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Community Media Production

Access, Institutions, and Ethics

Ellie Rennie

Production is more than the day-to-day work of community media organizations. When taken to mean part of an industrial cycle, production is central to the theoretical underpinnings that have defined, and to some degree determined, how community media should be accommodated in the media landscape. Advocates have argued that the means of production should be available to all, extending community access not only to production skills and program resources, but also to communication spaces and technologies. Broadcasting reforms in many countries have helped institutionalize community media through access measures that enable amateurs and community representatives alike to take part in media production. In this chapter I trace the intellectual history of community media, looking at production as a defining rationale both in practice and in policies. In the digital age this rationale needs rethinking, as new technologies both enable and complicate not only access to the means of production but also the ability to institutionalize critical media structures. In the final section of this chapter I consider issues of ethical consumption as a new way forward for thinking through the role of community media in the digital age.

The community media I refer to in this chapter emerged during the mid-twentieth century, when media production was restricted to a few dominant participants. For instance, in the USA and Canada, early community media production via public access television – that is, public, educational, and government access (PEG) – existed both as alternatives to and in negotiation with large, commercial cable television companies (Fuller, 1994). In time, community media have grown into their own sector of national media landscapes. In Australia, what began as a handful of experimental radio stations in the 1970s became officially, in 1992, the third sector of broadcasting, after commercial and public service. Today it is the largest sector of the media in terms of number of broadcast licensees.

Community media exist in all corners of the globe, and, although demands for community media have not decreased, their place within the broader media environment is changing. When I first started to produce and write about community media in the mid-1990s, community stations were the only real means for amateurs to distribute sound and video content to broadcast publics. Mainstream media offered a few avenues for public expression, such as home video programs, letters to the editor, talent shows, and talkback radio; but they ceded no editorial control or ownership of their content. Community media gave people a more direct means to access media platforms and to control production processes and content. In the current media environment, however, the community media sphere has been crowded with other noncommercial, citizen-led forms of media production. Individuals may contribute “user-generated content” to communities, but this content is mostly distributed across commercial sites such as YouTube. Government broadcasters may bring more people's voices into media content through digital storytelling or content sharing hubs, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Pool project (http://www.pool.org.au); but, while they provide access, these projects seem to rely on national companies. Indeed, these days it is often easier to access and participate in mainstream media outlets, which is due to their advanced technologies, better bandwidth, and public branding campaigns.

If access and institutions alone do not distinguish community media, then we need to identify what community media may do differently from commercial or government-funded media. I posit that community media are something that participants choose because of the values they uphold. If the dilemma of the new media environment is identifying and navigating the abundance of media production and consumption outlets, then the benefit of community media is that they offer a value based system for these forms of media participation. The historical foundations for theorizing community media provide a starting point for thinking through the values of these media in the digital media age, turning our focus to the politics that underpins a later consideration of ethical consumption over participatory production as a way to retheorize community media.

What Are Community Media?

The phrase “community media” refers to media that originate in civil society, outside of commercial and governmental control. Although there is a long-standing debate in the field as to whether “community media” is too broad a description to be useful, I choose it to reference the community sector as a field of action that operates with aims and purposes different from those of commercial enterprises and government agencies. Those who participate in community media often do so because they are attracted to these aims and purposes as alternatives to other media, and this leads some to call community media “alternative media” (Atton, 2002, 2004; Comedia, 1984; Duncombe, 1997). The phrase “community media” on the one hand suggests organizational structures that are unique to the community sector, while on the other it encompasses the loose ties and informal arrangements that connect people and provide impetus for alternative types of relationships between producers and consumers.

