 Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called first person plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. What do you do if you produce a radio show and you lose your voice? This question became a practical one during the month of December in Patty's life as she recovered from a bout of pneumonia. The timing wasn't that bad. Reruns of first person plural had been planned for the Christmas season. She had a chance to recover and find her voice again, but the infection has had other ideas and her voice remains too croaky and strained to carry her through an hour-long show. This setback has led to a creative solution for this week's episode of first person plural. Patty's inability to speak has reminded us how important radio has become to us. For the past 19 months, we have produced a radio show of some sort or another almost every week. Today we will spend some time sharing some of our early efforts and telling our own oral history in radio. Since one calendar year has come to an end and another is beginning, it seems appropriate to reminisce about our experiences in radio in 2002 and to reflect upon the state of radio in North America. Radio seems to be the most democratic of media. It does not require the high production costs of television or the natural resources production of books and newspapers. The receivers are cheap to acquire, so even the poorest of people often have access to the broadcast waves. One need only be able to talk or listen to use a radio. Literacy isn't even a requirement. Attempts to regulate and contain radio have remained futile, with the emergence of new technologies and the implementation of simple willpower thwarting efforts to abolish so-called pirate radio in spite of heavy penalties. One of the most poignant moments after the abolishment of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was when the people of Kabul celebrated in the streets by bringing out their contraband radios and musical instruments. It seems that even though broadcasting and playing music were forbidden during Taliban rule, the citizens of Kabul had these devices hidden in their basements and walls, awaiting the day when they could use them again, even under the most oppressive conditions where such an action could mean death or imprisonment, people saved their radios. In March 2001, self-described ALI reporter Robert W. Machesney published an article called Farewell to Radio, agreeing with our assessment that radio is the, quote, quintessential people's medium, close quote. Machesney limits the closing of this medium to the people in the United States. Quote, in the United States, however, radio is anything but the people's medium. It is the private preserve of a small number of billionaires who are falling all over themselves to better serve the needs of Madison Avenue. I do not wish to romanticize the nature of U.S. broadcasting from bygone days, but the fact is that the present-day radio is nothing short of pathetic. Close quote. Machesney goes on to outline the ways in which so-called reforms in U.S. broadcasting was during the 1990s led to a monopoly on radio through the oppression of low-power FM radio broadcasting and arbitrary limits on the number of broadcasting bands in the new digital age. With digital, more stations are technically possible, but their implementation is legally restricted. Machesney writes, quote, In other industries, like computers or automobiles, there might be arguments that having fewer owners is necessary for economies of scale that will eventually translate into product innovation and lower prices for consumers. No such claims can be made in radio. All the advantages accrue to the owners, not to the public. The stations now cost a fortune. Not because the cost of production is high, but because stations are worth so much as part of these massive radio chains, such as Clear Channel, which owns around 800 stations in the United States, it is a rip-off, pure and simple. And the rip-off has nothing to do with free markets. It is entirely due to a corrupt change in the law regulating the publicly-owned radio spectrum. The rational solution would be to only allow one station per owner, period. The cost of stations would plummet while the quality and diversity and local orientation would skyrocket. Everyone would benefit except the radio-owning billionaires who currently floss their teeth with politicians underpants. So don't hold your breath expecting any policies to improve matters. Close quote. Since this 2001 article, the same kind of monopolistic tendencies have arrived on the Internet. The passing of the same kinds of laws in the late 1990s pushed for royalties not only for the artists, but for the recording companies that produce music. The holder of those royalties is the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA. This is a convoluted royalty because many of the broadcasters who pay the royalties also own the recording companies that collect the royalties through their membership with RIAA. Royalty arbitration with the largest of these companies, Yahoo Radio and AOL Time Warner, was settled in 2001. But the next level of broadcasters, including sites they cater to hobbyists and micro-media broadcasters, settled their royalty fees through arbitration in the first half of 2002. The agreement made with these websites was similar to the earlier Yahoo and AOL agreements based on actual playtime rather than revenue made from the broadcast. This made