Simon, three cheers for all that.

Hey, Simon, I agree with most of what you say. Even most of what you say about my reductionist, mean-spirited remark about the likelihood of people visiting a theatre blog that doesn't stay on topic.

But I'm not sure why you're confused. I simply don't have as much faith as you do in the ability of social media, broadly defined, to satisfactorily supplant or stand in for all the things that print media have traditionally provided. As such, I think it's worth pushing to re-imagine on the internet some elements of what old-school print media does on paper. And if, in the course of doing that, we create some new models for ownership and control of those more hierarchical forms of internet communication, we'll make the internet richer than it is already.

There are all sorts of protocols for communication. Social media create very important new protocols. I don't think it's heresy to ask what works about those protocols and what doesn't. Just as it's hardly heresy to ask what has and has not worked in the sphere of traditional media.

Craigslist and Wikipedia and The Tyee and Facebook and Twitter were created by people trying to shape how the internet works. How are these entities owned and controlled? What implications does that have for their future and for the future of those who use them? Are there any lessons in these examples for how we might organize arts information at a local or regional level?

I could go on, but that's proven lately to be just one of my bad habits...

@Mr. Campbell

I'm sorry, I'm confused. There seems to be a conflation here with the terms 'social media' and 'the internet'. Social media sites were invented to take advantage of the instant communication offered by the internet to keep us in touch with one another in convenient and entertaining ways. Businesses, the arts included, saw this as a mighty big opportunity to market themselves to individuals and leaped on the idea with a vengeance. But business co-opted social media, not the other way around.

The Tyee is a splendid publication smart enough to do its business online, and has identified the value in letting its readership engage directly with its respective contributors with an open comments section. But are the editorial standards set by The Tyee, or the Sun or any other 'institutional' site the standards that should be implemented by everyone who uses the internet? Who's to say who independent bloggers, microbloggers and other social media users are accountable to? The value in Web 2.0 lies solely in its diversity and ability to establish trust by allowing its users to present the honest, truthful, human reality behind the brand, whether that be personal or corporate. Publicly ridiculing a working artist in a room of her peers because you didn't see the value in a single post on a personal blog is reductionist at best and defaming at worst, regardless of who the actual observation is leveled at. When we start telling people that the way they use their personal space on the internet is 'wrong', then the snake truly starts to eat its own tail.

Providing free content, either blithely or richly considered is, in fact, the new model, and it exists reactively to the old one, which has been proven obsolete by its very readership who now choose to target their attention and glean their information from the authors and sites that touch them the most. The ones that have earned and established their trust. We can and should be building organizational hubs to promote and foster our arts industries here, and I'm sure we will, but the core ideology is never going to change, that of accessibility and exchange of opinion, because no site or organization is ever going to be free of bias, and everyone knows and inherently understands that in the new age. My personal bias is why I read the Tyee, and not The Province, for example.

Can these hubs be monetized and their contributors remunerated for providing content? Should they be? Or can the new media be defined as an information-laden brand extension driving attention to our cause and ultimately our bottom line?

If I want to sell my art, I can no longer do it by merely selling my art. I have to do it by selling my industry, thereby making it stronger. Social media is about combining many stories into one voice, and the more honest and natural that voice, the better. Because our future audience will come looking for us one day through the magic of google, and we need to be ready for them when they do. And what they're going to respond to is a feeling of inclusion and comfort that they belong in the conversation. That in fact the conversation exists because of them. And then they'll happily open their wallets.

For me, as the moderator, the panel was a bit of personal gong show. I was originally invited as a panelist but was then asked to moderate. Because I have given a lot of thought to these issues, and obviously have some strong opinions, I tried to play both roles. As a result I did a disservice to my primary role as a moderator. I didn't get the best out of some of the panelists present, and to them I apologize.

One of the other tensions during the afternoon arose over the divergent expectations of the session. Some people wanted to discuss practical tools, but my understanding from the panel description and from the organizers was that it was an ideas session and not a workshop.

I hit a personal low point, after purporting to be a stickler for accuracy, when I complained about a theatre blog that opened, when I looked at it, with what amounted to postcards home from a Hawaiian vacation. I identified that blog as Rebecca Coleman's. Wrongo. It was in fact another blog that Coleman's excellent The Art of the Business only linked to.

Now to the issues that get me riled. Social media accomplish many wonderful things. But just as traditional media have all sorts of orthodoxies and make all sorts of assumptions that are troubling, advocates for social media do the same thing. Raise these issues and some evangelists for social media think you're questioning what they see, and with some good reason, as a profoundly democratic enterprise. But hey, I'm also a pariah in the eyes of many people at the Vancouver Sun for challenging some of that institutions assumptions. I'm proud to be an equal opportunity gadfly.

In one of the panel's many off-topic excursions -- many of which nevertheless illuminated core issues regarding art, knowledge, authority, democracy, and the internet -- the matter of social media's role in exposing repression in Iraq came up. New media tools have been a critical source of information. Conversely, some of that information has been challenged as fraud. It's complicated. After the panel was over, I thought of Nicholas Kristoff, the New York Times reporter credited by some with single-handedly putting Darfur on the world stage. The new documentary Reporter, which screened recently at the Vancity theatre, examines his unsuccessful efforts to do the same for the Congo, where more than four million have died as a result of violent conflict, the highest death toll since the Second World War. Not a lot about that on Twitter.

My media credo is species diversity. I want there to be diverse methods of communication, with different models of accountability. I do believe that Twitter and Facebook can be a great pointers, but they've got to have something to point to. Social media can be a bit reductionist, as the personal insults directed my way on Twitter during the session suggest to me. I want people to have the means (yes, money) to take their time gathering information and testing it, then organizing that information clearly and succinctly so that information can become knowledge.

I think those who want the internet to be free of capitalist baggage -- the need to make it pay -- miss a key point. Capitalism is a juggernaut that is already overwhelming the internet, and the medium's democratic potential is imperiled by that. I think it's important to consciously build resilient structures that resist that juggernaut. I'm not prepared to rely on connectivity and free information alone as the bulwark against that juggernaut.

That's why I'm proud of The Tyee, where I'm a contributing editor. It represents an effort to build something that combines old and new values and tools. During past technological upheavals, a few Canadians stood up to create the CBC and the NFB in order to keep us from being overwhelmed by American information. National broadcaster advocate Graham Spry is in my opinion a national hero for what he accomplished. We need to leverage these moments of technological upheaval.

The internet presents somewhat different challenges, but there is still a critical need for information hubs that are accountable to someone other than a stockholder and their proxy CEO. We need a different model. Twitter and Facebook are at the business level corporate juggernauts built on the backs of people sometimes blithely providing free content. I don't think that connectivity alone is enough to meet our future needs. Do we need to muster resources in Vancouver to build a place where information about the arts can become knowledge about the arts, where our culture and sense of community can be strengthened? Is that a good idea? I wanted to steer the panel in the direction of that question, but I'm afraid I didn't do a very good job of that.