Openness in Video-Communication: New Forms of 'Open Television' Find Their Own Way

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a conceptual framework to analyze and understand some emerging forms of video communication systems, emerged both at the local level and worldwide. Despite the importance of video communication systems in orienting public's understanding of important issues, they are still centric and inaccessible to people, but a number of cases unveil a new frontier of development. An appropriate way to conceive and analyze these cases is to apply and extend the concept of openness in domains that differ from software development. The existing perspective on openness in communication are used to analyze some emerging experiments of 'open television'. This paper advances some critiques to these perspectives and propose some fundamental traits that qualify the investigated experiments of open video communication. Various and multiple activity configurations, fluid roles of prod-using, direct development of the tools, literacy, IP right management are some of the issues that are taken into account in this paper and that enrich our view of open phenomena not related to software development.

Keywords: vide-communication, openness, media, prod-use

JEL Classification: D23, L22, L96, O34