name: Geke van Dijk subject: Public Access To The Media date: friday 19 january 1996 time: 10.30-12.00 (Paradiso Hall) |
| Public access During the opening session of the Next 5 Mintes Nico van Eyck (board member of Salto, the Amsterdam public access tv provider) sketched the situation of public access tv in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is lucky to have 3 local tv channels, of wich 2 offer public access. This situation is pretty unique, also for Dutch standards (The Netherlands is densely wired with cable tv into several regional networks). Nico explained that the fight for public access is a very long one and it is still going on. It took Salto 8 years to get public access to radio, 11 years for tv and now the struggle is still on for access to electronic networks. After Nico, Juergen Linke (director of Berlin Open Channel) sketched a similar situation for public access in Berlin. A question from the audience showed that these 'success stories' should not presume that the situation in other countries are anything like that. A man from the United Kingdom wondered if the struggle for public access is a political one or a matter of infrastructure and technique. Nico answered to this that his tactic should be to buy a suit and a tie and hassle the responsible people on changing the regulations. Rop Gonggrijp from xs4all (the popular Dutch internet provider Access For All) did not agree on this; "don't buy a tie and a suit. Any system can be broken, go break the system". David Garcia (organizer of the Next 5 Minutes) added that sometimes trying to get your programs into mainstream channels is a more effective tactic than fighting to change the system from the bottom up. As an example he mentions the series Videodiaries that Jeremy Gibson developed for the BBC, where people from the audience documented their lives with camcorders. Though these suggestions may not lay out a blue print for other countries' struggle for public access, it does seem to indicate that annoying the regulators on different levels at the same time can have a positive effect. The fight for public access, on any medium, is something that is fought for in many different ways. It differs very much per country wich medium is prioritized in the fight for public access. Noni Carvalho from the Brazilian Association of Popular Video pointed out that in Brasil they put a lot of effort in developing community tv; the internet is not a big issue for them. And, as mentioned above, in the United Kingdom the struggle for public access on tv is going on at this moment. In the Netherlands the public access debate is focussing on electronic networks. Both Nico van Eyck, Juergen Linke and Rop Gonggrijp believe that the different media will merge in the near future. They can not predict what will be the outcome of this process, but they are aware that it is important to be an active partner in this process. Rop Gonggrijp made a plea not to wait for developments that are regulated by the powerful. He states that it is very important that as soon as possible and as many as possible, people get their hands on the media and just force their agenda into the developing situation. DeeDee Halleck from Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV (New York) adds to this that apart from our own local or subcultural struggle for public access it is important that ideas and experiences are shared with others. She herself has benefitted a lot from meeting people from other countries and cultures and talking about their fight for the right to communicate.
Geke van Dijk (geke@acsi.nl) |