sense for the big guys because they could make as much money as possible and not have to pay more royalties. But for the websites which aren't turning a profit, this created a major change in their strategy and it left hobbyists out in the cold. Before coming to CFU VFM and creating first-person plural, we produced an Internet radio show called Coffee Shop. This very low-tech, punkish show consisted of us taking a tape recorder to a coffee date and recording our usual bandering back and forth on topics that interested us. Beginning on June 20, 2001, we aired episodes of Coffee Shop on live365.com, an American website that allowed audio streaming. We got into live365 early enough in the game to be able to use the site at no charge. On the surface, one might think that a spoken word show that uses its own original content might not be affected by all the verbiage about royalties that was in the air. After all, we owned the copyrights on all our material and we recorded all our material ourselves, so whom else would there be to pay? Things did not work out this way in 2002, however. After the arbitration decision was announced by the United States Librarian of Congress, which ironically happened on the one-year anniversary of our station, Coffee Shop, live365, the website through which we broadcasted over the internet, decided that it was too much trouble to distinguish between those who broadcasted RIA materials and those who did not. So live365 announced to their plan to begin charging all hobbyists a US $5 a month quote, royalty administration fee, close quote. This meant that we would be paying the RIA $5 a month for permission to broadcast our own copyrighted material. Needless to say, this arrangement was unacceptable to us. We produced 30 episodes over a 14-month period. Our disappointment in live365's decision was great. We ended production of Coffee Shop in August of 2002. Many hobbyists, such as us, opted not to continue with live365. The prominent web server strategy, however, paid off for them in the end. They remain a strong presence on the web, but in our opinion, they are a watered-down version of their previous self. Their content is mostly RIA with little independent or original content. They are just one more member of the broadcast oligopoly, an effect that served the interests of the RIA well. The jury is still out in Canada. There are signs that micro broadcasting is in trouble here and that things are not moving in a good direction. Community and campus stations abound, but their funding is in jeopardy and their dependency upon volunteers is increasing while the number of volunteers is not. Love Power FM is also discouraged via its disproportionate subjection to federal bureaucracy. While internet radio in Canada is not being regulated, it is in practice homeless non-existent. Some shoutcast stations and others maintaining their own servers exist in Canada, but there is an absence of the kind of bandwidth dedicated to the medium that live 365 essentially give away pre-carb. CBC radio has to garner instant tax from commercial sources and has neglected its positioning among younger audiences. Commercial radio is growing in Canada and in spite of Canadian content requirements, it is highly connected to U.S. commercial radio. In short, it wouldn't take much for Canadian radio to follow the American way. Much vigilance is needed to prevent this. On today's episode, we are re-airing an interview off-patty by Geraldine Wilson for a women-on-air episode originally aired May 1st, 2002 on CFUV. May 1st was a day of protest by internet broadcasters concerned about the copyright and arbitration royalty-nail process. We are also going to share a long-sign with Colt from the sixth coffee shop episode called Freely Heard, originally recorded December 20th, 2001, here in Victoria. The sound quality on the coffee shop segment is significantly lower than CFUV standards, but we believe you will enjoy the authenticity of the recording with its cappuccino machines audible in the background. Join us as we reflect upon the importance of being able to speak freely and broadcast widely in an episode we call Binding in Our Voices of sociological sagaciousness. The police state is using its phallocentric organ, the corporate media to control ordinary people like you and me. In 2002, a number of webcasters protested the process by which the librarian of Congress arbitrated royalty payments for Internet radio. Because the board that oversees the process is called the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel, or CARB, the theme for the day at the live365.com website was, quote, Stinky Fish, close quote. In support of this effort, Patti co-produced an episode of Women on Air at CFUVFM dedicated to the protest. With then-Women's Radio Collective Coordinator, Geraldine Billison. Included in that show was an interview that Geraldine did with Patti. We are re-airing that interview in its entire team. How did you begin webcasting? Well, about, I guess about a year and a half ago, my husband started looking into it, and I actually wasn't interested in it as much as he was. I was busy doing my dissertation at the time, but he came up with an idea that I thought was a very good idea. We go for coffee almost every day. We get up and go and frequently go sit in a coffee shop, and we would get into these very intricate conversations about God knows what, any kind of politics, anything we were passionate about. Sometimes they were