I finally watched my DVD copy of “Opening Access” (photo above) produced by Denver Open Media. It’s an excellent overview of the possibilities that the Internet and user-driven media technologies provide towards revolutionizing Public Access TV. The DVD begins by situating Public Access TV in opposition to corporate television and other commercial media. It highlights the fact that large corporations sell viewers to advertisers in return for profit. Therefore, corporate media are biased in their tendency to cater to audiences in wealthier communities that have the money to spend on advertisers’ products. As a result, we have a commercial media landscape that largely fails to address public and social needs.

As an alternative, the DVD’s narrator and DOM Executive Director, Tony Shawcross says that Public Access TV is

* Inclusive
* A Free Speech Conduit
* Training
* Equipment Access
* Cablecast opportunities

Often for free or very low-cost.

Therefore, Public Access TV is an “alternative avenue that is not vulnerable to the inherent biases and restrictions of the corporate model.” But unfortunately,

“Support seems to be falling. Today it is a series of small, disconnected, and under-funded organizations. There is an opportunity to transform public access into something a more viable more powerful tool.”

Shawcross explains that “media distribution is moving to the Internet” and that the “many to many” internet model for distribution is the main use of the internet today.

Therefore, in order for Public Access TV to take full advantage of this new distribution technology:

1. All content must be made digitally
2. Creative Commons (public access TV content is noncommercial and CC allows us to get the word out)
3. Everything needs to be web-accessible
4. Rating and categorization. We need to let viewers watch, rate, tag and categorize content on the web.
5. Closing the digital divide

The DVD’s next section goes on to explain the model of Denver Open Media, which “flipped the switch” on this revoluntary new model in 2006. Shawcross explains that DOM is modeled after smaller companies like Wikipedia. A company with 5 staff members, but is more popular than Brittanica. DOM gets out of the way, so that the members can get involved.

In the video, DOM’s Station Director, Ann Theis says that DOM’s model fosters community because “community members are going to come in here and really have to rely on one another. They are going to have to help each other. And that in itself will just foster a greater sense of community and ownership.”

Brian Hiatt, deveropenmedia.org’s Web Developer talks about how DOM wants “the producers to be driving the station and hopefully through that model” people will “really feel that they own the station.” He also talks about how the website offers more traditional services, including equipment reservations and the opportunity to sign up for classes. They also hope to give producers the ability to upload content from home.

Most importantly, DOM is focusing on creating an open source model that other Public Access TV organizations can use. Shawcross talks about the significance of this system, in terms of connecting public access centers and the producers’ media through this system.

Mia McKenzie, DOM’s Education Director, talks about the fact that people with very little money are usually not heard from because they don’t have any way to produce their own media. DOM provides opportunities for people can get access “through very little cost and get the training and the tools to “be able to have a voice in media.” She goes on to say,

“We want everyone in the community to have a voice in media, but we want it to be as eloquent a voice as possible. So we train people to make the most high quality video they can make.”

The video explains that “public access fills the basic human need to communicate and to engage in one’s community in a way that isn’t limited by the financial profitability of your message.” It allows freedom and individual control. “The user driven approach will allow communities to mold TV into an institution that fulfills public and social needs.”

To watch the video or order a DVD copy, visit DenverOpenMedia.org. The DVD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.

QuickTime Video

The Alliance for Community Media’s 2006 Boston conference website continues to be an excellent resource for this project. Thanks to Ryanne and Jay’s interviews from the conference, there a number of videos available for download in learning more about this intersection of cable access TV and the web.

The video above, features a short conversation with Kari Peterson and Scott Alumbaugh discussing the opportunities and challenges of this new community media space and how PEGSpace can help ease the transition.

Jason Daniels of Medfield.tv generously contributed the header image above for this blog. My feelings about this WordPress theme have been lukewarm since I installed it. So, now I’m really inspired to find a new theme for this blog. Thanks, Jason!

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?

In working to build a framework for this study, I found John W. Higgins article “Community Television and the Vision of Media Literacy, Social Action and Empowerment” (PDF download), published in the Fall 1999 issue of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, particularly helpful for a number of reasons which I hope to highlight in this post.

Higgins begins the article by reviewing some critiques of the community television movement over the past 30+ years, including - and most important to this study - the focus on technology. He writes

These critiques assert that, without the broader perspective of technology within societal structures, the “symptomatic technology” or the “alternative technology” movement is easily co-opted by contributing “to the health of just that system of corporate domination that it initially reacted against” (Slack, 1984, p. 36). (628)

In some ways, this critique is relevant to today’s YouTube v. Public Access TV debate, where local officials have used the “existence” of commercial video-sharing platforms to question the funding mechanisms that support PEG access TV. And as Higgins points out

Yesterday’s “liberating technologies” were video and cable television; today’s “emancipatory technologies” are the computer, data networks, and enhanced media. The rhetoric today regarding new media echoes the uncritical aspects of the nascent community television movement. (640)

As PEG access TV (community media) centers begin to incorporate networked technologies, such as video-sharing platforms and other participatory forms of web communication, I am most interested in exploring the role that these geographically-focused community media centers play in the process of building, what Higgins refers to as, an “awareness of self, others, and society” (634) among community television participants.

