Media: Lydon 2.0

Of course his first show had to be a meta-show. Christopher Lydon and company were minutes into the debut “Open Source” on WGBH when they started gnawing on the question of what, exactly, does “open source” mean?

There’s a legalistic answer involving Linux licenses, of course, said guest Doc Searls, but the software term has morphed into a metaphor for “anybody can participate.” Podcasting guru Dave Winer wrapped open source and podcasting and related developments into a single democratization of the media, “the revenge of all the sources,” where us old-media “filters” get “disintermediated.”

 Lydon, a former New York Times reporter and WGBH news anchor, sounded enthused. He's a giant step beyond the two-way chat of his old radio show, “The Conversation.” He's taking input from everywhere. He’s gone native. He’s the Col. Kurtz of mainstream media. The faintly distorted, Dopplering sound of the WGBH audio stream, like a shortwave from the www.jungle, added just the right note of distance and strangeness.

The show’s topic of  “Web 2.0” was set by Lydon’s blog post: “The Internet just got cool again. Forget the crash. What was a collection of static pages and commerce sites has become a living, breathing conversation. A handful of innovations — tagging, syndication and yes, of course, blogging — have only now become user-friendly. They’re changing the way we communicate. And finally, the doomsday predictions about the old models — of journalism, of marketing, of research — are no longer exaggerated. They’re calling it Web 2.0, and it will probably change your life. A few people saw it coming all along. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, they wrote.”

In other words, "Everybody can podcast," as Doc Searles said during the show; the threshold has been removed. There were jokes about newspapers' falling fortunes and Dan Rather's exit, pursued by bloggers. But there was also a higher-minded strain of talk about opening up the conversation to new voices: when blogger Dina Mehta called in from Mumbai, you got the sudden fresh sense of what they were talking about.

There were less high-falutin’ moments that illustrated Lydon’s topic almost as well:
Searles: I just got an IM from somebody – 'I’ll pay you $10 to mention my name.'
Lydon: I’ll pay you $10 not to. (Laughter.)

It was thought-provoking talk, much of it. More about questions and possibilities than about answers and great results, though; this new medium has changed the conversation, but it's still not clear exactly how it's changed the world.

Lydon's return to the airwaves after four years was greeted with joy by those who saw his departure from "The Connection" as a dark moment in the history of civilisation. "To get Campbellian for a moment, this is the part of the monomythic heroic cyclewhere the hero comes back from his journey outward, and brings back the knowledge to the whole community," Lydon fan Stirling Newberry posted before the show. Uh huh!

The smart kids are always going to form their own clique. Reading the blog during the show, one learned that "Lydonistas" -- "veterans of the old Connection battles" -- have their own invitation-only message board.