heated, sometimes they weren't, and he came up with this idea that this was really interesting conversation and that other people ought to be hearing this besides just me and him. And so he found Live365.com on the internet, and it was free to upload our stuff. And so he came up with the idea and created Coffee Shop. And I got just a thrill out of being on the internet, and I became more and more interested in the technology of it, more and more interested in how do you actually do broadcasting. I worked as a journalist before I went back to school, and this just really tapped into something in me that I didn't even know was there. So since that time, for the last year or so, we've been doing, we've done 21 episodes so far of Coffee Shop. We moved to Victoria and found out about CFUV and are now getting ready to start a show here on CFUV. And it's just been a year of sort of finding my place. I didn't even know I would be interested in radio over a year ago, and I'm just having a ball with it. Good. So how would the decision by Carp, if it goes through, affect Canadian webcasters? Well, I'm in a unique position here because I'm from the United States, and I'm working in Canada right now. And so I'm kind of straddling the line, so to speak. And so I think that I have a perspective on this that a lot of people might not have. I think that Canadians are going to be affected because a good number of Canadians are using American websites to broadcast their stuff. Victoria has 17 stations on live 365 alone, and most of them are music, a couple of comedy. I think we're the only spoken word original programming that's done out of Victoria. So that music, because it's sitting on an American website, sitting on an American server, is subject to American laws. And access to those websites for Canadians will be cut off if places like live 365 end up not being able to stay solvent because of the Carp decision and the high rates of royalties. So it is something that will affect access to the technology. It will affect Canadians because a number of Canadians are already using that technology, and it'll affect Canadians who want to use that technology but won't have a chance to do it. The other way that I think it'll affect Canadians is, let's see if I can put this, I think that if this works, there will be economic pressures in Canada to do the same thing in Canada. Oftentimes, however the economics goes in the United States, other countries follow suit, especially when it comes to internet technology. And so it won't be long before other groups like the international recording artists groups that exist will start demanding their royalties as well, and they will use this. This will set precedents that could be used in Canada. Right now it doesn't look like anybody's heading in that direction in Canada, but I fear that if they get away with this in the United States, there will be people in Canada who will try to get away with it here. And my hope is that the government would know enough to not follow suit, but the precedent will have been set. So I think it affects Canadians both directly and indirectly. So what do you think the implications to women are in the field of webcasting? Well, I think my own personal experience has been that I didn't even know about radio or how it worked or any of that kind of stuff. You know, my husband was a musician, has played with radio all of his life and has always been intrigued about it. But as a woman, I wasn't really, you know, as a little girl, I wasn't really encouraged to play with transmitters and do radio stuff. Though I do kind of remember when I was about 12 years old, we did WXYZ on a tape recorder all the time. So there was a little bit of inkling of that. But I think boys, especially, you know, I'm in my 40s, and I think that especially in the 60s when you were growing up, boys were encouraged in this more than girls were. I think that that's less true today, but still true. And I think that this is easy technology. I mean, the technology has gotten a lot more accessible. It's a lot easier. You don't have to, you know, know how to remove a transistor and put it back in and have an antenna and all of the stuff that you had to do when you had your little ham radio in your backyard when you were a kid. And because the technology is easier, and because more women are getting interested in the technology, this is one way to learn more about it, to find out whether you enjoy it or not. And it's a simple way. And if you already own a computer, it's a fairly inexpensive way. I mean, it doesn't add, it's expensive to get into if you were buying the computer just for this. But if you already own the computer, it doesn't really add a lot of cost to learn how to broadcast over the computer. And so I think that a lot of women, especially younger women, would have a chance to check this out as a career move and learn more about that technology and see what they enjoy and don't enjoy. And if this isn't here, if it's not here anymore, then they lose out. And it's just one more avenue that won't be available to them. And I want to make it clear why I think that that avenue would dry up if the car recommendation went through. I think that Mr. Jeffery's talked about this in the segments that we aired earlier. But I want to reiterate that I believe that what's going on will encourage an oligopoly among media on the Internet. They are using, I don't think it's an accident, whether they meant this or not. I'm not saying