Allied Media 2011: What Was Right and What Was Missing

This past weekend, I got to attend the 2011 Allied Media Conference in Detroit.  Since 1999, media change agents have convened at the Allied Media conference to discuss strategies for using media to enhance grassroots advocacy and to promote independent media.  Designed to mash up ideas and generate healthy dialogue, it is one of the few—if not, the only—media conferences of its kind.  But activism is essentially where it ends.  Missing from the conference was a discussion on how to commercialize different new media ideas. 

Grassroots activism is one very critical component that is needed to reduce inequality in the United States.  The other aspect is economic empowerment—giving people the tools they need to not just organize and promote media justice, but also to make a living.

Many Washington-style civil rights advocates seek to advance social justice albeit via different means—corporate support.  Although large corporations are often demonized, their philanthropic support is desperately needed.  For all of the negative press that Comcast receives, its broadband adoption initiative gets little of the credit it deserves.  Microsoft’s new partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to identify and promote minority talent should also be commended much more often than they are.  However, corporate support is but one means for bringing about the kind of change our communities desperately need.  Washington civil rights groups also need foundation support so they are in a better position to partner with other funding recipients.  The role that the private equity sector can play in helping to commercialize businesses in low-income areas cannot be overstated.  Further, universities with enormous endowments should build innovation outposts in unlikely places, such as Detroit. 

In his Pulitzer and Aventis Prize-winning book entitled “Guns, Germs and Steel,” Jared Diamond famously argued that the dominance of Eurasian civilizations over others is attributable to positive feedback loops perpetuated by geographic proximity to resources.  According to Diamond, rather than being the result of some innate intellectual or cultural quality of its people, the rise of Eurasian civilizations was largely the result of luck.  Similarly, most of the innovation happening in America takes place on a handful of large university campuses or in a few geographically-gifted areas.  All the while, we claim that the Internet reduces geographic barriers!

On July 21^st and 22^nd, the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC) will be celebrating its 25^th Anniversary at its 9^th Annual Access to Capital Conference.  MMTC has been a leading voice for minorities working in and seeking to own media companies.   This year’s agenda approaches policy “from the mountaintop.”  An ordained minister and Nobel prize winner, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been to the mountaintop.  And he got there by dealing with what was happening in the streets.  But missing from MMTC’s agenda is any discussion on what is happening on the ground that prevents entrepreneurship in low-income communities. 

It is time to stop talking about social justice in silos.  It is foolhardy to regard digital age entrepreneurship as something to be disdained, rather than as a tool for social justice and empowerment.  Nor is it something that should be viewed through an anachronistic lens.