In his 1993-1994 study of “the implementation of the public access empowerment vision as a method of evaluating the viability of the vision itself,” (630) Higgins interviewed community television producers at ACTV21 in Columbus, Ohio. Among his findings, he observed that “A new awareness of self is an outcome of the public access experience for some of the respondents; most also experience a new awareness of others.” He goes on to write, “An understanding of one self is enhanced by a heightened awareness of others and a broader society.” And it is in this “process” that leads community television participants to “move outward from the self, to others, and to society–including government and other institutions and organizations” (632). He found that the reflections of those participants in the study “become part of a process of societal change that begins at a personal level,” one that moves away from the idea of individualism towards “a dynamic process of interaction between the individual and the collectivity” (639).

Moving forward, I am interested in exploring other studies that document the role that geographically-focused community centers (more broadly) play in providing opportunities for its members to participate in similar processes of community empowerment and its resulting potential for societal and institutional change. In doing so, I hope it will help construct a framework for evaluating this role within the larger context of social gathering spaces, online and off. I believe this approach will provide, as Higgins writes, “a critical focus on applying the tools to social change and truly democratic purposes rather than the tools themselves” (641).

Similarly, I’m interested in reviewing literature on civic online communities and their relationship to physical community-building spaces. Again, I hope this approach will help move this study away from a focus that puts new technologies within community media at the center to one that looks towards opportunities for similar processes, such as those outlined in Higgins’ article, to occur.

From Denver Open Media:

“In recent years, the user-automated business model has proven to enable small organizations to have an impact rivaling that of any large corporation. It is how Wikipedia and its 5 employees surpassed Encarta and its staff of 2,000+. Its how EBay is able to compete with Target, why use of MySpace is outpacing AOL, and how BlogSpot gained more readers than the NYTimes. The approach is not to generate content, but to develop and maintain the structure within which the public can create, organize, and share their own.

Denver Open Media’s model is aimed at placing the people in control on a level never before seen in Public Access, exactly because they are the only group capable of accomplishing our mission: to put the true power of the media in the hands of the community. With advancements in media and internet technology, the opportunity now exists to level the playing field, to empower individuals to express their own agenda, and to use media as a tool for educating and mobilizing their own communities on a level we’ve only imagined before.”

In a recent blog post (via Clippings for PEG Access Television), Alan Moore highlights an article on “Citizen-produced” programs on cable access TV in Chofu, Tokyo. Because, as he writes, “it echoed with the theory that people embrace what they create.”

The post is interesting to me because of the connection Moore makes between examples of networked media (via YouTube, Current TV, etc.) and cable access television. In referring to the community-strengthening aspects of cable access TV, he includes a quote from the original article

The channel is now playing a part in bringing people together who didn’t know each other before. In one case, citizens who were producing programs began to take a greater interest in community issues and eventually got involved in cleaning up a local lake.

In the same post, Moore talks about what makes strong communities “Part of the answer is accountability and collective sense of responsibility.” And that “Being part of something, being part of its creation, is also the process of engagement.”

I wrote an essay, titled “Community Media in Transition: Exploring the Digital Culture within PEG Access Television.” It is an overview of my research and methods used for this project to date. My hope is that it will serve to help focus my work moving forward.

From the introduction:

In August 2006, following the Alliance for Community Media Conference, “Connecting Communities” at Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel, I launched a personal research blog, titled “Community Media in Transition: PEG Access TV and the Internet” to continue the conversation online. As I wrote about the project, I hoped “to explore the role of technology, public policy, and the Internet and its relationship to public, educational, and government access television.” Much to my surprise, I soon found myself at an exciting intersection of two worlds colliding without much of a roadmap to navigate the changes ahead. Through my professional and volunteer lives I realized I was in a unique position to help share the stories of those facing this intersection of cable access television and a complex new medium, called the social web.

This essay is about my process and discovery during this time. It is a document of the steps I have taken, up to this point, to investigate a thirty-year old practice by community media activists now facing a world uprooted by technology, politics and a global market economy. In it, I will present an overview of (1) the methods used, (2) the community observed, (3) the technologies being implemented, (4) the persistent themes and challenges, and (5) the potential paths of study moving forward.

Read more.

I recently discovered these three geographically-focused UK websites (above) through my thesis adviser’s del.icio.us feed. They are UpMyStreet, AreYouLocal, and MyNeighborhoods. They were interesting to me because of their location-based orientation within a global communications medium (the web), combined with their use of social software.

I was trying to imagine a version of this site where PEG Access TV centers and the communities they served were the focus. A social website that used online media to share geographically-based community stories. The purpose being not only to connect and empower physical communities, but to highlight and share stories being produced across cable access TV centers using the web.

Placeblogger is an example of a website that aggregates “hyperlocal” citizen media sites. Indymedia, “a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage,” might be a closer example of location-based (and non-commercial) community media groups working together online for civic storytelling and engagement.

I’m sure there are more examples to consider, but again, what would a version of these UK sites above look like if PEG Access TV centers were the focus? What purpose might a tool like this serve for access centers and the communities they serve?

The time seems right for PEG Access TV to harness its many years of experience in community-focused video production and to serve as a non-commercial alternative to YouTube and other commercial video sharing sites. Many access centers are doing it on an individual level, but what about on a larger scale?

Mapping Access, PEGSpace and the ACM website are all examples that perhaps come closest to this vision. Maybe a site that combined all three?