Public Access as Collective Ethnography

The following post (and blog title = email subject header) is from Jason Daniels who gave me permission to share an email correspondence here on this blog. I think it’s very relevant to the issue of archiving of Public Access TV content to preserve a part of the history of local communities and its potential made possible through web-based technologies:

Colin,
I just saw a festival called the Found Footage festival at the Coolidge a few weeks back and it really put the bug in my head about the value of archiving public access tapes.

http://www.cine-magic.com/foundfootagefest.html

They had a segment called ‘this week in public access’ and it was phenomenal. Weird, interesting.

I have always been interested in anthropology and visual anthropology in particular. When you passed along your research into Radical Software I noticed that there is a reference to the ‘public access experiment’. Experiment struck me because as it sounds scientific - and part of a scientific method is collecting the data in order to draw your conclusions. I see digital archiving, archiving to the web, etc - as a way of collecting the data. I saw the Found Footage Festival’s celebration of public access as a remarkable accomplishment in this light.

What does this have to do with your thesis project - I am not quite sure. But taking the FFF as the tip of the iceberg - the whole scope of public access as a cultural artifact is a collective ethnography of American life in the post 60’s era. Because so many idealists from the 60’s helped launch public access - access tapes can serve as some sort of record of American culture for the last quarter century. What is most impressive - when compared with the mass media from the same era is that it is PUBLIC ACCESS. There is no gatekeeper, no one grand narrator telling the story, it is people telling their own stories in whatever way they know how. It is the first collaborative documentary project. Maybe it provides some framework for evaluating the future of a web based community media experiment in which regulation helps to fund the next phase of public access.

Jason