I’m beginning to see the light. The following is a synopsis of my proposed research (a working draft), thus far:

The rise in widespread adoption of global social-networking software has created challenges to previously established forms of locally focused communication. For over thirty years, cable access television in the U.S., a medium with a particular focus on localism and subsidized by cable companies, has served the public with tools for producing non-commercial programs for other individuals in their communities. But as YouTube and other commercial video-sharing platforms grow in popularity, many authorities at the local, state and national levels are beginning to question the need for funding public access television in the digital age. As a result, these two spaces – virtual and physical – are being portrayed as separate and unequal. The purpose of this project is to bring them together. Its focus it to investigate how the practice of public access media benefits from the social interplay between virtual and physical spaces. Furthermore, it seeks to understand the role of the community media center, as place, in enabling new forms of human interaction at the intersection of public access television and the global social web.

Through comparative analysis this project will attempt to prove that place matters – and perhaps provides a foundation – for those who practice public access media across virtual and physical spaces. In order to test this hypothesis, the study poses the following questions: (1) What is the significance of the public access television center, as place, in the creation of meaning for those who participate in this form of community media production? (2) How does the augmentation of virtual space onto the physical place of community media practice reveal itself in identifiable and/or transferable ways? (3) What can be learned about human agency by making problematic the claim of separate and unequal in relation to the virtual and physical place of public access media?