Is there a Role for Distributors in the Internet Age?

There is a myth in the current, collective unconscious about an emerging internet age where virtually all the content in the universe will become available to almost anyone in reach of a browser. At the same time, everyone will be able to become both a content producer and a content consumer. Any producer will be able to self-distribute and spontaneous viral enthusiasm will replace conventional marketing. There will no longer be any role for censorious gatekeepers or rapacious middlemen like distributors. The social implications would be far-reaching: alternative ideas and social movements excluded from the old mainstream media would suddenly be able to mobilize an eagerly awaiting public. This admittedly somewhat caricaturized Utopia could easily be dismissed as harmless, even rather beguiling, adolescent idealism were it not based on dangerously misguided, widely-held assumptions about how social change, and learning in general, happens.

The basic misconception here is that technology changes people rather than that people, especially dominant social systems, shape technology. It assumes that increased technological accessibility will automatically result in increased audience demand, most critically, for the socially, intellectually and artistically innovative media foundations tend to support. In the best of all possible worlds, such media would no longer require continual, expensive subsidy; instead, a grateful, politically active public would support it itself.

Any experienced distributor armed with years of cold sales statistics could instantly disabuse such enthusiasts (if enthusiasts can be disabused) that media challenging the political and artistic norms of the mainstream culture doesn’t command a large pre-existing audience. This is why it is made in the first place and why it needs funding; it does not aim to satisfy established media demands, but to involve people in emerging, often oppositional, social discourses. Therefore alternative media should never presume an audience; it must be deliberately designed to help create and then extend an audience. In fact, social change media will have great trouble attracting an audience to itself; it must first integrate itself into those emerging social conversations where it can be a modest tool for broadening and deepening those dialogues. Thus, the real need is not so much for greater access or more media, as for more appropriate media strategically implemented to build innovative social movements. Infinite connectivity, random pod-casts will be ineffective and inconsequential. We must conceive the internet basically as a promising new site for the same old battle: the painstaking, step-by-step, development of innovative, social conversations through which we can re-conceive our society and ourselves. Distributors can continue to play the crucial, if often invisible, role of working with activists and educators to identify and disseminate the most useful media available.

This point would not need repeating, if the same Utopian illusions did not resurface with tedious regularity during each media “revolution.” The avatars of movies, radio, television, cable television, videocassettes and now the internet, all promised that these new technologies would inevitably promote a more diverse, intellectually aware, socially engaged America. No one should have been surprised that each technology was ultimately exploited for its commercial value while its educational and social potential remained marginal and under-funded. Any technology’s implementation will always reflect and magnify not change the values of the dominant culture. We can point to a very clear example within the memory of most distributors: the shift from cumbersome, expensive 16mm film to cheap, accessible videocassettes (and now DVDs.) In the late 1980s, we were assured that “home video” would finally allow experimental art, radical politics and culturally diverse programming to find its way into every living room in America. At last, foundation-funded films would become mass marketable. It was even proposed that the Rockefeller Foundation create a new company specifically to explore this hypothetical new market. Established distributors from across the country suggested that rather than subsidize an inexperienced start-up to compete with them the money might be more prudently spent supporting experienced non-profit distributors to make strategic forays into this uncharted terrain. To its great credit, Rockefeller graciously convened a taskforce which listened to the field and established National Video Resources (NVR) to support experiments testing the unproven “home video” hypothesis. Well the results are in and the thesis has been largely discredited. Decreasing the price of most foundation-funded films did not significantly increase their market. Distributors who slashed their prices across the board to home video levels found that the incrementally larger volume did not begin to compensate for their vastly reduced margins. They could not cover their operating expenses or the overly optimistic advances they had offered and many went bankrupt. This proved once again that the audience for social change media will not significantly increase until the larger social conversations in which that media alone makes sense and can have impact has increased. Politics, the struggle of ideas, precedes technology though new technology can and must be a valuable tool in that struggle.