In this relational sense, “community” can mean kinship connections, but more frequently it designates other social bonds. The term is often used to appeal to a sense of belonging or to a shared identity. A community can be a worthy or a functional group. It can suggest a warm or coherent way of living together. At other times, it can simply refer to people who share geographical proximity or cultural affiliation. As philosopher Iris Marion Young (1990) has pointed out, though, “community” can also be an exclusive and narrow term, signifying a social arrangement that promotes a denial of its members' differences. By appealing to an impossibly shared subjectivity, a community can mask or justify an “us versus them” mentality, resulting in racism or other forms of social divisions.

A community can also be put to work as a way of consolidating and advancing social causes. It possesses political usefulness, in that it refers to associations and groups that make up the third sector – including organizations that represent particular affiliations, and formal or informal networks that may promote particular causes, interests, or hobbies. The third sector includes large charities and small clubs, which are driven by factors other than profit-making and may provide services that government has either failed to fulfill or are best left outside of government jurisdiction.

As a whole, the community media arena is therefore an organic sphere of social affiliations and networks, as well as of the structures that support such groups in order to ensure that they can fulfill their social and cultural goals (Rose, 1999). The third sector gives space to a myriad of activities that may be independent of government and commerce, but that can also be leveraged to achieve certain ends associated with the state, such as services, or with the market, such as development. Beyond this, the third sector can also fulfill the social or cultural needs of its participants, whether they be producers or consumers. It is this final operational use that I will return to later in relation to community media ethics.

Community media can include local public access media, diasporic news and culture, media development projects, and various forms of culture jamming. Some scholars resist the description “community media,” because potentially it includes less progressive communities in these fields. It stands to reason that, if the phrase “community media” implies universal media access, then that would include people from communities that provoke hatred and unrest. I am less concerned with what should or should not be included under the community media umbrella than I am with the structures that support community media's ability to thrive as a third sector. In my own work, I have chosen to use community media, as they convey the attempt to take what is part of the social world – as in those relationships we call “community” – and to institutionalize them in media. Community radio stations in Australia, for example, are “exactly the type of institutions that define the contours of civil society,” in that they are “self-governing nonstate actors that exist as non-profit seeking expressions of the mutual and collaborative intent of ordinary people to effect social change through discursive means” (Fairchild, 2010, p. 25).

This definition does not make community media an alternative expression of citizenship, or something radical by nature (see also Rennie, 2006), but it also means that community media are not free of structural constraints. In Australia, community broadcasters must be incorporated associations and operate as not-for-profit entities in order to receive licenses. Structural constraints for community media vary by country, region, and locality; these reflect the various struggles that community groups frequently faced in order to achieve community media legislation. Early fights for community radio and television, for example, centered on access to the electromagnetic spectrum – that is, the “airwaves” needed for analog broadcasts. More recent fights have related to cable or satellite transponder capacity, and they were followed, even later, by battles for affordable broadband access. The resulting policies have formed a patchwork of requirements and guidelines for making community media.

Today the various programming groups that use community stations are often less formally organized than the third sector itself. Some participants, such as independent producers, student filmmakers, and sports clubs, may work independently, without committees or rules. Individuals belonging to these groups might actually prefer to use commercial or government media to publish their content online, but they may find it easier to access community organizations for radio and television broadcasting. These facts introduce several tensions into the ways community media have been defined and practiced.

Community media policy, where it exists, is designed around the needs of producers and of the communities they represent. Without specific laws and regulations that apply specifically to community associations, community media have proven to be vulnerable to commercial or state interests. At the same time, producers may see themselves as working independently of a community association, or he or she may reject officially registered affiliations altogether. This makes formal requirements for community governance difficult to achieve. Moreover, non-profit regulations that ensure that community media do not behave commercially may guarantee public access to stations, but they may frustrate those producers who use, or even prefer, commercially available platforms and production technologies. These tensions, embedded as they are in the definition of community itself, are present in theories of community media, which have focused on issues of access to, participation in, and control of the means of media production.

Theorizing the Importance of Production and the Means of Communication

The production process has been a key focus of community media theories, which can be traced to origins in Marxist social theories, in particular those of Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams, and in critical media studies. Community media theories have developed concepts, such as access, participation, and control, which help imagine alternative means of production, across both social and material processes (e.g., Kellner, 1990).

