Monkeys on a football field - why the ATV fiasco is just plain ridiculous!

Over the past couple days, a dear friend and I attempted to engage in a dialog on the ATV situation (which for all I care they could be XYZ, but right now it is what it is).

This is my take to the issue he labelled as 'the hot potato'. In an email this morning I wrote:

My gut tells me the inside scoop is so pathetic and vile that it would make me puke violently if I knew it all. I have a weak gag reflex!

But the outside scoop is far more important and critical than the inside one I think. The year is 2007. We are a country without a national broadcaster that reflects us. We continue to struggle to engage our youth, communities, orgs, in action, whether it’s fixing the neighborhood, education, voting, empowering communities, offering loans, gifts, finding and being proud of identity, joining the workforce, etc, etc, etc.. and the intellectual space we compete with is a barrage of content that infiltrates people’s homes and lives, made by someone else, delivered by someone else, reflecting someone else. Let alone the industry boat we’re missing from not having local broadcasters who can employ, commission, buy, sell, grow the landscape and help shape an economy we are in dire need of – a creative economy!

If this hot potato fiasco is an internal mismanaged/mishandled set up... there are solutions for that, and it’s business as usual. If there is a take-over, hostile or friendly, again there are solutions and it’s business as usual. If in the past three years someone forgot to keep track and things fell thru the cracks, guess what, there are solutions for that and again, it’s business as usual. But we cannot cripple something just when it’s about to move it’s second foot. We are amazing at vision, headlines, mandates, initiatives and business plans endorsed by the best advisors and consultants money can buy. We suck at implementation. We suck at continuity. We suck at evaluation. We suck at revision. We suck at reflection. We suck at accountability.

If ‘they’ don’t want to let this station on air so that this station can be properly evaluated on it’s performance, then we are short sighted, myopic and just plain stupid. If ‘they’ don’t want to let this station on air so that audiences and advertisers and producers make up their own minds about whether or not this content matters, then this is a police state and you just screwed your son by telling him, “yes daddy, go study film because there is career potential and an industry that welcomes you when you get back.” You just screwed him big time! Because tomorrow your son comes home and finds:

- There are no broadcasters to produce for.
- There are no cinemas nationwide to produce for.
- There is no audience.
- There is no community who cares for any of this because it has become so desensitized from content brainwashing of the ‘other’.
- There is censorship to keep dodging, albeit in ever evolving creative ways.
- There is 90% effort being put into how we can bend the archaic rules before we can begin the real work.
- There is an entire region illiterate in multimedia.

Welcome home son!

But then there is an internet that breaks every rule. Jordanians and Arabs in general are still terrified of dumping online, but this is going to explode and implode soon – on your computer and mobile screens - any screen.  And no one can stop that. Some of it is going to be negative and critical. Some of it is going to be positive and progressive. Some of it will be good entertainment, some bad. But most importantly it’s going to be about absolute freedom of thought and expression.  

Today, you and I can exchange the most amazing content back and forth in words, pictures and sound, and no one has to know nor can they stop us. You and I can engage in a peer-to-peer learning process where we inspire each other, motivate and support each other, without needing a formal system to let us do it. You and I thru our email, blogs, networks, mobile and face to face can today grow this into engaging a wider network of people who continue to learn, explore, do, make mistakes, fix and grow, all the while our governments flush down the drains massive budgets and resources as they try to engage us back into a national system. A system crippled from it's dependency on aid rather than it's natural resources - it's people and their intellectual abilities and that which they create.

It’s going to become so messy that we’re going to need millions of social entrepreneurial programs and a fund for 200million young minds, to contain and fix things, and even then there will be so much damage done, so once again we be will consumed in the catch-up game rather than the progressive one we aspire for. Do the math on: Education. IT. Political parties. Unions. Media. Culture. Knowledge economy.

What happens when we fail to act? Surely there’s a price to pay for remaining still, and for not getting up. So in this specific hot potato related issue, maybe we owe it to ourselves and each other to be engaged and create a wider dialog, rather than enjoy front row seats in a bad spectator sport because we have free tickets and are anaesthetized. And maybe our duty is to create a space where media workers are fed from their communities and in turn feed them back, rather than us contorting reality and sheltering our kids in incubators within good looking gated communities that fool them and then must eject them out to make space for the next batch.

Yassmina is exploring what to do for college next year. Liberal Arts? Film? Art? Sociology? etc.. all the questions that are her right to ask at this important time in her life. When she asked me, I formulaically gave her a ten-word answer, connected her with the ‘right’ schools to look at with good programs in liberal arts, social entrepreneurship, the arts, media studies, etc.

But now I think I screwed her. I misled her, making her believe there is something for her to come back to in a few years. I led her to believe there is a social fabric that empowers, something that will nurture her, allowing her to continue being enlightened, take risks and want to give back. It’s a lie. And you know what? It shouldn’t be her job to come back from school and clean up the mess we are consciously creating, while knowing better! What I should really be telling her is to study space exploration – because we won’t be able to hand over to her a world she deserves, so she might as well start looking at one that may be more conducive somewhere else in this universe!

But that’s just my thinking - worth a fils on a positive morning my friend!

PS:
We need ATV and we need another host of stations to go on air, so that a wide variety of programming reflects us in all our factions and diversity. But if the investment portfolio of media includes cases at hand like JTV, ATV, Media City, and the handful of stations airing 'stuff' that is poor and insulting while broadcasting it out of a hole in the wall thru a playlist less sophisticated than my free media player, well then this is a sad state of business affairs.

PPS:
Watch this space for my AudioVisual Commission rant! Back in March I posted this note.