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It's good to talk

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by William Davies, senior research fellow, digital
Media Guardian - 26 July 2004

When '90s nostalgia kicks in, we're sure to be reminded of one of the decade's most irritating innovations: Magic Eye images. For a couple of years, these fuzzy computer-generated patterns seemed to be everywhere, from shop windows to the backs of cereal packets. Viewers were instructed to stare blankly at the image for a couple of minutes, until their eyes were so lost in the fractals that they were no longer picking up the individual shapes. Only once their eyes had achieved this Zen-like state, would they be rewarded with whatever mystical apparition the pattern was hiding.

Public service broadcasters have traditionally employed a similar visual technique when surveying the public. Faced with a confusing mass of thousands of different tastes and interests, London's media elite would look beyond individual preferences, in search of some magical notion of the public interest. The identity of this "public" and how they chose the appropriate "service" were shrouded in mystery. If you looked and couldn't see it, this was your problem, not the broadcaster's.

A variety of factors have conspired to undermine the Magic Eye defence of public service broadcasting (PSB). Yet we may have seen the final nail in its coffin last Tuesday, when the government published the results of its public consultation on the BBC. Whitehall consultations rarely seek more than a bit of added legitimacy from a few NGOs and key stakeholders, but this one was different.

Between December of last year, and April of this one, the BBC was the focus of the largest and most open public consultation ever undertaken by a government department. For the first time, individuals were actively encouraged to submit views on any aspect of the BBC as they saw fit, on the basis that it was an institution that belonged to them. There was even a separate consultation document for young people. Five and a half thousand people responded.

Depending on how the government reacts to the consultation's findings, this could herald a profound shift in the way that the BBC is legitimised. Eighty years ago, Lord Reith defended the BBC in the following terms: "it is occasionally represented to us that we are apparently setting out to give the public what we think they need, and not what they want; but few know what they want and very few know what they need." This view held sway through most of the 20th century.

A decline in public deference towards professional elites, combined with the end of spectrum scarcity, made this elitist model of PSB untenable. Why continue allowing a liberal aristocracy to determine the public interest, critics argued, when the technology is in place to allow consumer preference to dictate it instead?

This argument is only a thinly disguised ideological attack on the BBC and its funding mechanism. But the BBC has lacked confidence in rebutting it. The "market failure" argument for the BBC - that it has a duty to supply services which the market can't or won't - has seen the corporation stay on the back foot, treating its audience primarily as consumers. Gavyn Davies's 1999 inquiry into the future funding of the BBC was another attempt to fight the economists' arguments with their own logic.

The public consultation, however, forms the latest addition to a new democratic rationale for the BBC that has been gathering momentum over the past few months. As in the BBC's own vision of its future, Building Public Value, and Ofcom's detailed review of PSB, the government has finally recognised that the BBC plays an important constitutional role in British politics. In an age of interactive media, it is not just there to produce content, but has a responsibility to facilitate debate and civic engagement. Projects such as BBC iCan, the online portal for civic interaction, indicate how this can be done. Yet it is critical that citizens have a strong sense of ownership and influence over the BBC, if it is to serve this new role successfully, hence the consultation. In this respect, the exercise was self-endorsing - a majority of respondents said that the BBC needed greater accountability to the public.

Having dedicated its largest ever public consultation to the BBC, the government must now consider how the BBC can itself play a role in supporting similar consultations in the future. The BBC should be granted the responsibility and funding for a "Civic Commons": a single, integrated sphere of public debate which the government formally recognises and consults, before legislation is drafted. Until there is such a space, online deliberation remains fragmented and inconsequential.

The consultation should not just be seen as a new way of legitimising the BBC, but as a new model for public participation in government. With the creation of a Civic Commons, all forms of legislation could receive this pre-legislative scrutiny, and citizens could participate in government on a day-to-day basis, should they wish.

The bureaucrats of Broadcasting House have been forced to consign the Magic Eye notion of the public interest to the scrap heap. The bureaucrats of Whitehall should be encouraged to do the same.