Walter Benjamin, an influential German intellectual writing during the Weimar period, was perhaps the first to introduce the idea of an alternative means of production. Benjamin was associated with the Frankfurt School, which set forth a critique of mass media as a capitalist institution that sealed the fates of a subordinated working class. In 1934 he gave a speech to the Institute for the Study of Fascism, at which he argued that publishing ideas, even from a critical viewpoint, is not enough to alter society. The creator, he insisted, must look at his or her position within the system as a whole, including the production process. Only by critically realigning where the work sits in relation to the “forms and instruments of production” (Benjamin, 1982, p. 214) can social change occur. Benjamin desired the advent of socialism, but what mattered most was whether cultural work transcended the bourgeois processes that upheld capitalism. Production, he asserted, needed to be freed from market influences in order to be truly revolutionary; simply expressing challenging ideas would never change the system if these ideas were distributed through the industrial press. Benjamin's speech has been adopted in contemporary critical media studies as a way to understand the role and purpose of left-oriented segments of community-based media, particularly those outlets that seek to challenge mainstream media.

To this, Raymond Williams, a thinker who profoundly influenced the development of cultural studies, advanced Benjamin's groundwork for community-based media. Williams claimed not to subscribe to the idea of a mass culture. He wrote: “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses” (Williams, 2001, p. 46). His theory of culture embraced liberal humanism in that it insisted on the individual as a free agent and on culture as mutable and contestable at the level of everyday experience. In his later work, however, Williams came to accept Marxism and to focus on the institutions and production forces behind people's agency and on their everyday cultural experience.

Asserting that the means of communication – everything from simplest forms of language to communication technologies – is socially or materially produced and reproduced, Williams (1980) regarded umbrella terms such as “media” unhelpful, because they conceal the different ways in which communication occurs, as well as usage and control of their means. The means of communication are not just forms, but means of production, containing economic forces as well as social relations. For example, the press relies on unequal social relations, whereby those who do the manual work of printing do not write the ideas, a situation that makes them “instrumental in the transmission of the writing of others” (ibid., p. 58). From a critical perspective, the supposedly free press essentially reinforces class divisions between “those who have something to say and those who do not” (ibid.). For Williams, socialism required more than the basic “recovery” of human capacities that capitalist forces have taken away. Instead, it needed the “necessary institution of new and very complex communicative capacities and relationships” (ibid., p. 62) – in particular, new forces and new relationships in the means of communication. Only by changing the productive relationship between community and communication could one make social transformation occur. Williams found a practical example of such transformation in community radio, “already within our reach” in 1978, and in the possibility of what he called “multi-way interactive modes, which can take us beyond ‘representation’ and selective transmission into direct persons-to-persons communication” (ibid., p. 61). Williams thus imagined social networking as a practice that potentially subverted the undemocratic production forces that dominated other media forms.

The intellectual frameworks surrounding community media thus came from a leftist, anti-capitalist intellectual arena, stemming from attempts to understand culture as part of the broader political structures that assisted and inhibited the freedoms of the majority of working people. The ideal of using communication means to develop alternative structures of production and thus to subvert unequal social relations has been a platform in international relations and global debates over communication rights since the 1960s; this platform can be summed up as “the right to be informed, the right to inform, the right to privacy, the right to participate in public communication – all elements of a new concept, the right to communicate” (CRIS Campaign, 2005, p. 17).¹ Its influence remains strong in relation to what other scholars have called alternative media, grassroots media, participatory media, radical media, or even development media. For some, who have participated in these global debates, community media became the site for realizing a movement, “even if the [community media] groups themselves were acting independently of the [. . .] debate and [were] largely unaware of it and often of each other” (ibid.). Although many of the community media outlets proliferating over the past 30 years had no political intentions at all, their collective presence challenged media ownership and control structures by being independent from corporate or state interests. This became the core focus for some community media researchers and policy advocates (for instance Hazen & Winokur, 1997; Aufderheide, 2000).

