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Name   : Bas Raijmakers
Time   : 
Subject: Looking back to the N5M journal
Date   : February 1996

A media-saturated conference as the Next 5 Minutes ofcourse had its Web presence. In addition to the conference program, the live TV and radio shows, and the printed daily radio newsletter, an electronic journal was permanently produced during the event.

The Next 5 Minutes can be seen as an experiment in 'many-to-many communication'. At the open TV-studio (transmitting live on the Amsterdam cable network) participants were invited to join the production team. At a certain moment the whole studio was 'borrowed' by Hallo TV from Berlin, and later by a TV crew from Kiev. The radio studio had to be more or less hidden in the basement of one of the festival locations, because some radio stations still need to operate illegally. But that didn't prevent conference guests and visitors to drop by and participate in the illegal transmissions in Amsterdam ether and experimental transmissions on Internet. Also the electronic journal was open for contributions by the conference participants. Both radio and TV were on the desks of the editors of the electronic journal as vital sources for the coverage of the conference, and vice versa of course. The notion of readers becoming writers, consumers becoming producers as well, so popular in circles of Internet guru's from all kinds and continents, needed no further explaining to the conference crowd.

The newsroom of the journal was also a bit outside the maelstrom of the conference itself. We had packed the directors room of De Balie with some nine computers. The whole evolutionary line ranging from Zerotronics XT to PowerPC was put to work. Amsterdam cable TV was plugged into one of the computers to rob the images sent from the open TV studio in Paradiso one hundred meters away. This brought the live-aspect to the newsroom. Just as our journalists had to write down a statement as it was made in a conference hall, our designers had to grab an image as it flew by in a side-window on their screen.
Speed is an important charm of making a live medium on the spot, while the events keep happening around you. The pressure of speed brings in the flavor, together with small inconsequences that would bother you if you had the time you normally take for editing. The speed makes the written medium more conversational, just like email has made letters more conversational. Generally the journalists would spend as much time listening to debates and presentations as they would be writing in the newsroom. After final editing, simple formatting in precooked ready-for-Internet templates was done by one of the editors, and another piece of content could be uploaded to the server of the Digital City. Even the scripting of additional functions of the journal was done in the newsroom by the webmaster. From the first word typed to the final distribution of the journal, all was done in one room during the conference.

At a certain moment the speed level we reached could be measured rather precisely by everyone in Amsterdam watching the N5M TV-channel. In the newsroom of the journal we were watching TV too, grabbing images and typing in statements made on TV at the same time. Thanks to the simple formatting process it took only minutes to get the material on line in the journal. Since the video mixer at the TV-studio was keying images from the N5M journal on the bluescreens in the TV-studio, we could see the results of our work appear on TV only minutes after we had robbed them from that very same spot.

Is this a prime example of the on-site reflection we had sought with the journal or is it just recycling of data? Is this the heralded many-to-many communication or is it just piling up one-to-many communications? That depends of course mainly on the nature of the contents of these messages circling in the conference pipelines.
The messages travelling the N5M media channels were derived directly from the events on the N5M conference itself. With all these N5M media struggling for the attention of the conference visitors and guests, they might almost forget the actual, In Real Life, unmediated gatherings on one of the conference floors.
There were so many things happening that there was absolutely no need to recycle old data. Fresh data presented themselves every minute. On the contrary, it was important for journalists to retreat behind a computer screen now and then to chew a bit on a piece of text, temporarily outside the conference maelstrom. For the visitors and guests of the conference it was much harder to escape the speed of conference life and find a quiet corner to read the journal. So we might have ended up with many-to-few communication as far as the physical present public was concerned. Statistics showed that the pages were read from outside the conference more often. The journal provided a way to keep the home front of the international conference informed.

Looking back, we must conclude that if you make an electronic journal it is very important to provide very good reading conditions on the conference floor. Not a large table with as many computers as possible, but a situation where you can read and react without being distracted by the screen next to you. Ideal for a working conference like N5M would be some open cabins where you can not only read quietly, but also gather with some people around a monitor and discuss projects while viewing webpages. At the same time you should provide the most reflective parts of the electronic journal that can fuel debates still to come in the conference program in a printed version daily if finances and work load make that possible (which was not the case at N5M unfortunately). Twenty computer screens can never compete with a thousand prints lying about in all conference spaces if you look at how many people you will reach. But a print can never bring all voices and opinions together on one platform, nor can the conference itself do that when the program is so diverse and overloaded as it was at N5M.

The conference program was extremely various on more than one level. To name a few: the content of the media presented ranged from hard core debunking journalism to street parties, the context of the guests ranged from Seoul to Sarajevo, the media used ranged from old to new, the subjects of the debates ranged from 'sex in the age of the media' to 'the desire to be wired.' Unfortunately the program in Amsterdam was not very coherent. The visitors and the guests had to zap their way through the mass of simultaneous events, compiling their own personal conference, attending the ever important off-program gatherings in cafes at the same time.
So the best guideline for the journalists was to use their own context, their own media worlds, and put the N5M events in that perspective. That tactic brought them on the same level as the average visitor or guest who had no overview or master plan either. But the journalists had the advantage that they were forced to switch between listening and writing a few times during the conference. Just like insights grow over time, after repeating lines of thought again and again slightly different every time, the reflection on the conference grew with every new article they wrote.

In the end, we all know that attending a conference means that your daily life is suspended temporarily. You will engage in as many debates as possible, at the cafe tables and on the conference floor. You will try to stuff as much in your head as possible, to examine it only after the conference. It is like going to a gas station for a refill. But at the same time you show your car to the crowd. When the crowd consists of people used to produce media-content on a daily basis, like the crowd at N5M, you inevitably get to suffer from a shortage of storage capacity. No way you are going to get an overview. But don't panic. Once you get home, you can fire up your web browser and surf the N5M website at http://www.dds.nl/n5m. The Net makes it possible to elaborate on the many discussions that started on a N5M conference floor, a N5M TV channel, a N5M radio wave, a print flyered at N5M or a page of the N5M electronic journal. And all of that at your own pace from your own home. The perfect preparation for the next conference maelstrom.

Bas Raijmakers (bas@ACSi.nl) , editor in chief of the N5M journal.