Why?

Community Media: Why?

Regarding media in general, it seems we are in the midst of one of those transitional periods of great change. Corporate media is consolidating and becoming one dimensional. At the same time, internet media is becoming wide open and multi-dimensional. New opportunities are opening up for community activists to by-pass corporate media and spread their messages through new channels.

But why? Why organize ourselves into groups? Why form communities?

It occurs to me that these new opportunities mean nothing, if you can't answer the question, "why?" For as long as humans have been organizing themselves into groups, there has always been "why?"

Safety? Efficiency? Survival? Progress?

Today, amidst six billion humans spread across the globe and becoming more connected by the day, the question remains. Why organize ourselves into groups? Why build communities? What's the goal?

For me, this stands out as the most important distinction. Access, control, funding, and content are all important. But ultimately, none of it matters if there is no message. I have to believe that the most important driving force behind community media will be people and their passion. In the end, if there is a person with fire in the belly then he or she will wield the tools at hand... and that passion will spread from person to person.

It happened in the stone age. It's happening now. And it will happen for as long as the third rock from the sun is peopled by humans.

Virtual Communities

Virtual Classrooms

Last year, I got involved with MediaOne at my vocational technical high school. It is a web space provided free to Massachusetts public schools. As I read this week's coursework, I realized MediaOne falls into the category of a virtual classroom, albeit a primitive one.

MediaOne provides free web storage to students, and allows teachers to set up a web site. I say it's primitive, because it isn't set up well for interactive use, but rather is structured for posting announcements and depositing assignments. A good first step, but, again, rather primitive compared to a true virtual classroom.

Eventually, I gave up on MediaOne. One reason was reliability. The servers seemed to have a lot of problems, but I must assume this has been resolved. The other reason was practical; the site was cumbersome, requiring passwords be issued to all students and login authorizations were highly controlled. This is for obvious security reasons, but also precluded extensive use on my part because I have a high number of students coming and going on a quick rotation basis.

My online courses at UMass Boston have opened my eyes to what's truly possible when it comes to virtual classrooms. My participation in live classroom sessions has been a tremendous eye-opener, as has been the rest of the online classroom experience.

In particular, my current course - Media and Community Building - has exposed me to tremendous possibilities. It is now clear that we are in the midst of rapid technological change that will be having a major impact over the years ahead. Blogs. Wikis. Video spaces. Social spaces. Online communities. It is all unfolding very quickly, redefining the landscape.

Johnson (Interface Culture) writes about Doug Engelbert changing our view of cyberspace when he demonstrated his first graphic interface. It appears to me that technology is now changing our view of community, by creating familiar, social environments in the cyberspace that Engelebert blasted open.

I like it!

TakingITGlobal

I introduced my Student Activist Club today to the TakingITGlobal.org Web site. The teenagers perused the site and spent some time checking it out and seeing what is available there. I believe they were most excited about being able to communicate with young people from around the globe; young people with an interest in bettering their communities, just like my students want to.

We were pressed for time today, since they're already working on a project; Locks of Love. Ours is a vocational high school, and the Student Activists are hosting a Locks of Love day in coordination with the Cosmetology shop. They have planned the fund raiser (for cancer patients) for early next year.

I hope the TakingITGlobal site is something we can build upon over time. Perhaps, if one of them strikes up some personal connections on the site, it will catch on and quietly grow as a source of inspiration and growth. Also, the site provides some very useful resources. I printed out their how-to workbook. It's about twenty pages long and is a terrific planning document. It was written by young people, for young people, and seemed to be an excellent tool for organizing and leading individual projects.

There is also a how-to on presenting workshops. This would be an extremely ambitious project for the club, since it was only founded about two months ago. However, once a track record has been established with a few successful projects, I believe this group will certainly be up to the task. The TakingITGlobal manual was very thorough and would serve as an excellent guideline.

In any event, I have found yet another outstanding resource, in this case TakingITGlobal.org, which is a perfect fit with my high school Student Activist Club.

