Multimedia Project Invites Discourse on Human Existence

By John Roach
for National Geographic News

May 23, 2001

Will the Internet change humanity? Why do we make music and art? Does
sex have a future? What will tomorrow really be like? Questions such as
these lack simple answers, but open discussion of them is vital to
understanding the nature of human existence.

At least that's the theory of Robert Kuhn, an investment banker with a Ph.D. in brain science from the University of California in Los Angeles and a passion to use communications technology for intellectual discourse, not to sell advertising.

Kuhn's passion led him to form a partnership with KOCE, a public television station that serves southern California, to create Closer to Truth—a multimedia enterprise in which artists, scientists, philosophers, and members of the general public discuss the fundamental scientific and ethical questions of modern times.

"We are looking at becoming the program of record for new knowledge," said Kuhn, "where new knowledge is presented and long-term implications discussed."

The project centers on 28 television shows that were taped in 1999. For each show, a panel of four or five experts on a given subject—most of them well known in their fields—sit around a table and discuss one of the fundamental questions facing society.

In one show, Leon Lederman, director emeritus of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1988, joins a panel of men discussing why quantum physics is so beautiful.

Viewers can provide feedback after the shows through a related interactive Web site. One viewer of the show on physics, who described herself in an e-mail message as a "young woman interested in absolute knowledge," wrote to say she was "transfixed" by the discourse.

"The way they spoke of quantum mechanics, it was as if they were talking about a woman they had all shared a tremendous affair with," she wrote. "The way they waited as each man spoke of it, as if to compare the experience. That's why I watched so transfixed, wishing I were this thing they described."

Tool for Serious Discourse

The shows, distributed by American Public Television of Boston, are fully funded by a foundation established by Kuhn, K2 Media Productions, at a cost of about U.S. $200,000. They began airing, in no particular order, on public television stations across the United States, and can also be viewed on the show's Web site through a format known as streaming video Closer to Truth.

Bruce Murray, a planetary scientist and geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who has been a panelist in several of the shows, said a major strength of Closer to Truth is its integration with the Internet.

Murray helped Kuhn develop the accompanying Web site so the general public can participate in the discussions, through a Web tool known as a hyperforum. "It is a moderated discussion conducted in non-real time," said Murray. "People have to take time to think about what they are saying and use their real names."

The use of real names and a moderator, said Murray, helps insure that the discourse is not offensive and results in something that people find interesting to read. Visitors to the Web site can also participate in opinion polls and catch up on the latest news in science and technology through a link to SciTech Daily Review.

"We do think the Closer to Truth Web site is an example of the best of what the Web is and can be a mechanism for serious discourse," said Kuhn. Future episodes, which the team hopes to tape later this year, will be even more integrated with the Web site, he added.

Targeting a Thoughtful Audience

Closer to Truth does not aspire to attract the large masses of viewers who regularly tune in to shows on commercial television such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire or Survivor. Instead, the show's producers want to reach what they believe is a growing segment of the population interested in the progression of ideas.

"We recognize that there is a majority of the American population that, when coming across a panel of four distinguished scientists discussing an issue, will not stick around long enough to find out what the issue is," said Mel Rogers, president of KOCE. "But there is a segment of the population out there that will."

Public television stations, unlike commercial television, lack a system like Nielsen ratings to determine how many people tune in to Closer to Truth. But a local ratings survey of the Los Angeles area found that about 50,000 people had tuned in to a recent episode, said Rogers. And about 5,000 people visit the Web site each week.

"We want people to find us and grow with us," said Kuhn. "As the world becomes more knowledge oriented, more and more people are going to have discretionary time to consider important questions."