This was the full brief:

Okay, we’re joking…..sort of. But be it video-snacking, YouTube resumes, digital video activism or live-streaming to the web from your mobile phone, the world of Web 2.0 is being driven by the moving image. This panel will examine the role video is playing in shaping communication techniques within companies as well as helping reach new consumer audiences.

In a way the event answered the question itself. One of the participants, the BBC’s Robin Hamman, who I had thought was going to be on the panel instead streamed the proceedings live via his mobile phone to Qik where it is now archived. So now I’m thinking why blog about the event when you can see the whole thing on Qik? And, in my case, why write a note to my boss when I can just point him to the full recording and (slightly scary thought) he can make up his own mind on how it went?

In preparing for the event I did a couple of things. First, I thought about my professional experience within Reuters. We’ve got perhaps a couple of hundred journalists blogging on a regular basis but just a handful video blogging. That’s partly because video is still a bit tricky while blogging is relatively easy since, in essence, it’s just a text-based content management system and nearly all our journalists are writing on a very regular basis.

But that’s the view from a mainstream media organisation. What’s the picture in the blogging world? I asked a number of people in the Global Voices blogging network for a perspective. These are people who live and breathe blogging. They deal with the realities of handling content using social media day in, day out and from the four corners of the globe. I thought their answers gave the topic a deeper perspective that I struggled to get across to the London audience.

…there’s definitely lots going on with video, but I firmly believe most people spend so much time in their pyjamas they won’t want to be on video most of the time they spend online. It’s hard enough to get people to use their own names in discussion forms, blog and article comments.Someone sent us a link to this Wordpress plugin the other day that allows people to make comments in blogs with videos. It’s kind of neat and perhaps the kind of thing we’ll be seeing more of soon. It’s complimentary to the Web 2.0 activity that already exists rather than something that replaces it. Personally, I think we’re more likely to see video, still photos, and text mingling more effortlessly on the web, rather than a situation where moving images dominate. The multi-media experience is much more effective for interactive story-telling. Text is just too effective and easy to lose the battle.

Solana Larsen

I think the idea that the world of web 2.0 is being *driven* by the moving image is debatable, especially given the dominance of microblogging platforms like Twitter that are primarily text based. Nor is video as immediately “social” as text. Which is not to say that it’s not an important ingredient in the mix.

I think that as more individuals become versed in multiple forms of media we’re probably going to see them mixing them and harnessing them for various purposes at different times. Online video can be of immense value, nevertheless, in the places where television continues to be very effective - ie in live coverage. Bandwidth and service constraints notwithstanding, the day a live streaming service like Qik is deployed beyond US borders it going to be revolutionary. And unlike TV, this content is instantly archived.

And of course, and perhaps obviously, the existence of cell phone and other small digital video cameras has completely changed the game in terms of security and privacy, both for better (police torture videos in Egypt) and for worse (videos featuring schoolgirls in Trinidad having sex). I was thinking just the other day how difficult it used to be to take photographs in airports, in many of which I think it’s still illegal to do so.

Georgia Popplewell

“As long as connectivity speeds are an issue, videos will continue being food for few. I´m hoping that web 3.0 will make it easier to tag online videos and search them, but so far it is mostly manual labor: sitting through dozens of videos trying to find the ones that have useful tidbits of information. So in countries where connectivity is slow, watching videos online can be torturous at worst and annoying at best. I spend most of my time looking at icons that remind me that the video is still loading, so I know firsthand it can get frustrating. Likewise with uploading content when one has an intermittent connection. Uploading and viewing video has tech requirements that blogging in text doesn´t, so I don´t think it will substitute blogs anytime soon, they will continue growing in tandem, complimenting the other’s content. As long as we depend on typed tagging for videos, videos will still depend very heavily on written context.”

Juliana Rincon

Instead of writing this I could have recorded a two minute ‘piece to camera’ (will we start calling these items ‘pieces to mobile’?) and uploaded it to a social media platform. I haven’t done that because I just don’t think I’d have been able to tell the story as well. I like the flexibility that blogging gives me. I’ve got video here, I’ve been able to link to underlying sources, I’ve been able to use all the media there is. And very quickly.This feels like genuine multimedia production that plays to each medium’s strengths. I just can’t see video alone eclipsing this ability to weave media strands together.