I will add that to some other very practical things I've learned in this media course. Namely, how to create a blog, how to participate in a live internet classroom, and just today I learned what a wiki is, and went about creating a space on wikispace.com. Wikispace offers a free classroom space to k-12 teachers. I'm going to take them up on that, since I see some great potential there.

This stuff is amazing!

Independent Media

STRANGE

My recent investigations of independent media uncovered an odd situation. It appears to me that independent media is mainly a liberal effort; a rant and rage against evil corporate moguls who feed the public what it wants to hear for the sake of profit. But my personal experience has been that the drivel being fed out is mostly liberal drivel.

I like to read all points of view. But in the mainstream, corporate media, I find an overabundance of liberal views, and a darth of libertarian and conservative views. So when we dug into independent media, I hoped to find relief from this one-sided view of the world. But it was not to be. The independent media appears overwhelmingly slanted leftward, while it rails against corporate America.

I find that strange.

Why are leftists angry that someone is turning a profit by publishing what leftists want us to know? Do profits upset them? Maybe they don't like corporations. Or maybe they don't like the public. Or maybe they don't like profits, corporations, and the public. Who knows?

INTERESTING

As our UMass course progresses, it becomes more clear to me what a great flux mass media finds itself in. Also becoming clear is the idea that we have a number of potential alternatives floating about, but none have yet solidified and become strong, viable options.

YouTube and the like offer great potential, but how will it be realized? Presently, it seems like a wild and crazy blizzard of internet flakes. In the past few weeks, however, this has changed greatly. I've gone from seeing YouTube as teenagers' playground to perhaps being the next great media outlet. The potential is there for it, and similar outlets, to have tremendous impact.

Then again, maybe it fizzles... potential unrealized.

Film at 11:00.

Radio, Democracy, and Breaking the Law

In my weekly course session, I discussed a dilemma. Our options for local, community focused radio seem to be either or. Either we have great community programming that no one listens to, for lack of time and money. Or we have crappy commercial radio that everyone listens to, thanks to plenty of time and money being available at a commercial enterprise.

There is however, another option, and I have seen it. I WAS IMPRESSED!

I used to write Business Plans for a living. If someone wanted a small business loan, they would hire me to write their plan for them. The plan would be in my customer's head, and my job was to interview him or her and document their business strategy, as part of documenting the loan.

Which brings me to community radio. I was hired once by an immigrant who was relatively new to the states. His primary business was a retail store that catered to the local population from his country of origin. His side business, however, was to operate an unlicensed radio station. The local broadcast was very popular with the local population. He provided them important information that no one else would consider relevant, for free. It was commercial in the sense that advertisers paid him (well below market rates), and that was how he funded the site.

This is, of course, completely illegal. The FCC routinely caught up with him and shut him down. But he would simply wait a short time, then set up on a different frequency, and go right back into business.

Common sense dictates this is not a viable solution to community radio broadcasts being made available to low income immigrant communities. If everyone did it, where would we be? But I can't help admiring his entrepreneurial spirit and fearless disregard for FCC jail, or whatever the FCC does to broadcast miscreants.

I do believe it was the legendary economist Milton Freidman who said: America's strength lies in the ability of everyday Americans to ignore the government and break the law... or something to that effect.

Democracy & Public Access TV

"Public Access Television and the Struggle for Democracy" by Douglas Kellner was extremely thought provoking. It appears to be dated material, and we are presently living out the threats to Democracy that Kellner feared. Mass media news, for example, has now been completely transformed into a profit-centered commodity. What Kellner did not see coming, however, were two other major problems that accompanied this dramatic change.

First is that internet news would be free. But more importantly, internet news would become a bland, generic commodity.

Second is that mass media news would become internationalized. Mass media now serves up commodity news to the entire world. That of course leaves no room for old-fashioned patriotism where Americans are allowed to celebrate victories over our enemies, nor is there room for local community activists to highlight the ills produced by globalization.

I'm beginning to see for myself what Aufderheide stresses in his keynote address. (Daniels also alludes to this in his video interview.) There is great potential in public access television when it is distributed on the internet. In my mind, it solves many of the pressing issues. It would bypass today's mass media outlets: high circulation newspapers that amount to nothing more than junk mail delivery systems wrapped in Associated Press articles, sensationalist local TV newscasts that feature endless rapes, murders, and fires, and empty world newscasts that serve up more commercials than information.

