Community Media in Transition:

Exploring the Digital Culture within PEG Access Television
by

Colin Rhinesmith

 

In August 2006, following the Alliance for Community Media Conference, "Connecting Communities" at Boston's Park Plaza Hotel, I launched a personal research blog, titled "Community Media in Transition: PEG Access TV and the Internet" to continue the conversation online. As I wrote about the project, I hoped "to explore the role of technology, public policy, and the Internet and its relationship to public, educational, and government access television." Much to my surprise, I soon found myself at an exciting intersection of two worlds colliding without much of a roadmap to navigate the changes ahead. Through my professional and volunteer lives I realized I was in a unique position to help share the stories of those facing this intersection of cable access television and a complex new medium, called the social web.

 

This essay is about my process and discovery during this time. It is a document of the steps I have taken, up to this point, to investigate a thirty-year old practice by community media activists now facing a world uprooted by technology, politics and a global market economy. In it, I will present an overview of (1) the methods used, (2) the community observed, (3) the technologies being implemented, (4) the persistent themes and challenges, and (5) the potential paths of study moving forward.

 

 

Research Tools and Methodology

 

When I began this project I chose a number of participatory web tools to help me with my research and encourage participation online. I set up the blog (mentioned above) to serve as my online research portal. It has allowed me to share my process and engage with others. Online collaboration through the use of these tools has played a large role in this project. The blog also provided me with an easy way to publish and share a range of multimedia resources beyond plain text. I set up a del.icio.us feed for the project, using the tag "cmediachange." This social bookmarking tool allowed me to aggregate my findings on my blog. The purpose was to share resources with my audience and to learn from what others were finding. I also began to tag my pictures and images in Flickr with, "cmediachange" which I've also incorporated on my blog. These tools have helped to contextualize my research for visitors to my blog. I launched a video blog at blip.tv, the online video sharing site. This has allowed me to easily upload and share my video interviews with the community at blip.tv and to easily cross-post them to my blog. This past summer, I launched a group wiki where four others have since joined to participate in this form of "commons-based peer production." Last, and perhaps most important, I added a Creative Commons license to my blog (and wiki). This tool states the terms by which others can share and remix my work. It has also served to help raise awareness about the project.

 

I chose each of these tools because on their significance to this study: To explore how geographically-focused community media centers are using social web tools within a global media platform to connect and empower their physical communities. More simply, I knew if I understood these tools and their various uses I could gain a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities they presented to the community I was researching. As a result, my methods to this point have included a mix of research, collaboration and advocacy.

 

This approach proved extremely valuable in November 2006, when I was asked to present the keynote speech at the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region Conference in Brockton, MA. I titled my talk, "Our Viewers Know More Than We Do: PEG Access TV in a Participatory Culture," (Powerpoint download) after Dan Gillmor's quote, "My readers know more than I do." When Dan first arrived as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (where I worked as a staff assistant at the time), he talked about the potential of "citizen media" in a way that was reminiscent of the mission of public access television: to provide free speech, media education, localism and a commitment to public service. In my keynote, I presented an overview of the terminology, new technologies and the shift I saw as so closely aligned with the changes taking place within the newspaper industry; much of the focus of Dan's work. Little did I know, in less than a year later that the two worlds would collide in such a messy, but important, way.

 

 

From PEG Access TV to Public Access Media

 

In May 2006, at the second Beyond Broadcast conference in Cambridge, MA, Dan put a challenge to public access television. In it, he wrote: "I think it's time to phase out public-access TV and replace it with something more attuned to the Internet Age." This one sentence lit a wildfire that raged across a deeply rooted forest. At first I found myself similarly outraged by the statement. Later, I realized that Dan was saying something important. This was a crucial moment in this study that made the lines clearer to me between the "old guard" and a "new generation" in PEG access TV. And it is within this division that I have found myself committed to learning more about over the past year and a half.

 

I've been very fortunate through my professional, academic and volunteer lives, to have had the opportunity to meet some extraordinary people at the cutting edge of this new grassroots medium. But what exactly this medium is remains the question. Some have called it "PEG Broadband," "PEG Internet," and "public access media." Ben Sheldon writes,

Cable Access is television because 30 years ago, television was the dominant media model. Today it is looking like the internet is about to become dominant. But 30 years from now, will the internet (the current architecture/protocols) continue to be? . . . Cable Access should not become Internet Access, it must become Media Access.

Ben and many other web-saavy young people in public access television have been involved in an array of projects within this new medium.  In the following chapter, I will attempt to highlight some of these contributions.

 

 

Networked Innovation in PEG Access TV

 

One of the projects in this new "public-access media" space to gain attention across the PEG community over the past few years was the development of Digital Bicycle, "Distributing Community Media":

The DigitalBicycle is an online community for PEG Access television stations, Community Media and Technology Centers, and independent media producers. Media producers can use our system to publish high quality video content that can be broadcast on community television stations around the world. Access stations can download individual programs or subscribe to content for automated download. That content can then be burned to DVD, prepared for cablecast using a digital playback system, or imported into a nonlinear editor. Individuals can download content using BitTorrent, or subscribe to programming and view it using our media subscription tools. We encourage the members of the DigitalBicycle community to license their media for free redistribution under a Creative Commons license.