anything about what their intentions were. But as a sociologist, I'm always interested in what cultural norms are. And they are considering it normative to use Yahoo and AOL as their models for figuring out how to structure the royalty rates. And I think that that will have the effect of whether they intended it or not to encourage the development of AOL and Yahoo and discourage the development of independent webcasters who are dependent upon audio streams like Live 365. And because of that, I mean eventually it will end up being an oligopoly because it'll end up just being these big players. You have to have the money up front in order to stay alive. And I'm pretty sure that AOL or Yahoo is not going to give me a chance to do coffee shop on their websites. They're too busy broadcasting their own affiliates over the web. And these are the same, I mean, Yahoo, this isn't so much true of Yahoo, but AOL is owned by Time Warner. And these are the people who already own all of the TV stations and well, not all, but many of the TV stations, many of the radio stations and many of the newspapers, they already own a great percentage of the media. And the internet is the sort of last, one of the last places and certainly one of the last in the United States where grassroots broadcasting can happen. So this is also an issue of freedom of speech, really, because if large companies like AOL own so much of the media, where else are you going to go? Yeah, exactly. And access gets left out a lot in freedom of speech discussions. It's like when you hear discussions about freedom of speech, it's like being able to talk, but it also has to be about being able to be heard and having somebody who can listen to you, having access to an avenue where you can talk to somebody and they have a chance to listen. So if I sit in my living room and talk all day long, that gives me a sore throat and not much more than that, but having access to the technology is a part of having access to the freedom. And by making this just simply an economic issue and not looking at it within its social context, it unmarks all of that freedom of speech discussion. It looks like, I mean, if you read RIAA's web, they're great advocates of freedom of speech and great advocates of intellectual property right, which I am too. I mean, I plan on doing a lot of writing and a lot of broadcasting in my life, and I want to be compensated for it someday. And so I certainly don't want royalties to not be part of the process. But if you only consider royalties in an economic context and don't look at the social implications for what these royalty schemes mean, then it penalizes whether the people wanted it to or not independent artists. It penalizes independent cultural producers like me, micro-media people. And so it's important to not pretend that it's just an economic issue. We need to also recognize that there are ramifications for this beyond just the players that are most directly affected. So the process didn't include these stakeholders. It didn't allow, I mean, they said explicitly they didn't want the public commenting on this. And I mean, you can go to the Library of Congress website and the Copyright Office website and you'll see they say it directly. This is not for public comment. And so it was constructed as if it were simply an economic arrangement between the webcaster companies and the RIAA. But the truth is, is that it does have a social context. And if you ignore that social context, you have implications for freedom of speech, whether you mean to or not. And so I'm making no comment on their intention. I have no idea what's in their hearts and minds. But I do know from my point of view that this is limiting who I can talk to, how I can talk to it, and what access I have. Our first foray into radio started on June 20th, 2001 when we came up with a simple idea for an internet radio show. We like to talk. We like to drink coffee. We like to go to coffee shops and talk and drink coffee. Why not do a show where we go to a coffee shop, drink coffee, and talk about the world around us? We recorded 30 episodes of coffee shop over the next 14 months. And each one was encoded using our own computer and made available to listeners on the internet via the Y365.com website. Subsequent decisions by the U.S. Library of Congress and by Y365 made it impossible for us to continue to use the latter to host the project without the ludicrous consequence of our paying royalties on our own intellectual property. We offer today a sample of coffee shop excerpts from episode 6, The Freedom to Be Heard. Hi again and welcome back to Coffee Shop. This is our sixth show. It's the 20th of December, 2001. My name is Carl Wilkerson and with me is Dr. Patty Thomas. We're in Victoria. Patty just said hi. We're in Victoria, British Columbia. Patty at a coffee shop drinking coffee and doing what we always do in these shows which is talking about things that have peaked our interest in the last week or so. Patty has a topic she particularly like to bring to the forefront this week, something evolving communication and the context of speech, is that correct? Yes. Great. I guess what sparked that this week was that we got to talking about how various countries in light of the terrorist attack have been eroding freedoms, detaining people for what they talk about and who they associate with as well as for what they do. That got me starting thinking about freedom of speech and the place of freedom of