For other community media researchers, however, the focus on production processes as the raison ďêtre for community media projects has led many groups to assert that participation is in itself a radical project, providing an alternative to mainstream media structures. Communication rights, after all, remain a marginal issue in policy spheres. Despite their official recognition of community media, “[t]he codification of communication rights in international agreements – let alone the widespread recognition that communication is a basic human need as well as a fundamental human right – is no guarantee that these rights are respected or upheld within and between nation-states” (Howley, 2010, p. 7). Further, many scholars have questioned whether community media are capable of changing broader media structures to any great extent. Changing the means of production on a large scale has proven to be a complicated task, involving “problems of effective access, of alternatives to class and state control and selection, and of the economics of general distribution” (Williams, 1980, p. 58).

In defining what she calls “citizens' media,” for example, Clemencia Rodríguez (2001) sees the transformative potential in the act of participation and in the agency inherent in media production. Rather than overhauling ownership and control of the media – as inferred in Benjamin's earliest articulations – Rodríguez claims that the importance of citizens' media resides at the local level, in disrupting power relations in everyday life and in opening up the possibility for empowerment. She concludes that:

Attempts to impose order, or to scale up community media, could even threaten the subtle achievements of small-scale media. For instance, some have argued that a number of community radio stations in the United States lost touch with the grassroots by changing their programming and practices when Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) money became available (see Walker, 2001).

The revolutionary intentions of reclaiming the means of communication through collective ownership or participatory production have been influential, and they are evident in several national community media policies. While they differ on the needs of producers and of the communities they represent, these policies are often framed by the general language of participation and by the need for media to be accessible to producers from that community. Examples of how community participation and access have been enshrined in legislation include the following facts:

• The Council of Europe's Declaration on Community Media 2009 states that community media are not-for-profit in nature, are independent, and involve the “voluntary participation of members of civil society in devising and management of programmes” (CM/Del/Dec(2009)1048/5.1E).
• The South African Broadcasting Act of 1999 includes requirements that community radio licensees must be “managed and controlled by a board which must be democratically elected, from members of the community in the licensed geographic area” (Government of South Africa, 1999, Broadcasting Act 4, section 32(3)). Programming must “reflect the needs of the people in the community which must include amongst others cultural, religious, language and demographic needs” (section 32(4)).
• The Broadcasting Act of Canada states that the Canadian broadcasting system should be comprised of “public, private and community elements” (Government of Canada, 1991, 3(1)(b)) and must “include educational and community programs” (3(1)(i)(iii)). The regulatory authority defines community radio as “owned and controlled by a not-for-profit organization, the structure of which provides for membership, management, operation and programming primarily by members of the community at large. Programming should reflect the diversity of the market that the station is licensed to serve” (Canadian Radio–Television and Telecommunications Commission, 2000, paragraph 21).
• In Ireland, community radio stations are “owned and controlled by a not-for-profit organization whose structure provides for membership, management, operation and programming primarily by the members of the community at large” (Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, 2009, p. 3).
• The UK includes “the promotion of civic participation and volunteering” in its definition of the social objectives of community radio, as outlined in the Community Radio Order 2004 (Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 2004, section 2(3)(g)).
• In Australia, legislation provides that community broadcasters “encourage members of the community served to participate in the operations of the service and the selection and provision of programmes” (Commonwealth of Australia, 1992, Schedule 2, Part 5 (2) (c)).

These incantations toward community participation sit strangely among communications laws otherwise focused on concrete matters of public resource allocation, responsibilities toward audiences, and market controls. Such policy concessions have been mostly a way to accommodate a gap not filled by commercial or public broadcasting services, rather than a way to challenge those systems. In practice, the motivations behind community media production and distribution are diverse, as can be seen through the following examples of interlinked community media endeavors in the city of Melbourne, Australia.