 

The project recognized that broadband technology provides an exciting new platform for individual access centers to share its community's work and provide cable programming for other stations' PEG channels. For more, visit the article on PEGSpace.

 

         PEGSpace is another great example of innovation in PEG access TV. Using Drupal, the open-source content management system, PEGSpace was created "on behalf of the Alliance for Community Media to help access centers best use the internet to further the mission of public media. PEGspace (pegspace.org) is based on the following:

o      The internet will continue to grow in importance as a tool for advocacy, community outreach, and media;

o      A Content Management System (CMS) is the best means for access centers to be effective in these areas;

o      CMS tools and support need to be further developed to make them viable for most access centers;

o      It is also important to develop PEG-specific programs designed to interface with the CMS;

o      Access centers benefit if all such tools, support, and software development are open source, rather than proprietary;

o      Everyone benefits if these tools, support, and software are built on the on the same platform;

o      The platform of choice for the ACM is Drupal, which is free, open source, and already has an active development community within the access movement."

PEGSpace also provides online forums for sharing and collaborating on web-based projects and serves as a space for knowledge sharing around web hosting, drupal development, metadata and other topics relevant to community media workers involved in this networked transition.

 

         In November 2006, I posted a video blog interview with Ben Sheldon of Mapping Access, "a tool for acknowledging the ubiquity of Access Television and providing a means for stations to better work together. Awareness of one another is the first step." The website adds

In order to provide such a powerful tool freely and accessibly, MappingAccess.com is designed to empower stations to submit and maintain information about themselves. By self-empowering the MappingAccess.com's users, our developers can best develop and improve the tools themselves.

Also built using Drupal, the website incorporates Google mapping technology to visualize the "Geography of Community Media."

 

         Some specific examples of PEG access TV centers implementing Drupal and other participatory web platforms include: Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Worcester Community Cable Access, Lowell Telecommunications Corporation, Community Television of Santa Cruz County, and Cambridge Community Television (where I serve on the Board).

 

         But as noted by Felicia Sullivan, Executive Director of Organizers' Collaborative and former Director of Community Programming at Lowell Telecommunications Corporation, many of these new web technologies have been more widely adopted by "white, middle-class, male students and engineers." I hope this study will continue to explore how issues of gender, race, and class intersect with the adoption of networked technology not only by community media centers but also within the communities they serve.

 

 

Persistent Themes and Narratives

 

In this next section, I will outline some of the other key topics related to this project. Beyond a simple investigation of individual tools and their use, I hope these broader topics might serve to help focus my area of inquiry moving forward:

o      Free Speech: How do we understand the role of free speech in a "democracy" and how does free speech change from the participation in public access television to public access media?

o      Media Education: What is the role of education in public access media, what tools are being used to foster online learning and what can be learned from these examples?

o      Localism: How do we understand geographically-focused media centers within a global networked culture?

o      Public Service: What role can community media centers play in the revitalization of civic engagement through networked technology?

These four areas have been central to the mission of PEG access TV for the past thirty years. Therefore, these goals must remain at the core of this study forward.

Some other areas of inquiry might include:

o      Citizen Journalism: What is it and how does it relate to PEG access TV?

o      Identity: What is the identity of PEG Access TV in a changing media landscape?

o      Search: How do community media centers make their media more accessible online through tagging, flexible licensing and other online metadata?

o      Networked Public Sphere: What is the public sphere in a digital age and what is the role of community media within this space?

o      Community Technology Centers and PEG Access TV: The adoption of networked technology in public access television has is roots in the community technology movement.  How do they intersect and what can be learned from each?

o      Legislative Challenges: Pressure from large telecommunications companies, the Federal Communications Commission, and Congress - as well as from state and local governments - have closed the doors on many PEG access television stations and left many community media centers struggling to find support in a shifting marketplace.

o      YouTube = Public Access TV?: This question has become part of an increasingly common narrative and in some cases it has been used to justify the end of cable access television.  What is the real connection between commercial Internet video-sharing sites and community media centers publishing web video?

o      Civic Engagement and the Social Web: How does the mission of public access TV align itself with those interested in using the Internet for social change?

 

 

Public Access Media and Social Change

 

Because of PEG's commitment to free speech, media education, localism, and public service, (as mentioned above) this community is uniquely positioned to utilize these new technologies for community empowerment and change. The Summer Issue of Community Media Review, "Community Media and Social Change," was devoted entirely to this topic. In it, Betty Yu of the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, and the issue's guest editor, writes, "The potential for people, particularly those hardest hit by social injustice - low-income workers, immigrants, people of color, women, youth and the disabled - to use these technologies in the service of social change is growing." Unfortunately, many of these stories are often overlooked by the mainstream media and therefore fail to reach a wider audience. However, as publishing becomes easier through the Internet, public access media centers can play a unique role in providing the tools, skills and knowledge to connect and empower their communities in a digital age. (For more, see Community Media 2.0 for Justice and Democracy)

 

 

Moving Forward

 

This document is by no means exhaustive in its outline of my research to this point. However, I do hope that it provides some context for the methods used and observations presented. In writing this essay, I realized I have much more to learn from this community. It will be necessary to keep the mission and rich history of public access television as a focal point in this study moving forward.