Now, proving history’s notoriously short memory, many media pundits are once more promising technological salvation from the latest literal deus ex machina, the “internet.” Again, broad access to the information or media content is increasingly confused with the much more complicated process of building influential social conversations using the internet. For example, plans have been floated to set-up huge media data bases, servers bloated with tens of thousands of titles of interest to social activists and academics which anyone with a browser and a credit card can download. There is, of course, no need for new server providers; there are already more than enough eager for customers to fill vacant space on their servers. Who needs a parallel phone company for “social change” calls? Considering that the best films for education and organizing are already distributed by PBS Video, Films Media Group and the smaller specialized distributors, a skeptic would be justified in questioning the quality of the content on any large new media data bases. These centralized, server-centered systems would rely solely on internal search engines, haphazard viewer reviews and paid bloggers to help users locate the one film which might actually be of use to them among a vast agglomeration of random content. This “information delivery” paradigm promises a media democracy where makers can self-distribute to the academic and advocacy groups they purport to serve without the decades-long connections, expertise and expensive outreach campaigns of traditional distributors.

In contrast, established distributors, especially the small distributors committed to specific issues, academic disciplines or communities, are employing a radically different paradigm to take full advantage of the internet’s potential to allow their targeted constituencies to use media more effective. These distributors, some with as much as 30 or 40 years experience in their chosen fields, distribute a disproportionate amount of foundation-funded media, largely to institutional video users like universities, high schools, public libraries and community groups. Their priority, obviously, is not indiscriminately to amass large media libraries; rather they filter through masses of useless, inept or simply redundant media from around the world to select the lamentably few works which can actually help educators and organizers meet their concrete goals. They study syllabi and state educational frameworks; they read daily organizational newsletters, list-serves and blogs to alert themselves to the most urgent concern of their constituencies. And their role is becoming even more essential and difficult as digital production technology exponentially increases the quantity of visual data available while inevitably diluting its overall quality.

The key to any specialized distributor’s success is how successfully they integrate themselves and their media as seamlessly as possibly into the larger social and educational movements they serve. They quickly discover that these organizations have their own pre-existing cultures, their own ways of communicating, their regular conferences, special interest subsections, journals and newsletters, list-serves and web-sites. Distributors should not attempt to circumvent these existing structures, but participate in them vigorously and responsibly until they become perceived not so much as vendors but as colleagues and allies. For example, rather than try to duplicate organizations’ own independent review procedures by setting up alternative paid blogs, distributors should encourage organizations’ own blogs and on-line journals to evaluate all media more prominently, regularly and rigorously. More and more we are linking our content directly to the web-sites and blogs of these rapidly proliferating internet conversations and in many cases internet users are posting those links for us. In contrast to specialized, “boutique” distributors, the information supermarkets and mega data bases proposed for the future will neither have the time, money, interest or knowledge to become regular contributors to the highly segmented and focused networks through which organizers and academics increasingly communicate and develop their fields.

The need for intimate, sustained relationships between media distributors and activist users will not change as social change dialogues increasingly shift onto an internet platform; it will only increase. Virtual communities, organized around issues like health care, the environment, racial inequality etc., more and more communicate, formulate their policies and campaigns and exercise their political strength via the internet. Distributors, in response are rapidly converting our core business of delivering and promoting content from DVDs to digital downloading, from print flyers and journals to on-line web-sites and list-serves. But more importantly we are recognizing the new opportunities the internet is opening up to alternative media. We are glad to surrender the glamour associated with stand-alone media, its peculiar ability to captivate an audience and lift it out of its world, in exchange for merging our media inconspicuously, transparently, into the continuous internet flow, a respectful interlocutor in the larger conversations transforming our society. The accelerating speed and quality of internet delivery, has made it easier to include media flexibly and transparently into organizing campaigns as well as college curricula. Some distributors are already working with educators to re-purpose video for use in classes, student “papers,” and multi-media, on-line courses. All these new uses of digital media, of course, raise unprecedented copyright and licensing issues which will have to be resolved over the coming years.

