“CMT Mind Map” via Flickr (CC license)

In an article titled “Who needs public access TV?” by Adrian McCoy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the author writes

“Public access supporters argue that Web video isn’t really as democratic as it appears. Sure, anyone can do it — anyone with enough money for a video camera, high-speed Internet access and the right software. The truly democratic media is public access, they say, where the entire community can use camera and studio facilities for free.

Public access is also local, aimed at a specific community, while most Web video is not.”

In a brief online exchange, following a recent Philly Independent Media Center article, entitled “Public Access TV in Philadelphia is Finally Here,” one commenter inquires about the relevance of public access in a digital age. The commenter brings up two relevant issues: (1) the growing popularity of internet video production, publishing and distribution platforms and (2) the fact that not everyone subscribes to cable television.

I won’t attempt to respond directly to these comments, but I did choose to highlight them as a way to continue to catalog these and similar conversations taking place at this intersection of public access TV and the Internet.

Drawing from community informatics literature, I found Slack and Williams, “The dialectics of place and space: On community in the “Information Age’” (2000) of particular interest because of its focus on the role of physical place within online networks. The article highlights a study of The Craigmillar Community Information Service, which the McDonald and Denning describe at the Digital Divide Network as

“A project funded by the European Union and Scottish Executive, was the first mainland U.K. project to sign up with the U.S. Community Centers Network (CTCNet) as an affiliated member in 1994. Founded in November 1993, when over 80% of those living in the area were on some type of welfare benefit and the popular Internet was in its infancy, CCIS became a community-based Internet service and training provider, a port of quality digital applications and services focused on employment, education, arts, youth, social welfare and the environment.”

In its background section, Slack and Williams’ article describes their work in relation to previous theoretical frameworks of ICTs (information and communications technologies) in urban contexts (315). Referencing Manuel Castells, the authors explain

Castells points to the shaping of the ’space of places’ by the ’space of flows’, arguing that place is a site of experience and experience is separated from power thus impacting on the types of knowledge one can have as well as the meanings that can be accorded to things in the world. (316)

What I most interested in exploring in this section is what the authors describe in the following

Significantly, for our purposes, the danger is that the two spaces will become isolated and unable to interact, leaving those in the space of places outside the shaping of knowledge taking place in the space of flows. (316)

This passage directly addresses my concern about how virtual and physical spaces in public access television are being regarded as separate and unequal (as I’ve described here and here), thus rendering public access television unnecessary in the digital age. Quite the contrary, as the authors describe

The local is obdurate and serves in part to ‘hold down’ the space of flows. We will show how the space (or, perhaps more accurately, the placeholder) ‘community’ serves as a critical resource upon which community members can draw in any putative move towards the space of flows a la Castells. (317)

Furthermore, I am interested to learn how public access media practitioners understand “community” through their involvement in both cable television and the Internet, while staying connected to the community media center and its role in holding down the “space of flows.”

From Karen Christensen’s Berkshire Blog:

“But what is community, anyway? A famous article, from 1955, listed 57 definitions - like ketchup. Just what kind of community are we talking about here today?

I usually say that communities are human webs that provide essential feelings of sharing, belonging, and meaning. Tom Bender, a historian at NYU, wrote that community is ‘a network of social relations marked by mutuality and emotional bonds.’ But I emailed Tom this week and he pointed out something else worth keeping in mind, that the ability to collaborate, to create a sense of community, with people who are different from us, might be the most important thing for companies to develop. That’s quite a different thing from cultivating communities where there are already strong ties.”

From “Everything Old is New Again” by Felicia M. Sullivan in the Winter 2005 Issue of the Community Media Review:

“The roots of community media are solidly planted in the idea that access is provided to allow our citizens to participate in a democratic society and to affect and engage in decision-making that benefits all in our community. It is this role in supporting and growing public discourse that is most vital to our future. When interviewed about the influence of the internet on access, public access founding father George Stoney stated, ‘It’s getting the attention of a lot of people but it doesn’t replace the need for group action, … So much of the internet is individual stuff.’”

In New York Law School Professor Beth Noveck’s article, “Democracy–The Video Game: Virtual Worlds and Collective Action,” from The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, she talks about the promise of virtual worlds, like Second Life, in fostering new forms of group participation in democratic practice. She explains that while the “First-Generation Internet” has reduced the cost of becoming a speaker, it “also eliminates the familiar structures and rules of real space that contribute to sustaining groups over time” (261). As a result, individuals remain largely disconnected from groups which she defines as “an intentional collective that creates a sense of belonging to something and manifests a shared purpose” (259).

Virtual worlds (or the “Second-Generation Internet”), Noveck explains, puts place back into cyberspace. Virtual worlds make real-time, visual interaction and group formation possible. She writes that a user’s avatar “is akin to assuming the role of citizen.” They represent “public characters, personalities designed to function in a public and social capacity” (269). Further, when people see themselves through their avatars, and the avatars of others, this makes “it possible for people to see the groups to which they belong and participate in them more effectively by sharing tasks via a computer network” (276).

