My co-workers and I had a meeting today to discuss plans for our new website. Two important things caught my attention in thinking about how to frame the work we’re doing through our visual and semantic design.

First, visual design. The thing that sets us (community media centers) apart in a REALLY important way from social network websites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc.) is our focus on the physical communities we serve. We need to represent that both in our stories and in our visual images online.

For example, the picture above from the staff page on the DCTV website shows the visitor that there are people involved at DCTV in a physical community. So, if you’re a worker at a community media center with a presence online show pictures of your access center and the people from your community. It not only humanizes the web technology that you’re using, but it also tells the website visitor there is a physical place and people involved that others can come to learn more about, learn from, and participate with.

Second, community media is about empowerment. Therefore, community media on the web is not about getting “users” involved. It’s about empowering people to become producers and owners of their own images, messages and meanings–not the ones told by somebody else.

One way that we can take back the terminology adopted from computer technology is to re-frame “users” as producers of community media on our cable access channels AND online.

For example, if a resident in a community signs up on a community media center’s website to participate in a conversation online (e.g., on a blog), they are producers, not users. If this individual is contributing positively to the public discourse on an access centers’ website, they are producing as a member of a physical community, not just simply using the website for individual needs alone.

By showing pictures of a community media center and the people involved on a participatory website and by re-framing users as producers online, community media centers can not only help to take back the discourse surrounding participatory media online (e.g., “Web 2.0″), we can continue to lead and innovate in an space that may soon become co-opted by a commercial Internet culture.

“Consalvo said the city could use the new Boston Neighborhood News (BNN) studio to film the announcements, which he envisions spanning topics such as education, voting and summer jobs.”

This would be an excellent use of a community media center to provide residents with locally relevant information using web video platforms such as YouTube. The access center could also share the content on its website, while inviting community members to be involved in the production process.

It might also encourage residents to work with the city to create a more democratic communication process through their involvement on such a project. In any case, it’s an interesting model that access centers might consider particularly in working with local non-government and non-commercial organizations.

Read the article online at MetroBostonNews.com

I appreciated the feedback I received from my committee during my defense. They recommended that I spend a bit more time on the paper before making it public. I agreed.

My plan now is to spend the next two months revising the paper. I hope to create a more clear and direct version of my thesis statement with the revision. My hope is that in doing so it will provide a much more detailed road map of policy recommendations that I’ve only begun to layout in the paper thus far. I also hope that a revised version will be more accessible to the general public.

While I’m eager to share the ideas presented in the paper, it’s more important to me that I spend the time making it all it can and should be. That’s the work ahead.

3CMedia, the Journal for Community, Citizen’s and Third Sector Media and Communication published an excellent article, entitled “Community Media in a Prosumer Era,” by Community Communication Scholar Ellie Rennie (author of Community Media: A Global Introduction) in their December 2007 issue.

In her article, Rennie discusses the impacts of convergent media on traditional forms of “broadcast-era” media through her research on SYN: Student Youth Network in Australia, “a media organization and community radio licensee based in Melbourne run by and for people under 26″ (25).

She makes important distinctions between “user-generated” content (found on commercial websites, such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube) and community media, such as public access television, community or “grassroots” radio, and other geographically-focused media.

The author adds, “digital divide aside,” what are characteristics that remain unique to community media as more individuals gain “access” to participatory media on the web? (26)

She explains that geographically-based community media enjoy added characteristics – beyond access – that allow individuals to participate in member-driven processes. These include, “open, participative” (25) functions that allow individuals in physical communities to take ownership within the organization and of developments regarding technology implementation and use (31).

Therefore, Rennie writes “a new research agenda for community media might include:

• The role it plays in supporting public information and engagement – in ways that are both similar and different from commercial and public media. (The Griffith University audience study is a useful starting point. See Meadows 2007).

• The contribution of community media training (and what theat means for the creative industries labour market)

• The changing status and role of third sector organizations” (27)

While the author recognizes a number of technological and structural challenges to implementing and sustaining convergence among broadcast-era community media, she writes, “community media provides a structure and method which can take amateur media to the next level” (31).

“Community media sector organisations are socially-responsive and proactive in that they cater for groups who are not otherwise adequately represented and develop technologies to serve identifiable needs rather than market gaps” (31).

In addition, Rennie finds “Convergence is encouraged within community media organizations which are open to people with different skills and interests, yet brings them into a shared culture and social world” (29).

Access the entire article online, available at the 3CMedia website. Thanks to Rob McCausland and Chuck Sherwood for the pointer.

Rennie investigates community media through the frameworks of political and legal theory to study its ambition “in what it sets out to achieve” (12) and its “sometimes contradictory principles” (61) (see, Rethinking Access Philosophy).

