The Process of Community Television

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.