Cultural Battlefield Europe #aboutlastnight — BXL 8/10

Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix… the hottest media platforms Europeans use are not European. Europe has become a playground and market for digital companies from the US and China. A battlefield even.

How is Europe dealing with this? And how does this affect our culture and position in the world? In this session we studied Europe’s reaction to the platform powers and explore how Europeans think about that. How can technology and media stimulate and safeguard diversity, privacy, participation and freedom of speech?

After an introduction of our host Fredo De Smet (Curator of MFF) & Tim Raats (Phd lector at VUB), Joris Vanthienen (Corporate stratigist atVRT) explained briefly the previously released 15 VRT trends for the near future, setting the stage for this new battlefield.

After this Karen Donders (Phd and head of Media unit at imec-SMIT) gave a state of affairs of little and big platforms we use. Concluding that Europe is the smallest player in platform land, but the war isn’t won by anyone yet. Research shows that fierce competition emerges all the time and we haven’t seen the end of that yet. New platforms, products and services will rise. After all, who remembers the promising & glorious years of Nokia & Ericsson huh ?

Next up was ‘Cassette for Timescapes’ with Céline Broeckaert, explaining her role as impact producer for smaller interactive and linear documentaries. She’s trying to resonate in the digital world by using personal connections not big platform algorithms.

After a small break we wanted to find out if our definition of a battlefield was making sense according to VRTNWS conflict journalist Rudi Vranckx. This session made him think thourougly on how his job as war correspondent changed over the years. Concluding that his job has changed in recent years, due to the rise of big platforms, into an intense digital fight. In times of war, different groups are using the newest technology & formats to fill political and ideoligical vacuums with extremist ideas. The only way to tackle its succes, is to keep getting physically close and factchecking these resonating viral stories. Journalism is on the breach of becoming obsolete by this evolution. Can technology help us to eradicate the lies ?

Next up was Mick Ter Reehorst (journalist & entrpeneur) who launched ‘Are we Europe’, an independant magazine, community & agency of 600+ young European journalists. Bored of the negative European media, they decided to tackle this in a new funky European digital slow journalism way. Their ‘breaking border stories’ try to tackle this cultural battlefield. Inspiring and really nice company, but unfortunatly he couldn’t stay for drinks as he was leaving for Armenia the next day.

To finish off the talks, most speakers joined Lieven Vermaele (director operations and finance, VRT) on stage for an animated Q&A with the audience. Time to get some real answers from our representative world stage. Lieven immediatly bounced back a question to the crowd : ‘Do you youngsters still use and trust Public Service Media ?’ From the mic in the middle of the room spoke not only representatives of media companies such as BBC and mediarte.be, but first of all students from all over the world. These millenial experts of tomorrow are used to a lot of convenience provided by the big platforms, but are still in need of a truthfull PSM for factual information and pluralist ways of seeing the world. Funny quote from a Brazilian student: “No one in Brazil knows Spotify!” Guess this Swedish champion needs to spice up its samba & salsa collection & matching algorithm :-).

Karen concluded that only strong, progressive & proactive legislation on European level can protect our humanistic values.

We finished this great evening with some peacemaking and good resolutions to bring peace to this battlefield :-)

For more impressions & interesting links & video’s on this you can read Fredo’s personal blog . You can find some more pics here and tag yourself so Marky Z knows you were there …

Stay tuned for the next sessions of our University Tour