Participants' Motivations for Community Media: Three Examples

Three different instances of community media, all created for and by young people, illustrate the diversity of community media: organizations based on access and participation; organizations intended for development or social change outcomes; and the less structured groups of amateur creators that choose to work outside of the mainstream media. Together, they demonstrate that the diversity of community media is not just cultural, but that different institutional structures are created to achieve different outcomes. The first two examples exist within third sector structures, while the third example is intentionally informal and avoids institutionalization.

Access and Participation: SYN

Student Youth Network (SYN) is a youth-run community radio licensee that has been operating full-time since 2003. I spent two years getting to know this station and researching the dynamics of youth radio, which was different from the student radio that emerged in universities in the 1970s. The original student stations were no longer as accessible to young people, as volunteers stayed on, grew older, and the culture of the station changed with them. In order avoid this fate, SYN insisted that programmers had to leave the station on their 26th birthday and limited the amount of months per year that an individual radio announcer could be on the air.² I began researching SYN partly to see why young people – the so-called “digital generation” – might want to establish an old-fashioned community radio station. Couldn't they simply carry out their media activities online? After a while I began to see that the station was a central point of their production.

The station was a place where young people could come together. It enabled a more complex form of media engagement, including a real work environment and access to a sizable audience of approximately 80,000 listeners weekly. Those who might have reasonable levels of what could be called “informal digital literacy” learned how to structure stories, to be articulate to a public, and to manage their media time and resources. The “SYNners,” as they called themselves, did not always succeed in making innovative content or changing media routines. Not everyone left with a positive, well-rounded experience or with new means for self-expression. However, if it was a coherent and successful project all the time, then I suspect it might not have been enough of a challenge for those involved. The constant influx of new people meant that the organization had a tendency to repeat mistakes. Yet the same organizational policies that encouraged turnover also ensured that the station has remained accessible and that its content has never gone stale.

SYN has become more multiplatform in its operations than many community broadcasters, partly because those involved have been open to learning and producing across a range of media that they distribute online. The radio station is still the entry point into the organization for many, particularly for school groups that come to SYN through its many training programs. This has been the main income source for the station. SYN is an example of an organization that is committed to access and where community participation produces positive outcomes, such as innovation, as well as obstacles, such as lack of experience and of professionalism.

Social Change and Development: YouthWorx Media

It is fair to say that the young people who come into SYN of their own accord (for instance not those in school groups) are mostly already confident with, or interested in, media production. The founding SYNners were aware from the start that disadvantaged young people were less likely to get involved. They formed partnerships with various youth organizations, including a large project that was developed by SYN in association with the Salvation Army and Swinburne University. The YouthWorx Media project, as it is known, is an example of what has been called development or participatory media – which brings me to my second example of the different motivations underpinning community media. The phrase “participatory media” has been used mostly in the context of media projects in the Third World, entailing media projects established by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with strong direction from local communities toward social change outcomes. The intention of participatory media projects is to give communities control over the messages and information in ways that are culturally and politically appropriate, together with skills and livelihood opportunities (Gwinn-Wilkins, 2000; Servaes, 1999). Although much of the literature on participatory media applies to these Third World projects, the same approach is used in First World countries for certain “disadvantaged” segments of the population, such as at-risk youth or public-housing residents.

YouthWorx Media has provided access to technologies and skills in the same way as SYN, but with a greater level of support, using networks with various social services and schools. Aside from media production, YouthWorx has focused on other outcomes, such as building the confidence of participants, encouraging teamwork, responsibility, and providing paths to schooling and education. Unlike the SYNners, who were mostly already at school or university, YouthWorx participants could get training for future credentials. Although YouthWorx has produced good content under the guidance of professional media trainers, the emphasis is, just as much, on providing those involved with a space where they can be free from the problems of home or of the streets. YouthWorx has thus been a more directed and deliberate endeavor than SYN. It has acknowledged that access, on its own, does not necessarily meet all needs.

