New value resides in engagement, not content

The BBC Trust, established in January of this year as more robust means of protecting the public interest in the running of the BBC, is engaged in a three month long review of the bbc.co.uk website. Last night they invited a group of academics and consultants to short series of conversations.

One of the most fascinating contributions came from JP Rangaswami the MD at BT Design who is also the thinking blogger behind Confused of Calcutta. He noted that the BBC, like all large organisations (or indeed individuals) online, they are in the business of seeding ideas:

"When I hear the word audience I get irritated or the word content, I get irritated. I don't have an audience and I don't want an audience. Content are assets and audience is about the distribution of assets, but new value only gets created when there is an engagement.

"I want an engagement.  I would like to open up blogging inside the BBC, so I can have an engagement with people deep inside. If that happens, suddenly you will find that the walls become deeply porous."

Sue's also got a discussion going on the BBC Trust's Six Public Purposes. See also Charlie Beckett from Polis; Simon Dickson; Sunny Hundal; and David Wilcox.

Comments

[Mark]

An interesting point of view - although I profoundly disagree with it.

Why would I want engagement without content? Content is not and never has been a finite thing. If I take a book - a completely packaged piece of content if ever there was one - from the shelf, I can argue with it, chew over the ideas in it, show it to others to start a dialogue...and the point here is that 'engagement' without the content is impoverised engagement. It's just me and my stream of (vaguely coherent) consciousness at play.

We have entered an age in which, I suspect, the socio-cultural relativism of the moment means that all opinions, all views, are valid not just in the democratic sense of having a 'right to an airing' but in the rather more dangerous sense that my views on, say, nuclear fission are as valid as those of distinguished, experienced nuclear physicists who've researched the subject for 30 years.

I don't have a problem with the 'right to an airing' bit - indeed it is for me the ONLY justification for blogging. Blogging is most nearly like a set of monologues at a pub bar, with occassional interpolations and asides from others at the bar, the proprietor and others.

But I really don't think that a debate about the scope for nuclear fission in future energy plans for the UK is aided by MY blogging about it as much as it would be if the best mind on the subject did so, and invited us to 'listen in'. Would we honestly VALUE my opinion on that?

Ironically, it is that last form of engagement (listening to and interacting with the expertise and content) that has created some of the most engaged broadcasting undertaken by the BBC.