Locating Community Media within the Space of Flows
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.”
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