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.

Seungahn Nah’s 2003 paper, “Bridging Offline and Online Community: Toward A Networked Community Communication Model” (see Works Cited) the author surveys literature on community studies from the Chicago School of sociology to social network analysis. He develops a holistic approach to community studies across both online and offline spaces. The author weaves together a range of physical and virtual communication environments to provide a way to study the “community phenomena” (24). In the Introduction, Nah writes

Given that community in virtual space is also based on the community in physical space, and the two types of community are closely related to each other, we need to review the existing community studies comprehensively in order to understand the “online” community as well as the “offline” community. (4)

In his Networked Community Communication Model, Nah explains that from this approach “linkage among structure, agent, and computer network can create and expand the concept of community from local based community to global community and integrates them into networked communication environment” (24).

Nah’s model is particularly helpful in looking at the community media center as a specific geographic location within which to study community in a way “in which all kinds of communication pattern are integrated and coexisted” (24).

In June 2007, after learning about this project Felicia Sullivan recommended that I read Community Media: A Global Introduction by Ellie Rennie. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve only just begun to realize - sigh - what an amazing resource it truly is. Particularly for students and scholars of old and new media interested in finding fresh perspectives within media studies and democratic theories of governance.

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.

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.

I’m starting to believe - but I hope it’s not true - that the lack of widespread research in Public, Educational and Government (PEG) Access Television studies may have profound consequences for media scholars seeking to understand participatory culture.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.