Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
TECH1502 What is Community Media
Lecture Week 01Community Media
Community Media
“By community media, I refer to grassroots or locally oriented media access initiatives predicated on a profound sense of dissatisfaction with mainstream media form and content, dedicated to the principles of free expression and participatory democracy, and committed to enhancing community relations and promoting community solidarity” (Howley, 2005, p. 2).
Community Media
“Community media represents a significant, but largely untapped site of analysis into the dynamics of media culture” (Howley, 2005, p. 4).
“Community media underscore the creativity, pragmatism, and resourcefulness of local populations in their struggle to control media production and distribution” (Howley, 2005, p. 3).
“At the heart of Web 2.0 is the idea that online sites and services become more powerful the more that they embrace this network of potential collaborators” (Gauntlett, 2011, p. 6).
http://robwatsonmedia.net/international-community-media-day-podcast/
Affordances Both Large & Small?
“The spreading of media texts helps us to articulate who we are, bolster our personal and professional relationships, strengthen our relationships with one another, and build community and awareness around the subjects we care about.
And the sharing of media across cultural boundaries increases the opportunity to listen to other perspectives and to develop empathy outside our own” (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013, p. 304).
Large Affordances?
What are the cultural boundaries?How do we recognise each others
interests?What are the ‘politics’ of community
building?How meaningful is notion of ‘community’?What interventions need to be made to
allow community based social production to take place?
What difference does it make?
“Contemporary culture is becoming more participatory, especially compared with earlier media ecologies primarily reliant on traditional mass media. However, not everyone is allowed to participate, not everyone is able to participate, not everyone wants to participate, and not everyone who participates does so on equal terms” (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. p.298).
Activity:
• Split into pairs• Discuss what you think a community is defined
by?• Draw a picture of what you think are the three
most essential elements of a community• Share your image with the whole group• Take a picture and Tweet #tech1502
#comedia
Definitions of Community?
“Participatory media are social media whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people. This value derives not just from the size of the audience but also from people’s power to link to each other, to form a public as well as a market” (Rheingold, 2012, p. 18).
“’Community’, as a way of referring to the totality of the population inhabiting the sovereign territory of the state, sounds increasingly hollow” (Bauman, 2007, p. 2).
https://wiki.our.dmu.ac.uk/w/index.php/Main_Page
Alternative Media
“When focussing on alternative media’s role in facilitating participation, we need to distinguish between participation in media and through media, similar to the way in which Wasko and Mosco (1992: 7) distinguished between democratisation in and through the media. Both participation in media and through the media see the (mass) communicative process not as a series of practices that are often restrictively controlled by media professionals, but as a human right that cuts across entire societies” (Bailey et al., 2008, p. 11).
Participation Media
“Participation in the media deals with the participation of non-professionals in the production of media output (content-related participation) and in media decision making (structural participation). Firstly, these forms of media participation allow citizens to be active in one of the many (micro-) spheres relevant to daily life and to put into practice their right to communicate… Secondly, these forms of micro-participation are considered to be important because they allow people to learn and adopt a democratic and/or civic attitude, this strengthening (the possible forms) of macro-participation, as well as the civic culture” (Bailey et al., 2008, p. 11).
Community Media organisations, groups and networks should:
1. Promote the right to communicate, foster freedom of expression and freedom to form and confront opinions, assist the free flow of information and opinions, encourage creative expression, contribute to the democratic process and to a pluralist society.
2. Provide access to training, production and distribution facilities, encourage creative talent and foster local traditions and culture, provide services for the benefit, entertainment, education, engagement and development of the wider community.
3. Seek to have their ownership representative of local geographically recognisable communities or of communities of common interest.
4. Be editorially independent of government, commercial interests, religious institutions and political parties.
5. Honestly inform an audience on the basis of information drawn from various sources, and provide a right of reply to any person or organisation who is or may be subject to serious misrepresentation.
6. Ensure a right of access to production facilities and platforms for minority and marginalised groups, in order to promote and protect cultural diversity.
7. Be established as not-for-profit organisations, which reinvest any surplus and ensure their independence by being financed from a variety of sources.
8. Recognise and respect the contribution of volunteers, affirm the right of paid workers to join appropriate trade unions and provide equally satisfactory working conditions for all.
9. Operate management, programming and employment practices that oppose discrimination, promote equality, and are open and accountable to all.
10. Promote and foster improved communication and partnership working in the community media sector, building networks at all levels to further develop good practice and strengthen communities.
Activity
• Working in Pairs• Visit the Community Media Association website• Find the Charter• Copy and paste the charter – turn it into a checklist?• Pick one of your favourite types of media • Check-off what your media does compared to the
CMA charter values?• Note any issues and report back to the whole group.
Process and Relations
“Rather than attempt to define alternative media solely by content I propose a theoretical and a methodological framework that incorporates content as one element in an alternative media culture that is equally interested in the processes and relations that form around alternative media production” (Atton, 2002, p. 3).
Activity
• Set up your blog on the DMU Commons• http://our.dmu.ac.uk/
• Set up your DMU Wiki profile page • https://wiki.our.dmu.ac.uk
DMU Commons BlogsYour usual DMU login username and password should work on the DMU Commons. For further help, see the ‘About’ and ‘Help’ tabs on the Commons. The ‘Building Your Site’ page is particularly helpful https://our.dmu.ac.uk/administration/building-your-site/
Now what?: Building your blog site: What title should it have? Change it if necessary Set the appearance and themes (overall look and feel) Can you add useful tools such as ‘widgets’ in the sidebars of your blog? Start with a welcome blog post telling people about your site Complete an ‘About’ section to let people know who you are and what the site is
about Start adding some pages of content and try to add hyperlinks and media such as
images and embedded video as well as writing Create a ‘blogroll’ of links to other sites that create a network of shared interests Change the address of the blog so that it isn’t your pnumber.our.dmu.ac.uk
DMU Wiki
• Log-in to the DMU Wiki• Add your name to the TECH1502 Student
page.• Create a new page with your name.• Add some comments and information about
yourself.• Save your page.
