Happy Friday War & Peaceniks! Please take out your passports.
I spent last week in Bergen, Norway, at Media City Bergen’s Future Week. The event was one of the most valuable I’ve attended this year.
The AI section alone was worth the price of admission. Bruce MacCormack showed how the Partnership on AI (PAI), a non-profit partnership of academic, civil society, industry, and media organizations, are charting a path towards safety and trust for AI. This unusual coallition of public, private, academic, media and tech created a Framework to ensure unified guidelines on the safe use of AI. So far, they’ve convinced Meta, Microsoft, Adobe, BBC, TikTok and OpenAI to sign on and follow the Framework’s guidelines.
Yes, MacCormack and many other speakers laid out the risks of AI in specific and frank terms. And, they showed the very doable things academic, private, and public partners have laid out to make AI work, safely. I went into the AI sessions a bit fatigued from the pendulum swing of buzz, hype and panic that GenAI has been generating this year, yet left inspired by its potential, and hopeful about our industry’s ability to harness its power.
Over the three days in Bergen, speakers such as myself, personal focus expert Nir Eyal, artificial intelligence savant Nina Schict, DEI inspriationalist Aaron Kroon, product guru Marty Cagan, @ElonJet inventor Jack Sweeney, tech translator Rotem Rise-Dotan and big brains from The New York Times, The Guardian, Epic and NVIDIA, came from around the world to join Media City Bergen members TV2, NRK, Myreze, Vizrt, Schibsted and the University of Bergen’s Department of Information Science and Media Studies, in sharing their views from the bleeding edge of tech, media, journalism and the attention economy.
Media City Bergen is the HQ for the Norwegian Media Cluster, where academia, public service media, commercial media, tech companies, startups, investors and companies from a spectrum of disciplines share space, best practices, collaborations, education and innovation. Future week and all the campus’s content and collaboration programs are expertly run by Helge O. Svela and a small, talented and tireless team.
The Partnership in AI, the Future Week, and especially Media City Bergen itself reminded me of the invention of the internet - academics and professionals joining in non-proprietary open-source collaboration to create things no one could invent alone.
The Media City model began in 2011 with MediaCityUK in Salford, England. UK’s Public Service Media, the BBC, and its biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV, now share the space with Salford University, and more than 250 other large, small and medium enterprises, in a groundbreaking physical and intellectual arrangement, on what used to be the abandoned Manchester docks. Since its opening, MediaCityUK has directly created 10,000 jobs, increased the population of Salford by 12% and grown the number of new digital and creative start up companies in the area by 70%. By integrating the Salford City College and University Technical College directly into the operation and ecosystem of MediaCity, the participants have elevated the media and tech education at the schools, and created a consistent method for shared knowledge and new, diverse talent for all the member organizations. While it may have been the first successful MediaCity experiment, it’s no longer one of the only.
Mediapolis is a decade-old MediaCity campus in Tampere, Finland, that similarly brings together big media companies and educational institutions such as the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle), Tampere University of Applied Sciences and Tampere Vocational College, with startups in film, television, gaming, and immersive media. This hub is a magnet for and accelerator of collaboration, innovation, and growth in media and tech, where 500 students collide, disrupt and inspire the 1,000 professionals who share the campus daily.
Kista Science City in Stockholm, Sweden is a major technology hub, that hosts tech, digital and media-related companies, alongside students, faculty and researchers from Stockholm University. Like many Media Cities, Kista runs an innovation lab, and year-round programming, meant to help companies big and small, start-ups, and Sweden’s governmental and academic institutions find new ways to collaborate for better, safer, and faster innovation.
While in Bergen I met Anne Scheel Nordestgaard Dyrehauge who is building MediaCity Odense in Denmark, using the same inspirational model that helped create numerous innovation hubs around the world including Seoul, Rotterdam, those mentioned above, and of course Media City Bergen.
The Media City model has transformed regions in desperate need of transformation, it’s created opportunities for tens of thousands of people who live in those areas, it’s educated and inspired many thousands more students, and it has facilitated innovation in tech and media that otherwise may have taken much longer, or never happened at all. By bringing together competitors, academics, innovators, developers, inventors and researchers, in one, un-siloed environment, with the specific intention of forcing them all together to share and collaborate, this model, as personified by Media City Bergen, lives up to the original promise of the original world wide web.
And, as I watched it action in the beautiful city of Bergen, the MediaCity model reminded of the high-walled silos that most American Tech, Media, and quite often academia, have built around themselves, in pursuit of profit and power.
I cannot find anything like a MediaCity in the US. There are many campuses where commerce, entertainment and other industries cohabitate, but nowhere I’ve seen where creators, civil servants, inventors, start ups, academia and big media and tech are forced by geography, and design, to share problems and best practices, hear from big thinkers and paradigm challengers, or collaborate on making our Media and Tech safer, better, and more sustainable not just for themselves, but also the public at large.
Why?
Increasingly, American Media and Tech seem more dedicated to the idea of capitalism than to the concept of innovation. The recent AI race between Microsoft and Google is a prime example, but not the first. The total lack of collaboration among America’s big tech on things like user safety is alarming, with companies treating privacy as a cost center or marketing campaign. They lobby together against regulation, but rarely if ever work together to ensure better outcomes for all.
This is just as true with American Media, whose first concern is shareholder value, and last is their users’ experience. They are all too concerned about their own walled gardens to consider the health of the larger ecosystem of which they are a part, and which they ultimately do serve. Yes, big Media do all belong to trade organizations like MPAA and AMPTV, and they all take on interns. But like big tech, their organizations function almost solely as lobbying and negotiating arms, and their internship “programs” typically provides little in the way of cross-generation collaboration and more in the way of entry level opportunities for rich, well-connected executive family members.
Simultaneously, unlike Europe and Much of the rest of the world, America’s higher education industrial complex is making it increasingly difficult for most Americans to take part in quality higher education. More than 45% of Americans do not attend college. The costs of state and private higher ed continues to skyrocket, while students report that the educations they receive are less and less practical for what they face in the real world. For the 35% of American students who attend lower-cost community colleges, akin to those mentioned in the MediaCity models above, the opportunities to gain valuable, first-hand experience working in Media and Tech are rare to non-existent.
Based in San Francisco, the Partnership on AI is an incredible exception to the American Media Tech capitalist model - a rare combination of industry, foundations, academia and the public sector producing tangible innovation not for profit or power, but for the betterment of all. Our industry and our country needs more of this.
This same mindset is personified in the fast spreading MediaCity model, where industry, public service, academia, and start-up culture intertwine to produce better crops of insight and transformation. Part of it is physical - an actual collision of different points of view in space and time. Much of it is metaphysical - an absence of actual walls removes figurative silos. American Media and Tech need much, much more of this, stat.
Monday June 26, we’re doing a webinar paying subscribers, where I’ll share news and best practices from Bergen and Cannes Lions, and unpack the biggest moves in the Media Universe with very special guest, futurist and no relation Doug Shapiro.
Webinar details are below my signature. If you see them, thanks for being a paying subscriber! If you don’t, try it, you might like it!
Ha en fin helg!
ESHAP
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