Beam Me Up, Beam Me Down

The latest trend in Star Trek culture-jammming is off and running, with people from the deep south to the Scottish highlands donning tight, monochromatic jerseys, heading out to the woods, and reinventing their favorite TV show for themselves.

“The fans are saying, look, if we can’t get what we want on television, the technology is out there for us to do it ourselves….”

At the risk of stating the totally obvious, the trend toward independent, interactive, consumer-created content is fundamentally changing the media. Though we might all say it’s obvious when we think about it, we haven’t yet fully grasped just how broad and deep the new paradigm of media will be. Traditional, one-way media will dominate our minds and media channels for the forseeable future. No one is going to create “The Incredibles” in their basement… but you might be crazy enough to create “Sky Captain” and get the attention of a studio. The new indie mode represents an emerging relationship between the public and the media that is going to define what “media” means from now on.

… And [traditional Star Trek] viewers are responding. One series, at www.newvoyages.com, and based in Ticonderoga, N.Y., boasts of 30 million downloads. It has become so popular that Walter Koenig, the actor who played Chekov in the original “Star Trek,” is guest starring in an episode, and George Takei, who played Sulu, is slated to shoot another one later this year. D. C. Fontana, a writer from the original “Star Trek” series, has written a script. …

We’ve known this was coming for the better part of two decades. The Web is Main Street for the new interactive media, particularly now that broadband is cheap. But this trend pulls in all the micro-revolutions we’ve seen during that period: the Walkman, portable videocameras, alt rock, standup comedy and improv, Wired magazine, indie film festivals, the Real World, John Waters, Madonna wannabes, the VCR. After two decades of experimentation, corporate technology is serving the individual media creator/programmer—with (relatively) affordable broadcast-quality video gear, TiVo and DVR, iTunes, and so on—and the interactive audience—with the aforementioned Real World and its endless iterations, plus new kids like American Idol, Survivor, and their clone armies that stretch toward the horizon.

But, more importantly, the impulse to create—to own and manage your own production, even if it’s “unprofessional”—is like a virus reaching critical mass. Some traditional media are starting to open up to the trend, as evidenced by FX openly soliciting pilot ideas and Current TV’s all-indie format.

But still too often, when they’re not trying to ignore or exploit new media creators, the traditional media are railing against the upstarts. Take the case of the willfully ignorant hit pieces on bloggers that have been flowing out of mainstream media sources for the last five years. When newspaper editors in 2006 still insist on slagging the idea of independent political writers (the Washington Post being the prime example), it smacks of desperation. These temper tantrums are the complaints of old tenants as new media renovates the apartment upstairs: things will settle down and resentments will probably smolder, but eventually everyone will learn to live together.

There’s an unexpected bonus lurking in this cultural shift. We need the media, but more urgently we need a public that knows how to read them. People should be running around shooting video and phasers in the woods; they should be toiling away in their basements creating the next great superhero; and they should be debating, reporting, and editorializing on millions of blogs. Because the best way to learn to read the media is to work with them, to dig around, get under the hood and find out how they run. That makes us a more media-literate audience, which in turn means we’re less likely to be swayed by the images and messages that corporations produce.

And that would definitely be a happy ending.

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