speech right now in the so-called free world. And that got me thinking about the internet as a counterpoint in whether or not it could succeed. And I picked up a, I think it was called the International Telecommunications Conference but don't quote me on that. It was something that said ITC. It was going over some statistics about who has access to the internet in the world. And it was interesting for a couple of reasons. One was that the top 15% of the world's population, the richest 15% of the world's population had 85% of the access. The other thing though was that the lower percentage was growing quite well. They went from about 2% of those that were in the lower two categories, the poorest, only had access. Only 2% had access in 1995, I think it was. And by 1999, closer to 15%, it was under 15% but I can't remember what it was but it was over 10%. So between 10% and 15% of the poor people in the world had access to the internet now. It didn't talk about what that access was. I don't know whether we're talking about libraries or actual ownership of computers or exactly how that worked out. But it seemed to me that a lot of freedom of speech, people, especially in light of what happened at Tenement Square and the ways in which the students at Tenement Square got the word out through telecommunications. Anyway, there was a lot of hope back then that this would be the way that freedom would be secured. And I guess I'm still hopeful, but I was a little shook by those statistics. It seemed to me that freedom of speech is being bought and paid for nowadays. About a few years ago, almost 10 years ago, I said to someone I knew when I was in school that the freedom of speech issue is really about the freedom to be heard, that if you're standing in the middle of your living room talking to yourself about something and no one else is there, nobody's got a serious problem with that from the standpoint of enforcement. So we're not really talking about freedom of speech, about freedom to be heard. And what that reduced to in practical terms, I said at the time, was who will be on television? What will they say and not say? Who will determine who will be on television? Who will determine what those who are on television will say and not say? A simplistic analysis, but at the same time about the perspicacious one, especially given my relative naivete at the time about how the world really worked, I would expand it to include the other media as well. I don't think television is the be-all and end-all of the media. I think I note that people read newspapers. I note that people listen to the rodeo. I note that people buy books and magazines and so forth. Yeah. But it does. I point out that certain voices are heard, are broadcast to expand that word about its technical definition for a moment, are broadcast to far more listeners than others. If you're standing at home in your living room talking to yourself about it. Does the amount of people who listen determine the right to be heard? I think it's one aspect of it. I don't think it's a singular determination. I don't either. I'm beginning to think that I'm going to say that who's listening is almost irrelevant, but it really isn't because one of the reasons these people are getting arrested or detained has got to do with who the government constructs them as listening, talking to, that who's listening part is also important in the restriction of speech. Which people do you mean? Well, I guess some of the detainees in the United States have been detained because not only have they had sympathetic rhetoric to the Jihad-style Muslims but they've been talking to other Muslims in sighting or have been construed to be constructed as talking to other Muslims as having influence over people. I don't know enough about the cases to comment on what's true, what isn't, anything like that. What I don't like is the general trend. And the trend is not only can we detain you because we don't like what you're saying or who you're saying it to, but we now can detain you without due process, especially if you're somebody who was born outside of the country that you're residing in. I don't think so. I think it's a straight power point. I think that, as I said to you privately, I think that, you know, I mean, independent of the symbols and what these people involved might do, I think the message here is not we don't want you to talk to certain people. It is the sitting down Muslim girl have decided that they're not going to be accountable anymore and they all got together and decided at the same time any excuse would suffice. I don't want to choose that rabbit. That's the point. I don't think it has anything to do with freedom of speech. It does. Whether they intend for it to do with freedom of speech or they construe it, it's taking away, but it does take away freedom of speech. Except in the sense that the absolute power of certain classes of people preclude the possibility of freedom of speech on the part of the rest of them. Yes. Okay, yeah. And I don't understand why you said that. I want to clarify something. I don't want to chase this too far. I want to clarify something. That they are restricting freedom on the basis of not only the fact that you're saying something but who you're saying it to, and you said, you know, you think it's a power play. I thought I was saying a power play. How are you seeing that as different from a power play? I mean independent of, not independent of not restricting to the