Picture credit: Social Media Influence

The context of the meeting was to establish what we don’t understand about the emerging media landscape in order to inform the direction of future research programmes.

So, in the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld, what do we know that we don’t know?

How distributed can the production of meaning be?
An academic question from John Zittrain of Berkman but very much with real world concerns in mind. He’s worried about where the atomisation of media consumption and production will take society. In an elitist world, one in which communication channels (including media) are controlled by the few, then it is relatively easy to see how the politics of consensus and compromise can be pursued. But many felt that the new social technologies were creating new silos, reducing the quality of public discourse, accelerating disengagement from politics and, possibly, creatng the conditions for extremist politics.

How can we get the public to eat their broccoli?
Traditionally, nearly all media has followed a public service remit to some degree and mixed content with public policy relevance with the really popular stuff. So you get a smattering of Darfur in a diet of domestic news, celebrity and sports. But that only works when publishers control the medium.

I know I wasn’t the only one to squirm as David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, described how increasingly anachronistic the Big Media model of editors deciding what it was appropriate for readers to read was beginning to seem. What seemed to worry this group more than anything else was that if consumers control their ‘DailyMe’ — a personalised news service — then how will the public service stuff get through?

Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation gave some great context when he said, “More and more people are sharing experiences. That means there are fewer shared experiences. Journalism has prospered for centuries because it created shared experiences that I will call community.” He thought that journalists would prosper if they used new social technology to rebuild shared experiences.

What is the future for journalists?

The most interesting exchange I heard came in a session on the nature of journalism in 2013, in which Global Voices’ Solana Larson suggested that the BBC’s model of parachuting in white men to cover the rest of the world was looking increasingly anachronistic . She predicted that by 2013 that there would be no foreign correspondents in the sense of outsiders coming to make sense of a foreign country.

Richard Sambrook, Global Head of BBC News , rather disarmingly agreed, saying the future would be all about ‘authenticity’ — a notion that seemed to underpin much of the event’s discussions but not a word that I ever heard repeated.

At the same time there was a feeling that citizen media hadn’t really delivered on its promise of a couple of years ago. Ethan Zuckerman , a Berkman fellow and co-founder of Global Voices, who probably knows more about this than anyone else, summarized the situation as one in which bloggers took their cue from mainstream media and added that this was a global phenomenom not just true of the States.

Despite pessimism about Big Media’s future and the pefrormance of Citizen Media, a straw poll of those present showed near unanimity in the view that the future was bright for journalism. So how do you square this circle? There wasn’t a huge amount of discussion but the notion of ‘networked journalism’ with professionals working closely with amateurs and experts was one that was mentioned. And when someone said that the most interesting presentations of the meeting — BBC, Global Voices and ProPublica — were all from non-profit organisations, there was much sage nodding.

Is there a conflict between personalised online experiences and privacy?

Manuel Castells of the University of Southern California gave a much discussed speech in which he questioned whether our freedom was being commoditised in the sense that by giving service providers details of ourselves we get more personalised and therefore more useful services but we give up a certain amount of privacy.

Obviously, Facebook has brought these concerns to the fore. But there are myriad ways in which personal data is being captured and used (and sold). How long would it be before just using the phone would mean being subjected to a personalised 30 second advert, asked one speaker? (It’s already happening with one UK mobile phone carrier apparently.)

Public sector bias?

At times the lofty academic analysis left me feeling bamboozled but I found comfort in social media in the form of other participants’ Twitter and chatroom messages as they swapped virtual notes on what they liked and what confused them.

And now, several days later and after reviewing some of the more thoughtful blogs compiled by Media:Republic, I’m struck by the analysis of two fellow London-based attendees who both detected a defeatist attitude amongst the U.S. participants about the ability for commercial media to compete in this new world.

Neil McIntosh of the Guardian looked at the Los Angeles Times and wondered whether its failure to use the kind of presentational tricks used by European media to make news more palatable might be one explanation for its problems. Charlie Beckett of the thinktank Polis thinks an era of super-competition requires a smarter approach from mainstream media and advocates ‘networked journalism’ — the blending of professionals and amateurs/experts — to herald a more participatory form of journalism.

I like my compatriots’ optimism. I still worry that what I think is ‘good’ will turn out to be uneconomic in this new world.