Thus the internet is turning small, specialized distributors into what we have always implicitly been, de facto media consultants to particular groups of activists and academics. We have over the decades been forced to play the often unenviable, sometimes impossible, role of trying to bridge the vague, good intentions and untested sociological theories of independent producers and the day-to-day media needs of our clients. Now we are uniquely situated to play a more pro-active role, linking media makers and media users in advance to produce the targeted programming and explore the exciting new, more open-ended forms which internet-based communications demands. Activist organizations need to be funded directly to produce the media they can use, often especially targeted for the internet, and this work needs to be valued as at least as effective for promoting social change as conventional genres designed for the more traditional exhibition venues.

In conclusion, we are offered two contrasting paradigms for the development of the social potential of media on the internet. On the one hand, it can be seen simply as a data base and pipeline, a comprehensive depository for content, whether for education or entertainment, which can be downloaded by anyone with the help of ever more powerful search engines. Distributors in this model would exist only as increasingly anachronistic middlemen between content providers and these super servers. On the other hand, the internet can be seen as a platform for purposeful but freely evolving conversations incorporating carefully selected media within a structured context for learning and civic advocacy. Here media would address its users not as passive audiences or isolated consumers but explicitly as members of socially engaged, continually developing communities. Distributors, in this second model, would not so much sell content as participate as responsible, creative contributors to these on-going, multi-media virtual conversations. The internet will doubtless have room for both paradigms outlined above. It is for media activists to decide which they think is a more reliable and realistic path for exploring the internet’s potential for education and social change.

Essay by Lawrence Daressa

Lawrence Daressa has for the past 34 years been a Co-Director of California Newsreel, a non-profit distributor of African-American documentaries, African cinema and films on globalization now in its 40th year. This article represents only his own opinions, not those of California Newsreel or any of the distributors associated in the Independent Film Distributors’ Licensing Consortium.

Independent Distributors Survey Institutional Media Users on Digital Delivery

Four smaller independent distributors, two non-profit, two for-profit, focusing on such issues as Africa, the environment, women and political theory, have commissioned a survey of institutional media users on their plans and priorities for converting to the digital delivery and storage of media. The four companies, Bullfrog Films, California Newsreel, First Run/Icarus Films and Women Make Movies are convinced that the change from DVD to digital delivery for educational media, including the majority of foundation-funded films, will occur rapidly over the next few years. The four companies, collectively representing over 100 years experience in the educational film business, decided it was both prudent and necessary to survey their clients first, before setting up expensive servers, designing new software and instituting new licensing structures.

Calling themselves the Independent Film Distributors’ Licensing Consortium, they hired an information technology consultant, Robin Vachal, to draw up the survey, distribute it to the most prominent institutional media users and tabulate and summarize the results. The complete survey contained 38 fairly detailed questions, covering such areas as how advanced respondent’s digital delivery systems were, how much digital content they anticipated buying from outside vendors, what licensing arrangements they preferred and how widely used were the few existing, on-line educational media libraries. For a copy of the complete survey, interested readers should visit http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=411573343986.

This survey was sent to 350 educational media libraries at college and universities across the country, focusing on those with the highest media expenditures and most developed information delivery infrastructures. So far 185 responses have been received and that figure should amount to 225 after follow-up phone calls to key users. More than 90% of the responses have been from colleges and universities; the remainder from K-12, public libraries and regional media centers. The Consortium feels that post-secondary educators are taking the lead in this conversion because of their heavy and continuing investment in wiring their entire institutions for digital distribution of all information from text to film.

We hope that the survey will be completed and its results summarized in about a month. People wishing to obtain a copy of the summary should send their e-mail address to: rvachal@gmail.com This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it ; it will be available at no charge to the public. Other independent distributors are already eagerly awaiting the results to assess the opportunities for cooperation in sharing costs and information, increasing the joint visibility of all our collections and facilitating access to media through internet distribution.