freedom of speech it does involve. It's not about listening to the people who are being put away. Are you suggesting that? They're a flipping board. They're not randomly putting people in jail. It's about who has the power as the king. If there were a quote, freedom of speech control issue, then the power of the people being put away would be the issue. I don't think that their power is the issue. I think that the power of those who presume the right to put people away for any reason, for no reason is the issue. The message being the message here is about who has the power. I don't think, for that reason, I don't think it's a freedom of speech issue in that a freedom of speech issue would be about what those who are being put away have to say about this or that. And it isn't, they're just, they're a scapegoat. Yeah, but they're a scapegoat because they talk. Well no, I think they're a I think they're a scapegoat for how do I put it? I think they're a scapegoat because the scapegoat is simultaneously something that is part of and not part of the culture. I think they're a scapegoat specifically because in certain nations that I can name, the possibility of locating problems within the power structure. The possibility of admitting responsibility on the part of those in power does not exist. The other does not exist yet. It must be blamed for everything. Okay, but I'm more concerned Right, but I'm more concerned about the scapegoat than I am about the power. You're listening to First Person Plore on CFUV 101.9 FM Victoria. It does not surprise me that people in power are interested in keeping their power at all costs or interested in expanding their power. What I'm interested in is strategies from that. I think you're taking a top-down view of this and I'm interested in a bottom-up view. I'm not so interested in what they intend. What the powers that be intend. I know what they intend. They intend to be more powerful. That is what they want. The more they can push for power the more they're going to. What I'm concerned about is how does one subvert that? How does one take that back? What are where are the sites of resistance? Where are the sites of empowerment? Where are the sites that they just that are ignored by the powers that be? And I suspect that given the right opportunities telecommunications is the place that that's going to happen. That the resistance is going to happen. The telecommunications is becoming so complicated and even chaotic to a certain extent that control over it by a central power is going to be not possible. Yeah, and I don't think that I think you're right about one more thing. I think that the central powers don't realize that yet. There was a U.S. senator a couple of years ago who was talking about regulating content on the internet and it was clear from the language of the bill he proposed what was going to propose and what have you that he didn't have the slightest idea. He didn't have a clue what was on the internet. Somebody had written this thing for him and he read it out just like an actor reading lines. He wrote it for him, had no idea either. And I'm not sure what the point was if it wasn't to make it appear as if he was doing something about the problem. The quote problem, quote quote. Item one, the internet is international in a way that few other media are. Especially a few other things that are available to people. Television isn't the real way. Radio isn't the real way. I suppose telephones. I don't know as much about how. It costs you more though to make a telephone call to another country. It doesn't cost you more to email somebody in another country. No, that's right. You don't even know sometimes if you're emailing or talking to somebody in another place. You suggested to me that communications media such as television or telecommunications was your word and that these are subject to control from above as a global. They're not, not as easily subject to it. Access to the technology is one way that it can be limited that access is possible in a lot of ways right now around the world without having a lot of money. And while I'm certainly not arguing that the poorest of the poor in the world can go out and communicate with other people in the world I know the barriers exist but there's still a lot of people in the world who would like to do something to help the poorest of the poor who have the capability now of connecting with each other in a way that they couldn't perform. Yeah and I think that's a valid viewpoint. Somebody asked Michael Moore at some point, do you really think that the working class if there is downtrodden to suggest has the time to read your books and Michael Moore answered I'll tell you who does have the time to read the books, to see the movies the children of the working class and they do. And I think that that Michael Moore is a sufficient defense and I would point out there are others. Michael Moore is a good example here too starting with some of the poor and downtrodden are not as poor and downtrodden as others. And Michael Moore is a good example here of what I'm trying to talk about a young man political party who's going to change the world all by himself but he does generate culture and he does generate it through communicative he doesn't create art that sits in a gallery somewhere that only a wealthy person can walk in and see, he creates accessible culture. I think art galleries on the contrary are one of the more accessible forms of culture. But people