Amateur Authority and Aesthetics

At the opposite end of the spectrum from YouthWorx and SYN is the community media production sphere of zine makers. Zines are “non-commercial, small-circulation publications which are produced and distributed by their creators” (Spencer, 2005, p. 13). The stories and artwork contained in zines are produced by an individual, or (less often) by a group. Zines avoid some of the barriers of media regulation and distribution by virtue of being small-circulation print media. In this respect, they are not unlike participatory media online. Zines disrupt the boundary between consumer and producer and are produced via nonprofessional methods and systems.

Stephen Duncombe (1997, p. 120) calls this form of media production “do-it-yourself,” as in “You did-it-yourself because no one else out there was doing it. Or because when they did it, they got it horribly wrong.” Punk zines, for instance, began appearing because punk music was ignored in music magazines. When mainstream media appropriated the punk aesthetics, punk zines “kept it real” for members of the subcultural community. Media participation, in this context, encompasses anyone who cares enough to get involved. In fanzines (zines about a particular show, product, author, band, and the like), the work is a way for the audience to claim a productive role in relation to the object of its consumption. In some instances, that might mean hostile or satirical engagement; or, at other times, celebration or extending characters and narratives into new territory, beyond the original author's intention (Jenkins, 2006). The amateur methods of zines also encourage others to create. Sometimes this is a deliberate call to arms, as are instructions on how to make a zine. Other zines simply encourage by example. Duncombe describes one instance in which Punk interviewer Legs McNeil departs in mid-interview, leaving musician Richard Hell to complete the interview himself. Zines thus strip the authority from the notion of producer. Such proudly amateur behavior proves that “anybody can do a better job as an interviewer than Legs” (1997, p. 119), opening up the playing field, about which Duncombe writes: “This notion of emulation – turning your readers into writers – is elemental to the zine world” (ibid., p. 123). A final and related point is that zines are deliberately amateur in their look and in their “closeness” to the subject, making no false claims to objectivity or professional distance. In the zine world the amateur aesthetic is often deliberate, a choice to remain streetwise rather than polished or mainstream. You don't have to be good at making zines to make a zine; the creator's prerogative overrides skill as the main credential.

As zines show us, there are structures even at the deinstitutionalized end of the community media spectrum. The intentions, values, and differentials of zines define an “alternative” sphere of media making, which is part of the community media sphere but may also exist outside or in spite of it. Although zines are not a core part of SYN's activities, the organization has hosted the occasional zine workshop. I travelled to the annual youth festival This is Not Art, in the regional city of Newcastle, Australia, with a group of people from SYN. The festival hosts the country's largest zine fair. The zine makers I met there spoke of their attraction to the low-fi aesthetics and the production process for zines. Although zines hardly qualify as community media, much less as a media movement, their popularity and connections to other community media forms and practices raise important issues about theories of community media that presuppose means of production, access, and participation as the core definers of community media.

Beyond the Limits of Community Media Theories

Theoretical debates about community media focus on their values and on whether community media can form part of a coherent political movement. This debate includes the limitations of community media policies in effecting social changes and the expansive possibilities of digital technologies, which have further blurred distinctions between producers and consumers. Yet to retheorize community media in light of their politics at the current conjecture requires that scholars include a discussion of community media consumption and ethical consumer choices in their discussions of production means and values.

