THE POSITIVE POWER MOBILE MEDIA WORKSHOP
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Easy Money - the best way to lose mobile media.
Why we need Positive Power!
Scott A. Shamp

"You have debased my child. You have made him a laughingstock of intelligence a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere."

Lee De Forest died a bitter man. The inventor of the audion tube that made radio transmission and reception possible and, arguably, the "Father of Radio" (in truth, he was the one arguing the loudest), hated what had become of his child, radio. He started out as the young medium's biggest booster claiming,

"Radio has kept the wanderer home at nights, it has brightened the gloom of separation and shortened the long hours of lonliness [sic]. It is a comforting companion to the shut-in; it soothes the pain of the suffering. It brings counsel to the housewife, information to the farmer, entertainment and gaiety to the young."

But then radio got lost. Why? Two words: easy money. Instead of becoming the channel for education and enlightenment, radio programming devolved into diversion and distraction. The grand vision of what radio could do for people for generations to come got lost in the myopic focus of what people wanted to do for the next ten minutes. Bottom line, the easy money is in the now.

I think about De Forest every time I hear a polyphonic ring tone. Will the cell phone be the next medium to stink up the airwaves? Will industry leaders be lured to the low hanging fruit of escapism and entertainment? Will this most mobile of media give us only games and cartoons just battling to keep boredom at bay? Or will this powerful medium step up and fulfill its potential to enrich and enable people's lives? Is it possible to provide content which makes people satisfied and not just satiated? Can cell phone video make communities stronger and people really happy?

Today, the first answers to these questions scare me. Revenue on ringtones in the US topped $217 million last year. Mobile game revenue grew to $72 million. Where can we find the new Odysseus to reject the siren song of silliness (can you tell my youngest son is reading the Illiad)? We need a new creative class that cares as much about making things better as it does about making money. We need examples of how this powerful mobile medium can have a positive impact AND be profitable.

OK, you know where this is going. The "Positive Power Mobile Media Workshop" at UGA on Saturday, December 10th, will begin generating some of those important examples. We will be exploring how cell phones can help address problems like AIDS, homelessness, persistent poverty, ethnic divides, alcohol abuse, and public transportation. Maybe we can even start to figure out how to make change and dollars at the same time. Twenty years from now, I just don't anybody asking what we were doing while mobile media lost its way.