don't access them people don't go there. Pop culture is much more accessible in terms of you have to have a certain amount of understanding of visual art in order to walk into a gallery and appreciate and have accessibility. Just because I can walk in doesn't mean that I'm going to understand what I see once I walk in. Well no one understands it absolutely it's not a whole process but I will tell you this I think that if you wanted to cultivate an appreciation of art firsthand you could do that a lot more cheaply than you could for example an appreciation of professional sports which I take you and concede is pop culture Yeah An appreciation of professional sports But I'm talking more about movies I'm talking more about books books are free books are free, they're called libraries books and almost every library I've ever been in. It depends on where you live Well yeah that's true we're talking western civilization There are a lot of public libraries that are so good at staring and there are a lot of public libraries in art. I mean in places that you would not believe would have great libraries You're telling me that access to the media counts Not just access to the media but kind of media that production content counts too I mean it goes back to what you said at the beginning The ability to produce it you mean Yeah I mean it's one thing you're talking about television, television is meaningless in this group in counter, television is owned and operated for the most part by very wealthy people who have very specific interests in mind who want to sell you something But pop culture is still it's possible to do things to produce things that are pop that are accessible that are not commercial do you think I think the split between ho culture and the other sort is Yeah maybe that's what's messing me up Maybe that's what's messing me up is that it's very hard to define what I'm talking about because the lines are very blurred already I think the nut about production is entirely valid though I think that the ability to produce this sort of thing and subsequently to have it heard Yeah There is such a thing as community television try finding community motion pictures sometimes Except that nowadays people make their own videos all the time I mean it's become cheaper it's not accessible to most of us but it's become cheaper And who sees the videos of when they put them on the internet they show them at home The point is we're looking at the extreme end of the centrist dominated culture You can write an email or log on to a bunch of free forums and put out verbal content written content at will and you can do that at your local library You don't even have to own I mean westerners will do that at their local libraries They don't even have to own the technology They can walk into a library They can only do a half hour of it a day in most places But We're coming down towards the end of our show So we'll start winding down So why don't we identify questions instead of answers for a minute If we're going to be supremely self-serving I guess the question would be what kinds of culture, what media I mean to say are most receptive to a particular kind of content You can turn that question around but it'd be an intellectual exercise more than anything else Of course certain kinds of content are unsuitable for certain media It's tempting to say that one feeds the other and just be a nebulous about it but I'm not sure that's true I think that it starts with one and the question of the other is bagged at that point I don't think they're convergent in theory but in practice one almost always decides that one's going to pursue a certain medium and then the content follows that or that one's going to pursue a certain content and the media follows that that in specific cases it is hierarchical or at least chronological ordered by me Ordered chronologically I think the language is one or the other I don't think the decision is an explicit and mandatory one I think it happens as a practical matter Okay so this week we're actually not going to get cut off a mid-sentence and we're going to say goodbye now Goodbye so this was Carl Wilkerson and Patty Thomas excuse me Dr. Patty Thomas Gotta get that PhD in there This is Coffee Shop episode number 6 from Victoria British Columbia It's still the 20th of December 2001 Thank you for listening Bye bye Upon the death of her sister in 1993 Smith Jones became the last speaker of her native language called IAC Her descendants influenced heavily by public schools and dominant culture did not learn IAC Except for the part of it retained via anthropological archiving this oral culture and history will be lost forever when she passes No one can encapsulate the knowledge that is lost with such a passing It is in language that knowledge especially local knowledge is stored The rise of an ecological view of nature during the last 40 years has led to an appreciation of the harmonious ways in which the indigenous peoples of this continent managed natural resources One cannot help but wonder what knowledge has been lost as these cultures were destroyed and their languages blotted off the face of the earth Were the keys to ecologically sound practices bearing with them As debates about the Kyoto Accord and about greenhouse gases fill our political discourse Wouldn't it be a shame to realize that contemporary Canadians are left with a necessity of reinventing techniques of natural management that may have been available to the