While the internet does provide mass access for community based news, a way must be found to penetrate commodity news and silly YouTube videos. Work is being done on this, as shown by the PEGspace intitiative. Grand Rapids TV is tackling it head-on. They can now be found on MySpace. Lowell is creating a Web presence for itself, as described by Jason Daniels. He makes an excellent argument for Democracy when he says we need to get away from self reverential videos on the internet, and start paying attention to community driven efforts.

Local productions with worldwide distribution could overcome the constant drum of globalized everything; where everyone on the planet must respect everyone else on the planet. I believe globalizing our information outlets is a formula for us all becoming Stepford Earthlings and accomplishing absolutely nothing!

Free Software

Thank you Google!

Needless to say, not everyone owns Microsoft Office and the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. Families sometimes have other priorities for their hard earned cash. So they use Microsoft Works, which usually comes free with a new PC. The problem is, Microsoft sabotages its own files. The greedy buggers make sure Word doesn't recognize the Works files.

When students arrive flustered because they've done a ton of work and can't open it at school, I do two things. First, I assure them we have a converter and all will be well. But before sending them to the Technology Help Desk, I set them up with a free Google account and demonstrate the free Google word processor. Among other benefits, it can save documents in Word format!

It irks the daylights out of me that Microsoft intentionally restricts access to their most used file format, and leaves it to a competitor to save the day for my students. IBM has just released their own free word processing program - it, too, will save in the Word format. I do everything I can to promote these free programs, including introducing them to my Computer Literacy classes.

Let's hope they catch on!

I also advertise to my classes that I normally arrive at school about a half hour early, and encourage anyone with home access problems to come to my homeroom. It's located in a computer lab, and students can use the computers if they need to. It's not much, but I hope in my own small way, I'm helping out those with technology access problems.

Civic Values

The Institute for the Study of Civic Values explains: one need only visit Historic Philidelphia - home of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall - to be reminded of the founding vision of America as a free nation in which men and women of diverse origin would learn how to work together for the common good.

My youngest son, Kyle, turned 18 this year without ever having flown on a jet plane. So this summer we booked the cheapest airline seats I could find on the internet; $29 tickets to Philadelphia. Our plan was to fly in to Philly in the morning, check out the sites, grab cheese steak sandwiches, and fly home. Naturally, I assumed the cheese steak sandwiches would be the highlight of the day.

Turns out they were good, but not the highlight. I had three other highlights that surpassed the culinary delights.

One highlight was exactly what ISCV suggests. Historic Philadelphia brings you back to another time and place. Things were different in colonial America. Idealistic. Ideals that did not yet prevail in society were first dreamt, then brought to life there. It doesn't take much to imagine yourself there, in that time and place. Doing so, for me, brought on an overwhelming sense of awe. I stood where our Declaration of Independence was drafted and simply soaked the place in. Here was where the world changed forever. For the better.

I recalled feeling depressed when I turned 33 because Jefferson had penned the Declaration at age 33. What had I done to better the world? Thankfully, Linda had been there to offer encouragement, reminding me I was setting my sights a bit high, and encouraging me to be the best father I could be to our sons. Perhaps I could change the world in some smaller way than Jefferson, serving on the school committee, or something...

The second highlight was the cab rides. Talk about America in microcosm. Kyle and I had a blast on the cab rides, talking to the cabbies, finding out who they were, learning about their city, their lives, and sometimes their countries of origin. All this for the price of a cab fare and the willingness to race through South Phillie intersections at breakneck speed!

Third was Kyle. Just me and him. Father and son. At the end of the day, I told him I would be taking this day with me to the old home and the grave. Plane rides. National Heritage. Cabbies. Cheese steaks. Living free. Father and son. All thanks to idealistic rebels who put their lives on the line to bring us the United States of America.

Many thanks to them and to the long line of Americans who followed suit.

And thank you Kyle!