Project Acknowledgement and Statement of Purpose

I only know as much about public, educational, and goverment access TV as the experiences I’ve had spending time around PEG access TV centers and meeting people working in community media over the past three years.

This project is indebted to all those who have worked (both paid and unpaid) as advocates for and participants in an amazing platform called public access TV.

My Motivation

My first experience with PEG access TV involved shuttling (by foot) VHS tapes of Democracy Now! with Nicole Mandala (Emerson College) from CCTV in Cambridge to BNN in Boston. At this time, I was also a volunteer community radio producer for John Grebe’s “Sounds of Dissent” on WZBC at Boston College. These two experiences introduced me to the possibilities that community media offer to individuals in local communities in providing a communications platform within an increasingly commercial media landscape.

Later, I became a board member of CCTV in Cambridge and a member of the Alliance for Community Media. Living in the Boston area, I have been very fortunate to meet and learn from a number of folks who have been working in public access TV since the early days. Their hard work and dedication to the ideals of community media are much of the inspiration for this project.

My fear with the web (and more directly with Google and other online searches) is that it is still young, at least in its participatory nature. It’s easy to find stuff that people are writing about presently (like this blog), but not as easy to find the stuff that’s happened in PEG access TV and the experiences of service it’s provided to local communities over the past thirty years.

I don’t want this project to presume that I know more than other people who have spent much of their lives working in support of community media and its ideals during this time. This is why I am grateful for the interest and support of those how have contributed to this project through these participatory web-based platforms.

With this project, I look forward to learning more from others who know much more than I do about PEG access TV and the Internet. I think the web makes this possible. At least, for now.