Good VIBES

• Stuart Ridley
• 24 January 2008
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Tom Dawkins, Gen Y thought leader, in Vibe Wire's studio. Photo credit: OLIVIA MARTIN-MACGUIRE

When I was at uni, I set up an organisation called Nexus, designed to bring the different student political factions together. To engage non-political people in the conversations, we began using art, organising film screenings and art exhibitions, and bringing poets on campus more often than we’d bring politicians. We’d have comedy nights as well as the more traditional political speakers, debates and forums.

We were exploring the question, ‘What is the political expression that happens through film, art, poetry and music?’ It was about the use of culture as the key to mobilise people to articulate their concerns. I guess that hinted at where things would develop later with Vibewire.

Inspiration from burnout

The idea for Vibewire came to me in early 2000, and was really the result of burnout. I’d done nothing but organise events for four or five years: it was what I did in high school with Future Leaders of Australia, and at Nexus. Events are a kind of treadmill: you work really hard, the event happens and sometimes it’s great and sometimes it’s a total washout, but either way you wake up the next day and it’s completely vanished. It’s like the event never existed and there’s nothing to do but organise the next one.

After doing that for several years I was tired and frustrated that it wasn’t leading anywhere; it was just a sequence of events. I was thinking, ‘How do I tie those events together? How do I tie those conversations together so they don’t just occur in a particular room at a particular time?’ I also realised what I really cared about was this idea of democratic conversation. That’s what I wanted to foster.

Democratic conversation

I was reading a lot of tech magazines, and became really interested in the potential of the internet as a space for political participation.

On that notion of democratic thinking, I realised that where that conversation traditionally took place was through the media: it was the forum and marketplace for our society and ideas. Unfortunately in Australia we had the most concentrated media in the world and the most unequal access to express ourselves in that media. On the other hand, we had this new technology, the internet, and it was purpose-built for conversation rather than broadcast. So at first there were no plans for Vibewire the organisation, I just wanted to start the website, and vibewire.net was born.

The plan was to allow people to publish their articles on politics and culture in their lives, and then enable others to comment. We wanted to use those articles not as a definitive word on anything, but as a starting point for conversation.

“Young people use the internet as a way of playing with identity, as a political tool and a way to vent through blogs...”

Making it happen

I didn’t have a clue. I had no idea how difficult it would be. From the time we registered the domain name it was almost a year and a half before anything went live, and that time was spent slowly gathering together the people who could make it happen.

I sent out emails, stuck up lots of posters on different university campuses, and talked to a lot of people. Slowly we built up a team of the right people. That was the key resource we needed: people with the combination of skills that could help bring this dream to reality.

There were a lot of youth culture sites launched at that time. We never liked any of them terribly much, but we certainly looked at them to get the ideas on how you could structure certain sections, and we came up with the three-section structure that we still use; Pulse, Create and Life. Pulse is the section for issues, current events and politics. Create is for creative writing, including poetry, fiction and stories. Life is, well, the rest: lifestyle and culture, music, art and film.

Political connections

We didn’t want to launch a political website, even though for me my deepest motivation was getting people engaged in politics. I see politics as being incredibly broad. It describes the way we lead our lives, the kind of culture we participate in and consume, and the way we relate to other people, as well as who we elect as our next government. It’s all of that.

We knew if we launched a website that was just on the Pulse side of things, we’d only get people who were interested in politics. And what we were trying to do, our key purpose, was to try and get new people to see the connections between these elements in their lives and the political process.

Everybody cares about something

If you ask people if they are interested in politics, 90 per cent of them will say no. But if you instead turn that question around and ask people what they are interested in, or what they care about, everyone is passionate about something. Often what is lacking is the knowledge about how those things are impacted, and also how they themselves can impact on the political process.

We don’t have a magic solution, but our instinct, right from the word go, was that at the very least, you place all those things side by side within a single community. So someone might come and only read music reviews the first 
time they visit vibewire.net, and then maybe they’ll read an article that explores the state of the Australian music industry, and that article will begin to tease out some of these connections. Then they might float through to the actual politics section and read about the competing government policies on arts industry funding and so on.

You can create those connections within a diverse website, and that does bring new people in and can build knowledge in a way you could never do if it was just politics.

Expressing yourself

We believe deeply in the need to create a generation of young people who expect the right to express themselves. People who have the confidence to demand to put their story on the table. You do that by allowing people to speak out.

I almost don’t think it matters what they’re expressing themselves about, as long as they share their vibe, what they’re into, their story. There’s something deeply empowering about people sharing something, seeing it published and seeing people respond to it.