Central to the definition of community media, Rennie highlights the terms “participation” and “access.”

“meaning that nonprofessional media makers are encouraged to become involved (participation), providing individuals and communities with a platform to express their views (access).” (3)

Terms both associated with the cultural phenomenon of self-produced media content and refuted by media justice advocates, who write “the critical issue of access isn’t access to the technology but access to power over how that technology is developed.” In her chapter, “Access Reconfigured,” Rennie reinforces the latter position by considering community media within Internet commons and free software philosophies. She writes

“Some have called it ‘a new public interest,’ one that is based on an alternative regime where access is no longer about gaining access to a controlled territory, but where that territory is freely accessible to begin with.” (167)

While “alternative” and “radical” theories of community media remain part of their history, Rennie provides alternatives in her book that make us also look at “the good, the bad and the ordinary” (24). It is within this space, that Higgins’ approach to community media as process – rather than a means to an end (e.g., a program aired on public access television) – finds its place within community media studies.

“Community television as process conceptualizes constant change within individuals and the collectivities within which they participate” (Higgins, 1999).

A process, for Rennie, that brings “civil society into view” to understand how community media can negotiate both group needs and individual freedom (59).

This brings me back to my interest in the role of the community media center in the U.S. and its unique ability to provide spaces where individuals and groups in local communities can negotiate such concerns. In addition, these spaces provide opportunities for local residents with the community resources to contribute to and get back from a system created by, for and of those located in a geographic region.

When this process moves to the Internet it becomes a representation that also allows others to participate in making it their reality – wherever they may live around the world. This is where the potential exists for individuals and groups across distant locations to connect to shared visions within the process of community centric media – a form distinct from self-produced or self-representative (Rennie 188) media found on the web.

I wanted to highlight Sue’s post in particular because of her description of the possibilities she sees in community television and the social web working together, not apart.

“There has been some talk about the relevance of true community access television, with the advent of YouTube and other video services going online. If anyone can now make a video and post it for the world to see, why do community TV stations even need to exist any longer? The reason is simple. It’s about community. It’s about people physically coming together and producing valuable content, and the relationships that are formed when people are in this kind of environment. You can’t get that by hitting ‘Submit’ on your YouTube page.

I think the Internet is going to be an extremely valuable outlet for those community television stations who choose to embrace its potential. By taking the power of community and sending it out to the world, everyone stands to benefit. Now, we not only have the power of being able to bring the community to the world…we have the possibility of linking these communities to make something even greater.”

In searching Radical Software for articles on public access television, I found Ann Arlen’s piece, entitled “Public access: the second coming of television?” from Vol. 1, no. 5 (1972) P. 81-85. In it, the author writes:

“Technology is really nothing – a piece of equipment lying around – until somebody picks it up and uses it. And it is what we choose to do with it, which is to say, WHO we are who use it, which determines the effect of our technology upon us.

Cable technology has within it the possibility to hasten along a day when ‘big brother’ is indeed ‘watching you’, aided by a total system of two-way, individual access cablevision – into our homes, our bank accounts, our business transactions, where every TV set cablecasting the football game in the local bar can be transmitting our conversations and actions as well.

It also has the capacity to let us talk to each other, people who, in an earlier time, might not have been able to understand each other or to care, who might have been too frightened to listen to each other face-to-face.

We have a chance to witness the excitement of our own beings, our own lives, REAL people, not plastic people, with words we really mean coming out of our real mouths.

Do we want it? We can have it. Of all the promises of cable television, it is the immediately realizable. It is here-but to grow it must have our commitment.”

In thinking about Arlen’s article, about the potential of public access television in its early days, much of it resonates with me as I think about the situation today as community media workers, producers and viewers confront the challenges and opportunities with a new medium, called the social web.

But what exactly is the promise of the public access television in an Internet age? It’s true that access to affordable video equipment, computer editing software, and broadband Internet access for publishing and distribution is increasing. But as more and more people (including public access television producers) publish video to online sharing sites, like YouTube, many questions remain about the future of producing, publishing, finding, viewing and archiving locally-produced and locally-oriented media on the web. For example:

1.) Where can people in local communities easily find and view media on demand produced from the perspective of residents in their community on local issues?

2.) Where can people connect to, work with and learn from others in their physical community to create their own media about issues of importance to them and others in their local community?

Community media centers provide people with the opportunity to do both things in a way that may be different than simply using video sharing websites alone. While it’s true that sites like YouTube’s Virtual Video Map is a great example of the possibilities of integrating “video location with Google Maps,” community media centers provide individuals with additional face-to-face opportunities, such as classes in video production and web distribution, with other residents in their local community.

