Hello all, Andreas in particular,

Yes, of course Andreas, you are right that my speculation was
exaggerated, and that there are more practical and to some extent
"historical" reasons that might have influenced the down-turn for MLE.
On the nettime list I saw Ned Rossiter bring up the issue of economic
sustainability and limits of scale in the set-up of such an research and
innovation oriented organisation. If Andreas is right to suspect that
projections about future growth possibilities for MLE and the new media
industry were more or less linear extrapolations of the middle 90s
culture of optimism, then this closure might be one of the later new
economy / dotcom busts for us to witness.

Also the local perspectives provided by Matt and Jonah are very helpful
in understanding what is going on, why this brave initiative failed.
However, I would argue that there are at least two issues that seem to
emerge for me that would need to be considered beyond the specificity of
the MLE's demise:

1 - A more general question of the model of innovative R&D centres for
emergent media technologies in relation to the social, economic,
cultural environment they have to operate in.

and

2 - The specific position of centres of excellence in R&D and
technological innovation in Europe in particular, and the role of the
public sector in this.

I haven't thought this through, but maybe a few thoughts on this.

1) If we hold true what many of us have been professing for many years,
that technological development accelerates processes of social, economic
and cultural interaction, and that especially in the context of
networked media the kind of (communication) spaces that emerge should
first and foremost be understood as social spaces (i.e. social
structures that tend to favour and adapt certain technologies and
discard others, where the social in turn itself is redefined in the
process of adaptation of new technologies, and the image of assimilation
of technology is most apt - rather than impact of or choice for a
particular technology), then at the very least what must be concluded is
that such an environment is highly volatile and unpredictable.

Organisations that operate in such a volatile and unpredictable
environment have to be adaptive, ready for big and dramatic changes, and
this almost necessarily implies limitations in scale of operation, both
of the organisation as a whole, as well as within its individual
projects that it's running. There are of course many big players still
in ICT, mostly in hardware production and some mayor software houses,
but this is generally hardly the place where the kind of innovation MLE
was intended for would happen.

So is one of the lessons that we should look for models that are both
more limited in scale, and more diversified, so as to meet the
requirement of adaptivity?

How could something like this then be effectively organised (i.e.
innovative in a conceptual, technological, and ethical sense) AND
economically sustainable?

----

2) As to the role of the public sector in Europe: It seems to me one
thing that the MLE's failure is showing is that a model that worked at
least reasonably well in the US is not working quite the same way in
Europe. I hear in comments recurringly that corporate sponsorship did
not come in as expected. Obviously this has a lot to do with the
economic downturn of recent years and a general weariness to invest in
uncertain projects in Europe right now. However, I would suspect that
there is also an important cultural aspect involved in these kind of
discrepancies. In Europe the tradition of publically funded R&D is much
stronger than in the US (at least I think so), and the private
(corporate) sector in Europe does not naturally recognise their
responsibility and self-interest in supporting the kind of innovative
mid-term research that the MediaLab model is aimed at (developing new
applications for more or less existing or near future media
technologies). Long-term research is anyway a government/public
responsibility, and corporate players identify only research that is
directly related to their own product development as their self-interest
(ok - again somewhat exaggerated, but for the sake of the argument).

While it is now "bon-tom" in government circles to speak about the
private sector taking "their own responsibility", and the government
"stepping back", letting "the market" and society at large decide for
itself what is essential and therefore viable (or viable and therefore
essential), one of the problems might be that this role might not even
be recognised as such by the designated players themsleves in the
private sector / corporate world. I think that many public bodies
(governments, ministries, public think tanks, politicians, policy
advisers, large public organisations) tend to dismiss too easily the
specific role that the public sector has to play in supporting, enabling
and catalysing such processes of change and renewal, especially in the
field of emergent technologies within the European frame.

If there is no culture of accepting those responsibilities in the
private sector in Europe, then the failure of finding support for
innovative activities might not so much signal their irrelevance, as
rather the necessity of the public sector and public bodies and agencies
to guarantee that such innovation can indeed still happen in Europe, to
make sure that what is going on in this part of the world might still
mean something in a couple of years... Or are we content with indeed
becoming "Museum Europe"?, catering to the tourist wishes of the great
emerging economies of the 21st century, who send their stressed-out
innovators to Europe's cultural heritage sites to relax in a quiet
parochial atmosphere, enjoying the grandure of Europe's magnificent
cultural past?

Finally there is another important point to consider here in the
possible differences between the US and EU situation: the role of
military funding. Although publically kept out of sight the majority
funding for the MIT Media Lab is coming from military sources. This is
the "great invisible hand" that keeps the structure alive and  drives
'innovation'. I don't know what the military involvement was in the MLE
in Dublin, but I suspect that it did not match the extent of the
involvement in the MLM (MediaLab MIT) - and this is most definitely
public funding. This might also in part account for the dismal turn out
of the MLE project. It remains a question of course if this is something
that should be lamented at all, but that's another issue.

At least as important as all this economic reasoning is for me the
question of what this kind of innovative activity around emergent media
technologies actually means for our cultures and our societies? How it
redefines the "public" dimension of public life and the public sector.
Much of that is outside and beyond economic objectives, though it is
quite obviously constrained by what is economically possible. My
personal interest in these technologies has never been in what new
market opportunities they might offer or create, but rather how they
transform processes of cultural signification, and social and public
life. This is not something I would ever want to leave over to the
random fluctuations of the "market" - here also the public sector, in
Europe more than anywhere else, must take its responsibility, and if in
the process this becomes a catalyst for change, renewal, innovation,
then all the better!!

best,
Eric


Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
> eric,
>
> i think your hypothesis is probably exaggerated; it's probably not
> even a 'disagreement' about money: from the press release i gather
> that they made a business plan with inflated expectations about the
> business opportunities and corporate funding that was to be expected.
> my guess is: the end of the bubble and general economic downturn
> (they opened in 2000, so the planning since the mid 90s must have
> been overtaken by reality...), together with the slow development of
> the EU, plus probably false expectations about the way in which
> european companies would be willing to co-fund an american corporate
> research player. - though i am sure there are certainly many other
> layers to this.