compromise culture? notes from beyond broadcast 2007

Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, opened up the Beyond Broadcast conference here at MIT with a quick spin through the implications and possibilities of participatory culture and democracy.

One of Jenkins's slides including this compelling quote from Robert Fritz:

"If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect from what you truly want, and all that is left is to compromise."

As John Maloney has helped remind me recently: we've got to keep the values of the group, the "what the group truly wants," in mind first and use that value to find the technology or let the group itself find the right tools only after that'll support those values.

This values-first thinking is counter to the way I see most groups attacking the communication challenge to grow bigger than the geography they're bound by.

Typically, the communications tools and platforms that are widely available are those that have scaled up enough (and therefore have generally been watered down enough) to pander to a critical mass. The platform/tool creators, in their quest to build a platform that'll be as useful as possible to as many people as possible, necessarily bake in compromises during the development process.

It seems then that the users are forced to compromise at the get-go and the barrier is way high to keep the users as a group from really achieving what they truly want.

Does a group even realize the kind of trade-off they're making when they pick a tool to digitize their work under the auspices of "greater reach" than the people in the room at the time? I think they don't, and that's got to change.