Kent and Jen: Ebb and Flow

When I grew up, the treatment of spiritual topics on television was pretty much restricted to the 700 Club and televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and James Baker. Web show Ebb and Flow, rather than preach fire and brimstone and ask for cash, focuses on people using spirituality to foster social change, dealing with the subject in an intimate way that you can’t really find anywhere on television.

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The latest episode features Dharma Punx author and Buddhism teacher Noah Levine. The intimate interview is contrasted with Creative Commons-licensed stock photography and music to increase the emotional impact of Levine’s words, lending a sheen to the production. “We’re trying to reach outside of the tech world,” said Jen Gouvea, who, along with partner Kent Bye, produces the show.

The two live in Marin County, America’s spiritual activist heartland, and told NewTeeVee they felt that the topic of spiritually-charged activism merited greater exposure. They recently set a schedule, dedicating themselves to posting twice a month on the first and third Mondays. Last month’s episode, “The Universal“, muses on the future of technology and spirituality and was a Videoblogging Week entry that’s since been accepted for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

During the day Jen is a student at at the California Institute of Integral studies, and Bye is working on a grant-funded collaborative project called The Echo Chamber about how the media covered the run up to the Iraq war. I interviewed him earlier about government video archive Political Video.

The community response has been great, according to Gouvea. “We’ve been amazed at how open people have been.” They’re especially good at getting people to explain their spiritual philosophy and how it fits into their mission, anything from Buddhism to alternative medicine. Subjects of pieces often use the video themselves to help explain better who they are and what they do, important in a field that’s not entirely mainstream.

The CircleCenter used a piece from Ebb and Flow in a successful grant application, for instance. “It’s really a symbiotic type of thing. The subjects of our videos are getting something out of it, and we’re getting something out of it,” said Bye. And of course, so is their audience.

By leveraging inexpensive technology and stock media sources, as well as deep knowledge of the field and well-connected access, Bye and Gouvea have crafted a message just as slickly appealing as much of the mainstream media, providing an example for community media.