From Person-to-Place in Public Access Media

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.”