover.  How can the many voices of campaigns become involved in the many voices of journalism and media branding.  And on the other hand, the audiences of media companies can be sort of “directed” if you will, into the political campaign dialogue as well.  Do you have any thoughts on that?

Gloria Pan:	Well, I think that you can’s find the lines anymore between mainstream media and everything else.  I think that the BLOGesphere, has experienced a tremendous rise in credibility.  Not every BLOG is worth reading, but the big BLOGs, the BLOGs that rise to the top.  They have proven themselves.  Why do they have such large audiences?  They have large audiences because a lot of people find them credible.  

	So as we move into election cycles, more and more people are going to be going online and reading what these very well informed private citizens have to say and to find out what they’re thinking.  And they are going to use that on top of what they’re seeing from the mainstream media to make their decisions and to decide what they’re thinking on specific issues.

Interviewer:	Interesting.  Do you see a way where, for example if you’ve got a campaign or political structure like Move On and Move On sort of directs its members or encourages its members to do X,Y and Z with the New York Times or the Washington Post or a local paper.  Have you seen much of that sort of mobilizing people online to bring their voices into the media for political purposes?

Gloria Pan:	Well, okay I’m not an expert in this area.  But, from what I’ve heard from some of the people that we’ve been talking to, you can get a million citizens to send in their letters.  You have too many people shouting and nobody hears anything because it’s just noise.  Okay, and also a lot of these political campaigns or a lot of these political movements like Move On, you’re basically preaching to the converted.  You’re not getting people to do anything that they don’t want to do or weren’t inclined to do anyway.  I think on the edges you might inspire more people to go and vote.  

	I think the power is going to be in the movement that goes out and gets people interested in politics, gets people aware of the importance of going out there and exercising their vote.  And I think that’s what happened in the last election.  The Republicans used the internet to get people to the polls who were never voters in the first place.  And that was very unexpected.  And it turned the election.

Interviewer:	What in the 2004 election, in terms of the technology and the media, surprised you or impressed you most?  What is the sort of take-away for technology from that election?

Gloria Pan:	Well, there’s the mobilization that I’ve mentioned before.  I think it was in Ohio, and you probably know better than I do, where they were able to go out and get church-going people who normally are not so involved in the media space to get involved.  And they were able to get them to go out to the polls.  But they got all of these voters who normally didn’t vote to go out to the polls and it turned the election.

	The other part of it is just the enrichment of the political dialogue.  It used to be, you used to sit in your living room and watch TV or flip through the newspaper or read your news magazines, and that’s how you got your issues.  And that’s how you knew what people were thinking.  But in the last election, we saw that; first there’s what you always did by watching the news and reading the newspapers.  And then you got the voices coming from the BLOGespehere saying well this is what mainstream media is saying but it’s not right.  Or this is what this newsmaker or that candidate is saying and it’s not right and these are the reasons.  And a lot of these people are very well informed and they had to go out and really find out the truth

	So you have opinions and information coming from a lot of your different sources and you as a voter are much more empowered to be able to make a right decision for yourself.

Interviewer:	No, I think that’s right.  And what about looking ahead?  What do you see as 2008, we’ll assume for the moment that we’re now looking back on the 2008 election.  What do you think is going to be the big change?  What’s going to be the new innovation that’s likely to surface?

Gloria Pan:	That’s a very good question.  I was frankly very optimistic in the 2004 election that we were going to have a lot more informed citizens out there and putting their mark on the new election.  But I think that we’re still in a transition phase and people are still getting used to being able to go out and find information that they need.  Not everybody knows that they can yet.  A lot of people will just sit there and take whatever information is said to them.  

	I think that by 2008 we’re going to have a lot more people who are able to go out, who know that they are able to go out, and find out what they need to know.  And then also we’re going to have a lot more people who maybe before they never cared, but they will care because the internet is a community building tool that they will be drawn into the process.  And I think that we will have a much more robust political dialogue moving up to the election and I think that we’ll have a lot more participation.  But you know I’m an optimist, so (Laughter) this is what happens.

Interviewer:	We’re not all optimists.  We all get up every morning, right?

Gloria Pan:	Yeah.

Interviewer:	And what about the Media Center.  What can we expect to see in the next few months and couple of years from you guys?

Gloria Pan:	Well, we are going to continue to look at the future of using information and keep an eye on innovation and changing audience behavior.  One big focus that we have is one collaborative media.  Everything sort of merges with everything else.  It’s really hard to kind of separate out different issues.  To us it’s really all one big thing because it’s a phenomenon that we’re all going through, all of society.

	But in early October, just a few weeks ago, we presented a very high profile ________.  I met the Associated Press at We Media.  And what We Media did was it gathered leaders and thinkers from mainstream ________ and information companies as well as from advertising technology activism.  The BLOGesphere and other sectors to consider collaborative media in the context of citizen journalism trust and new communications opportunities.  Al Gore actually was the keynote speaker and he came as the Chairman of _______ which is major new initiative in collaborative media.  That one really raised our profile and our ability to advance our mission to help create a better informed society.  

	And we’re going to be holding a follow-up conference in May, next May 2006 in London with the BBC.  So over the next few months we’re going to be devoting a lot of attention and resources to pulling that one off.  We are ambitious and it’s going to be even better and I hope it brings out even more insights as to what’s happening.

Interviewer:	Well, I was at the conference and it was a terrific conference.

Gloria Pan:	Oh were you at We Media?

Interviewer:	Yeah, absolutely.

Gloria Pan:	You didn’t introduce yourself.

Interviewer:	Well I don’t think you and I met, but I met a couple of other folks from the Media Center and Richard Samburg is an old friend of Politics Online.  We do a lot of work with the BBC and we’re looking forward to big things from your conference over there.  Any previews of what you expect from them?  What’s cookin’ with them?

Gloria Pan:	Everybody is asking that question and I’m in the dark as much as the next person.  We wrapped 2005 We Media just a few weeks ago and Andrew Mathison who is our director, he is off to London next week to sit down for the first big ______ planning meeting.  And then after that we will have some flesh on the skeleton of our meeting and I’ll be able to share more information I guess in a couple of weeks.  So I hope that you will stay tuned and your audience will stay tuned.  You can follow what we’re up to at mediacenter.org on the web.

Interviewer:	Terrific.  Well, we really appreciate your taking the time with us and we’ll follow it closely because you guys are doing some great stuff and we want our folks to know all about it.

Gloria Pan:	Well thank you very much.

Interviewer:	Thanks a lot.  I appreciate it.

Gloria Pan:	Okay.  Bye-bye.

Interviewer:	Bye-bye.

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