Democratic Communication
“Raymond Williams (1980) highlighted three aspects of democratic communication which we might consider as foci for this realignment:
decapitalisation, deprofessionalisation
and deinstitutionalisation” (Atton, 2002, p. 4).
Reflexive Instruments
“A model that privileges the transformatory potential of the media as reflexive instruments of communication practices in social networks: there is a focus on process and relation” (Atton, 2002, p. 7).
“A model of the media where ‘people using small-scale media prevail’ need not be the product of idealism or entail the overthrow of large-scale media; we may find spaces in which small-scale media already prevail” (Atton, 2002, p. 8).
“One of the mysteries about peer production is what motivates people to do it in the first place” (Jones & Hafner, 2012, p. 172).
Leicester Peoples Photographic Gallery:
“Motivating and facilitating sharing”
“As producers consider how audiences will create ‘divergences’ from official systems of distribution, listening to such practices might provide insight for new models for content creation and circulation” (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 298).
Leicester Peoples Photographic Gallery:
http://lppg.wordpress.com/
http://robwatsonmedia.net/leicester-peoples-photographic-gallery-open-exhibition-preview/
FD2D
“Temporary and localised communication”
“Creators are listening closely to their audiences, meeting them when and where the audience is having a conversation to address questions related to the audiences agenda rather than just what the company wants to say” (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 299).
Citizens Eye
“Collaboration among roles”
“The blurring relations and between producers, marketers, audience, suggesting that few of us today are simply passive audience members in the classic sense of the term, and, increasingly, we are all becoming publicists for the things we care about” (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 300).
http://robwatsonmedia.net/making-the-wheels-turn-reflections-on-citizens-eye/
Down Not Out
“Grassroots intermediaries who advocate and evangelise”
“Because these grassroots intermediaries are trusted by other community members, because their voices are widely heard, and because they also have access to empowered decision-makers, they become the locus for campaigns to encourage greater accountability and responsiveness” (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 299).
Down Not Out
http://www.mydownnotout.org.uk/
Citizens Eye
https://museumofcommunitymedia.wordpress.com/
Citizens Eye - Audioboom
https://audioboom.com/Citizenseye
Media Trust
http://www.mediatrust.org/communications-services
Media Trust - Audioboom
https://audioboom.com/mediatrust
(Bailey et al., 2008, p. 19).
Domains of Community Media
Summarising the Four Approaches to Alternative Media (AM)
Summarising the Four Approaches to Alternative Media (AM)
“In fact, any given participant may be reconciling different motives in him- or herself, whether it is a corporate insider who wants to balance his profit motive with other personal and social concerns, a marketer who also sees herself as a member of a community she is marketing toward and this has to balance her professional motivation with her personal identity, or a fan who is troubled by the radical and cultural politics represented in a favourite text” (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 300).
Wha
t Exi
sts
Out
side
of t
he B
ound
arie
s?
Bounded Social Production
Jenkins, Ford & Green operate from within a world view of established competencies and capabilities. They don’t discuss how these capabilities are built or established:Who validates them?Who enables them to exist?Who determines the economic and social
systems?Who fights to challenge prevailing orthodoxies.
“If ‘community ghettos’ were relatively self-sustaining and self-reproducing ‘mini-societies’, complete with miniature replicas of the wider society’s stratification, functional divisions and the institutions required to serve the complete inventory of communal life’s needs, ‘hyperghettoes’ are anything but self-sustaining communities.
They are, we may say, piles of ‘cut-off string ends’ – artificial and blatantly incomplete collections of rejected; aggregates, but not communities; topographical condensations unable to survive on their own” (Bauman, 2007, p. 46).
“Our epoch is one of determinism, fatalism and the total absence of alternatives” (Donkis in Bauman & Donskis, 2013, p. 201).
“The notion of the gift economy helps us, in particular, to understand the rewards for participation – such as ‘status’, ‘prestige’, or ‘esteem’ – which have no (immediate) economic value” (Gauntlett, 2011, p. 95).
“Radically changing everyone’s field of reference and system of concepts would make it easier to take away the dimensions of the past” (Donkis in Bauman & Donskis, 2013, p. 134).
Value of Community Media
“As one of the few remaining vestiges of participatory democracy, community media demand the active engagement of media intellectuals whose expertise can inform and enhance the vital work of these organisations and help maintain and secure a dynamic resources for cultural production and democratic processes” (Howley, 2005, p. 269).
Value of Community Media
“Community media initiatives invite cultural scholars not only to test their theoretical propositions in particular and distinctive contexts but also to contribute their analytical insights to the everyday lived experience of their local communities” (Howley, 2005, p. 269).
References:Chris Atton (2002) Alternative Media; Sage, London.Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid Times - Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press.Bauman, Z., & Donskis, L. (2013). Moral Blindness - The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. London: Polity Press.Bailey, Bart & Carpenter (2008) Understanding Alternative Media; Open University Press, Maidenhead.Gauntlett, D. (2011). Making is Connecting. London: Polity.Kevin Howley (2005) Community Media – People, Places, and Communication Technologies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable Media. New York: New York University Press.Jones, R. H., & Hafner, C. A. (2012). Understanding Digital Literacies. London: Routledge.Rheingold, H. (2012). Net Smart - How to Thrive Online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