original Canadians for hundreds of years The real shame is that the demise of so many cultures and languages means we can never know exactly what has been lost The invention of radio and sound recording could mean that oral traditions and languages have a chance to survive But only if open access and free exchange of ideas are protected and indeed encouraged If recordings and broadcasts are dominated by the same imperialistic impulses that continue to wipe out languages at an estimated rate of 1 every 2 weeks then future generations will have only so-called market-driven knowledge upon which to draw It has become obvious that that will not be good enough to solve whatever problems future societies will face When we started recording our conversations and airing them on the internet nearly 2 years ago we did so from a purposely naive assumption that a good discussion deserves archiving It isn't that we particularly esteemed our own voices over others It was that we particularly objected to being silenced or rather drowned out by the mindless repetition that passes for cultural production in most media As singer-songwriter Jello Biafram once said Don't hate the media Become the media New technology makes that more possible today than it ever has been We are indeed privileged to have access to this technology But the technology alone is not enough We began our adventure into becoming the media on the internet Decisions made by the United States Librarian of Congress and the subsequent decisions of Y365 took away the privilege we had realized from the technology putting us in the position of either paying royalties on our own material or taking our show off the air Our experience here at CFUV has been a better one so far but government and listener funding for all of the public are more important to this good experience than the technology to create the show Support for community and campus radio is waning and like the demise of languages the demise of public radio will mean the loss of knowledge that may be useful and even vital to the public good Silencing voices preventing people from speaking has consequences for human society It may be true that most of what is said will be useless, but we cannot know that until after it has been spoken preventive attacks on speech on the basis of color, creed, status or association produces a silence that society can't ill afford Audrey Lord in her paper the transformation of silence into language and action wrote shortly after discovering that she had breast cancer quote, I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken made verbal and shared even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood that the speaking profits me beyond any other effect and becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality and of what I wished and wanted for my life however short it might be Priorities and admissions became strongly etched in a merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences of what had I ever been afraid to question or to speak as I believe could have meant pain or death but we all heard in so many different ways all the time and pain will either change or end death on the other hand is the final silence and that might be coming quickly now without regard for whether I had never spoken what needed to be said or had only betrayed myself into small silences while I planned someday to speak or waited for someone else's words and I began to recognize the source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength I was going to die if not sooner than later whether or not I had ever spoken myself my silences had not protected me your silence will not protect you close quote making radio this week has been a struggle that has served to remind us of the greater struggle to protect the freedom to speak and the freedom to be heard as with lost languages losing the voices of people with agendas other than to sell something will be costly to the public good community and campus radio are among the last places available to collect this knowledge and archive it 2002 was a mixed year for us on one hand we lost a valuable avenue for expression with the current decision in Y365's reaction to the decision on the other hand we found CFUV and the creation of first person pool and valuable avenue for expression we hope that the avenues of support for Canadian public radio continue to exist in celebration of this hope we leave you with a poem written and recited by ordinary lord the poem is entitled a song for many movements a song for many movements nobody wanted to die on the way caught between ghosts of whiteness and the real water none of us wanted to leave our bones on the way to salvation three planets to the left a century of light years ago our spices are separate and particular but our skins sing in complimentary keys out of quarter to eight meantime we were telling the same stories over and over and over but broken down God survived in the crevasses and mud pots of every beleaguered city where it is obvious there are too many bodies to cart to the ovens or gallows and our uses have become more important than our silence after the fall too many empty cases of blood to bury or burn and there will be nobody left to listen our labor has become more important than our silence our labor has become more important than our silence Wilkerson and Dr. Patty Thomas to examine social and organizational issues Wilkerson visit our website constructioncompany.com or email us at