Through the process of being involved in a community media production, people may meet, work with and learn from others in their community who they may not have known. These moments create connections and strengthen ties between people in a way that virtual interaction alone may not be able to facilitate. But, when this process of physical media making through community learning moves to the social web, there is enormous potential to extend these community connections to others within and beyond their physical locations.

Not only is there a huge misunderstanding about the differences between public access television and video sharing sites such as YouTube, but as a student of media studies I find the shortage of community television research particularly troubling when reading articles such as David Croteau’s 2006 article, entitled “The Growth of Self-Produced Media Content and the Challenge to Media Studies,” as an example.

In the article, Croteau writes that the growth of self-produced media content correlates with (1) an increase in “affordable digital equipment” and the young people growing up with them, (2) an increase in “broadband presence” to “facilitate the distribution of data-heavy files,” and (3) a rise in “specialty websites and services” to aid in the “distribution and promotion of self-produced media content” (341).

While the author recognizes that self-produced media has “long existed in many forms,” such as with community media and other independent forms, Croteau states that what makes participatory media different from previous media is the way in which the Internet enables locally produced content to be distributed to “far-flung” audiences (341).

As a result, the author writes that both the fragmentation and proliferation of self-produced media content have created challenges for media scholars previously focused on areas such as the concentration of media ownership and its impact on large consumer audiences.

Therefore, Croteau proposes that media scholars need to develop new methodologies for assessing “content trends across these new production platforms” in order to better study the “volume” of self-produced media content (343). The purpose, he writes

could provide a unique glipmse into an increasingly diverse society and an interconnected world. It could suggest new models for traditional media to adopt to facilitate civic engagement and participation. It could reveal a refreshingly broad range of self-expression and creativity, indepedent of market imperatives. (344)

I chose to highlight David Croteau’s article not because I disagree with the statements mentioned above. I respect his work as a media scholar in general and specifically in his works Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences and Business of Corporate Media. However, the article represents the disconnect between studies in community media and media studies more broadly – i.e., media scholars often seem to gloss over community media research contributions to the field of media studies.

Community Media Research and the Field of Media Studies

Previous studies in community media can provide a helpful starting point for scholars interested in studying what Croteau calls “self-produced media content” in the following ways:

1.) By studying the community media center as a communication site media scholars can help articulate the restoration of meaning to places that have become increasingly diminished by networked individualism.

2.) PEG Access Television distributed on the web provides researchers with the opportunity to explore the connections between user-centric and community-centric media content through viewing public access media alongside civic offerings such as school district meetings and local government proceedings online.

3.) The process of community television can be studied as a theoretical framework for those interested in investigating how individuals “move outward from the self, to others, and to society–including government and other institutions and organizations” (Higgins, 632) through their participation in self-produced media content.

4.) Community media studies contribute historical context for exploring the role of mass media in shaping public opinion about self-produced media content and its impact on those who view and produce such media.

For these reasons and more, I am concerned that media scholars may be left with the challenge of remaining “vibrant and relevant” (Croteau, 344) in a culture increasingly populated by self-produced media content unless community media research is considered more seriously within the field of media studies.

References:

Croteau, D. (2006). The Growth of Self-Produced Media Content and the Challenge to Media Studies. Critical Studies in Media Communication, (23)4, 340-344.

Higgins, J.W. (1999). Community Television and the Vision of Media Literacy, Social Action and Empowerment. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 43(4) 625-644.

Governing.com, “The Resource for States and Localities” published an article this week, entitled “Unscripted Ending” written by Josh Goodman. It caught my eye for a number of reasons. One for this Related Links caption (above). And another for the article’s interesting conclusion:

“Can Internet video match public TV as a venue for independent voices? Gordon Bloyer thinks so. Since he moved his local access show to YouTube, Bloyer has begun getting hits not just from Indiana, but from all over the world — although, tellingly, his focus has shifted from local politics to national politics. But Barbara Popovic, executive director of CAN-TV, a public access station in Chicago, isn’t so sure. If the Internet were an adequate replacement for TV, she says, you’d see big media companies giving up their cable channels. It’s no wonder why they haven’t, Popovic says. ‘This is prime real estate.’”

Read the article online at Governing.com. Thanks to Clippings for PEG Access Television for the link.

What I’ve learned so far in my research is that there is a huge disconnect between those who believe that public access television is like YouTube and those who believe the two are totally different. As I re-read Barthes, it becomes clear to me that at some point over the past 30 years a myth was created about public access television that still exists today.

With the growing popularity of YouTube this myth has resurfaced once again. What I hope to do with this project is explore the discourse surrounding the myth of public access television and how it has collided with the participatory web. As Barthes writes

We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature . . . what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive, but as a reason. (129)

Citation: Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.