There is a – as yet to be defined – correlation between “entertainment” driven news, commercials and commercially driven theatrical content and the apparent lack of involvement in civil society and consumerism.
The major media organizations “gesture” towards interactivity as a way of getting closer to their audience but they are limited by the fact that what drives them is not a full discussion which may challenge their fundamental assumptions but rather a narrowly defined range of opinions that achieve the image of interactive outreach without taking “inappropriate” risks.
NGO’s, foundations and government have important issues for people to come to terms with but they seldom have the ability to compete with broadcast media on an entertainment level.
As a result we have mainstream media serving up compelling one way content focused on insubstantial issues and the “alternative” media focused on substantial issues but without the ability to gain the interest of a broad base of people.
In both of these cases the result is “Passive Media”
Compelling (entertaining) content creates interest. This is seen as an unfortunate reality in our society and yet compelling stories in open forums have historically lead to compelling dialogs. And in small scale closely knit societies these dialogs often lead to some sort of accountable action that everyone can observe.
We have the ability to create an Internet content portal that brings together writers, photographers, filmmakers and others to capture compelling stories. Use these stories to focus interest and compel conversations.
Also, the collaborative and information aggregation tools of the semantic and ubiquitous net are developed to the point where they can be practically applied across the globe. We have synchronous and asynchronous dialog technologies spread out across the spectrum of bandwidth. We have collaborative tools for both real time information sharing as well as networked computing.