Can boring be good for business?

Pratt suggests new media is best understood as a situated industry and practice characterized by the networks of firms and skills that converge in particular locations, in particular ways, for particular purposes. The products, material dimensions, and dynamics of a new media economic center and its workforce are thus largely constituted by the local economy where institutions and firms apply new media to enhance internal operations and external relationships.
In this light any analysis of a new media cluster by definition must be contextualized in a regional economy and it must include a discussion on how a new media industry emerges from within a broader network of industries and skills. Indeed over the last decade there have been at least three attempts to explore the emergence of a new media cluster in the Greater Washington Region. Although each study explored convergence among different combination of the technology, communications, information, media, entertainment, arts, and cultural industries residing in the region, each articulated the new media cluster differently.
For example, in 1998, the Potomac Knowledgeway in an analysis on the InfoComm Industry in D.C. region explored the convergence of ‘heritage’ – the established communications, information content (including nonprofits, publishing, and the press), and computing and systems integration industries in the region; with ‘vision’ provided by a new class of entrepreneurial visionaries who understood the Internet and digital products and services.
In the second study produced by the Greater Washington Initiative (GWI) in 2005, new media was presented more narrowly. The report explored the convergence of the significant cluster of film, video, and niche entertainment production and distribution with the growing number internet service providers in the region and predicted it would result in a new digital platform for the delivery of existing media products as well as new digital products and services. In this light, this study made the argument that D.C. was poised create a new media cluster to compete with New York City.
The third study also conducted by the GWI in 2007 of knowledge workforce in Greater Washington, extended this argument and stated that DC had emerged as another Silicon Alley and was now fully prepared to compete with NYC. This study configured the industry differently than the 2005 study. The new media cluster in this study included the serious film and niche entertainment production, the news media, the media produced by the large non-profit sector in the region, as well as other creative industries like the commercial arts, museums, and all kinds of design work. Because the study positioned new media in the broader context of the creative industry, its close affiliation with the IT sector seemed to fade into the background.
These three studies, each defining the new media cluster and activities in Greater Washington differently over the last decade illustrate that new media in the Greater Washington Region continues to be an emergent, inherently unstable, and contested social object. This series of studies also show that new media is not all that new in the Region. Indeed it seems those involved in thinking about and observing new media in the Greater Washington Region have either focused on the relationship between the communications, technology, and information content sectors, which includes the mainstream news and the policy and advocacy information and analysis produced in the region - or the relationships between the news and entertainment content sectors and the internet. Except for the military, the role of government in new media convergence in the region receives little to no attention in these studies. Even less attention is paid to the whether and how convergence may or may not be occurring across all these sectors, or more importantly how this convergence is linked to or embedded in the broader political economy of the region.
Perhaps one of the barriers to a broader and deeper analysis of the new media cluster in DC is the stated and intended purpose of each of these studies, which is to present DC as more than a company town. Each of these studies goes to great lengths to emphasize the vital commercial sector in the region while downplaying the important role of government as a regional catalyst and orientor of innovation and growth in each of the economic sectors that are linked to the new media economy. I argue for an alternative approach. Rather than comparing the region to New York, San Francisco or other ‘cool’ centers of new media or the creative economy, economic development resources would be better spent fostering a new media economy that extends rather than departs from the historic relationship between the federal government and the commercial sector in the region. I argue that more study is needed to explore how government continues to orient the concentration and organization the commercial resources across the ICT, media, and artistic sectors in the Region.

What do you think DC?