Ever get the feeling that something is wrong? Our culture conditions us to destroy what is important - and works hard to persuade us there’s no alternative. It’s time to break the spell.

To see the lie that’s at the heart of our culture today, we have to weave together narrative threads that are always presented to us as if they are separate. To start seeing connections between early daffodils and late parenting, for example. Between pressure on salmon stocks and pressure on hospital beds. The relentless drive for cheap food and the alarming rise in suicide. The growth in industry and the incidence of cancer. Monotonous work and road deaths. Falling interest rates and rising Prozac sales. Prawn take-aways and distant coastal erosion. Cheap flights and the wall of water that buried the city of New Orleans.

Scratch the surface of these apparently disconnected phenomena and you find they all have something in common. They share the Story of Growth. Consistently and comprehensively we are told in all sorts of ways, that we must keep growing to keep going. Consumption must grow. Companies must grow. Production yields and productivity must grow. Pension funds, circulation figures, market sectors, audiences, exports, profits, the economy, GDP… all of it has to keep growing. Growth mustn’t stop because growth is good. Growth is the key to progress and social well-being. That’s the Story. Watch the watch. Watch… the… watch.
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Published by Future Exploration Network (FEN)

Article by Paula Downey of dya first published in The Dubliner Magazine in MAy 2006. [007]

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Media Futures. It’s a media revolution where the old rules are being broken.

Thinking about the future, and in particular the shape of our media future, is always enhanced by going back to the past. Just imagine where we all were ten years ago, at the beginning of 1996, and what our media life was like. The Internet was in its early days, with static home pages if you were lucky. I had just joined the BBC as a news manager and remember the BBC site was basic with little text content let alone anything else. Today it’s the number one news media site in the world. Just check out www.archives.org where you can travel back through websites for a reminder of how recent our web experience is and how far we have travelled. Then think about what was on air in Ireland – no TG4 or TV3, they’ve both come in the past ten years, and no Today FM or Lyric FM. RTE had no competition at national level and Lyric didn’t come around until 1999 during my own stint as Head of RTE Radio.
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A quick note on the Television Without Frontiers Directive

On the 1st and 2nd of June last the European parliament held a public meeting on the proposal of the European Commission to (among other things) change the name of the Television Without Frontiers Directive to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive.

This yawn-inducing and very technical debate will affect the way that television programmes are funded, made and distributed.

The Television Without Frontiers Directive (henceforward TWF) has been in existence since 1989 and is a very important piece of legislation that has affected the kind of television we make and watch quite profoundly. It has three key provisions. It requires all European television stations to broadcast a majority of European programming; it requires that at least 10% of the production budget goes to independent production (20% in Ireland thanks to the Broadcasting Authority (Amendment Act of 1993)) and it regulates advertising.
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