What does all this have to do with public access TV?

As I mentioned in a previous post, others have commented on how the “first-generation Internet” impacts physical group formation as individuals spend more time online, ultimately resulting in what Barry Wellman has called “networked individualism.”

What I am interested in exploring further in Noveck’s article is the following claim:

There is no substitution for the fellowship of the Kaffeehaus in cyberspace. Not only do people who want to sustain groups have to work harder to maintain their bonds, but also there is no way to cultivate allegiance or attachment to a place . . . There is another impediment to group life online. The absence of any connection to “real-world” institutions and power disconnects the social space of cyberspace from what we think of as the public sphere. (264)

Now if we consider that an increasing number of public access centers are implementing social media tools (e.g., Drupal websites, blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc.) to enable individual and group participation online, I believe this puts place back into cyberspace because it focuses group activity back towards a physical location–the community media center. Before jumping to virtual worlds to restore this missing element, I would argue that the promise of public access media for group activity (in the first-generation Internet) is the grounding nature that the community media center provides to its members in this way. As a result, public access media centers assist in enabling unique opportunities for individuals in local communities to join and sustain groups over time across both virtual and physical space.

From Ken Picard’s article, entitled “Does Public-Access TV Still Matter in the YouTube Age?” in Seven Days, Vermont’s Alternative Weekly:

“[Lauren-Glenn] Davitian is often asked whether public-access television is still relevant in the age of YouTube. Her reply: These are both the best of times, and the worst, for community media advocates.

On the one hand, people are more technologically savvy, interested in creating their own programs and have access to inexpensive and easy-to-use video equipment. And, there are more avenues than ever for showcasing citizen-produced programs, both on publicly operated cable channels and the Internet.

At the same time, she points out, ‘Free speech is more than just shouting out into the wilderness . . . Just because you can post something on YouTube doesn’t mean you have free speech.’ In that sense, the mission of CCTV’s Center for Media and Democracy is as relevant as ever: People still need to learn how to think critically about the media they consume. And, they need to know which tools are the most effective at reaching a targeted audience and mobilizing people to action.”

In Barry Wellman’s 2001 article, “Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking” in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, he writes that growth in online communication has led to a shift in societal interaction away from place-based communication to “person-to-person connectivity” (238). As a result, “Communities are far-flung, loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit and fragmentary” (227) and are often built around connections between people with shared-interests across “specialized” and diverse communities (245). For more, visit Wellman’s 1999 article, “Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism?” (PDF).

While reading the article, I was struck by one comment in particular. In his chapter on the “The social affordances of computerized communication networks,” Wellman writes

The communication site as a meaningful place will diminish even more. The person — not place, household, or workgroup — will become even more of an autonomous communication node. (230)

I thought this was interesting to consider within my study of the community media center and its role in “building a better community through technology.” So far, I’ve found that the public access center, as “communication site,” has had the opposite effect — it connects the person to the place through its focus on localism.

For example, while a public access member may join a community media center because of her individual interest to learn video production or other related skills, she quickly connects — through the cable channel and/or the Internet — to others in her community. Because public access is mandated to serve the local-community, the community media center becomes meaningful for its individual members because of the person-to-place connectivity that it enables and, in fact, requires. And as public access TV moves to the Internet, the role of the community media center becomes increasingly relevant to this discussion of “networked individualism.”

I just found another great resource through Eric Gordon’s del.icio.us feed. He recently bookmarked an online article, entitled “Communities of Practice: a brief introduction” by Etienne Wenger, author of “Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.” The article is particularly useful because it describes communities in a way that’s very descriptive of communities in public access TV. Furthermore, I thought it would provide context for my study of this community and its practice — or praxis — across multiple communications platforms.

Wenger writes

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

But he adds that “not everything called a community is a community of practice.” He says that while a neighborhood is often called a community, it is “usually not a community of practice.” Therefore, he provides three characteristics, which he calls “crucial,” in this definition:

1. The domain
2. The community
3. The practice

The domain is defined by people who share a common identity along with common interests. Wenger writes that “shared competence” is unique to this domain and it contributes to what “distinguishes [its] members from other people.” Furthermore,

They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise.

The community is defined by members who “engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other and share information.” Wenger adds, “They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.” And that, relevant to this project, “A website in itself is not a community of practice.”

The practice is defined by members of a community that

develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems–in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction.

I would assume that people who participate in public access TV, either on their cable channel or the web, would agree that these three characteristics apply to their work in community media. But what I am most interested in learning from my upcoming study is to test the hypothesis that the community media center plays a vital role in facilitating and sustaining this particular community of practice.

Wenger writes that the importance of understanding communities of practice is that it

allows us to see past more obvious format structures such as organizations, classrooms or nations, and perceive the structures defined by engagement in practice and the informal learning that comes with it.

An he adds,

New technologies, such as the Internet, have extended the reach of our interactions beyond the geographical limitations of traditional communities, but the increase in flow of information does not obviate the need for community.