Researchers Marisol Sandoval and Christian Fuchs (2010) critique participatory production as the main theme in theorizing community media, centering instead on the problem of visibility as a crucial platform for what they call alternative media theory. For them, alternative media cannot challenge “all forms of domination” in an age of fragmented public spheres, nor can they foster “societal alternatives to capitalism” when sustainability relies either on stable financing or on self-exploitation (ibid., p. 141). In their view, the history of small-scale participatory media often shows that they remain marginal precisely because they have rejected professional processes that would allow them to reach broader audiences more efficiently (ibid., p. 143). Small-scale media cannot achieve such an ambitious project as overturning the current means of production, they argue. Rather, the success of alternative media depends on the visibility of critical media content across public spheres. Citing the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, they write: “This means that alternative media at some levels can also employ capitalist techniques of media production in order to advance their political aims. Alternative media can make use of capitalist structures and at the same time criticize these structures” (ibid., p. 146). For them, professionally produced and financially solvent magazines on the political left, such as Mother Jones, The Nation, and Z Magazine, should be included in a cohesive theory of alternative media that conceptualizes access, social change, and alternative values and aesthetics in terms of the ability to challenge and critique the economic inequalities that prevent participatory democracy.

While Sandoval and Fuchs's critique is not completely new,³ their point that alternative media are not an antidote to capitalist media suggests that community media need to go beyond participation as a good in and of itself. Writing on her experiences with OURMedia/NUESTROSMedios, an international network of hundreds of participatory media groups, media researcher and activist Gabriele Hadl (2007, p. 17) argues that, while the network's diversity is its greatest strength, its “fuzziness” around shared concepts and goals is a weakness. Framing the problem as an obstacle to any unified community media movement, she reflects: “It has become increasingly clear that a way must be found to connect nuanced analysis and effective practice” (ibid., p. 16). Hadl's point is important precisely at this moment, when publics worldwide are beginning to hold a neoliberal/neoconservative agenda accountable for a series of global social and environmental damages, including the buying and selling of personal data. Community media have the opportunity to challenge the ways their audiences are sold to corporations in the digital media environment, whether through Google searches, Facebook networks, or YouTube uploads and downloads. Community media producers sometimes rely on these corporately owned technologies, but they do not have to be complicit with the aims of these services.

The participatory production process can advance the dominance of commercial media, and therefore it can no longer be viewed as a means of challenging such power on its own. While this is a matter of content visibility, as argued by Sandoval and Fuchs, it is also a matter of creating governance structures for a media third sector that upholds noncommercial governance practices. Hence we return to the conundrum inferred decades ago by Williams: How do we enhance the visibility of communities through media already dominated by a capitalist mode of production?

In their handbook on communication rights, the Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) Campaign critiques the concept of freedom of expression as individualistic and unmindful of power inequalities. Its authors write: “It can do little to prevent the loudest voices” (CRIS Campaign, 2005, p. 22). Communication rights, on the other hand, entail communicating, that is, speaking and being heard.

“The right to be heard” is a relatively new concept in community media theory that stretches theory beyond production and into consumption – or “listening,” as some prefer to call it (Couldry, 2006; O'Donnell, Lloyd, & Dreher, 2009). To begin to listen, however, audiences need to know that ethical media systems already exist; they need to be able to find what it is they are looking for and to enjoy it when they do. This calls for new systems and strategies: education campaigns, and possibly even ethical labeling systems for non-profit community media.

Audiences expect community media to be different from mainstream media in upholding different principles. Some of these limitations, such as the lack of advertising, have also made community media clearly recognizable to audiences. In the online environment, such limits and constraints either do not exist or are hidden from public view. The only way to know if something is community media online is if that site says so; and, even then, caveat emptor. The multinational corporation NewsCorp owns MySpace, for example, which often uses the term “community media” to describe its website (Reiss, 2006). Audiences need to be able to recognize what community media are and how to evaluate their content.

Community media online operate very much according to the same ethical values as community media in other places do. They frequently allow for open access and amateur participation in running the organization and in developing existing technologies in order to serve identifiable social needs rather than market niches. Community media avoid using personal information for marketing and tend to consider ethical issues when it comes to advertising. Nor do they intentionally impose technological gatekeeping to restrict the ways users access information. Knowing these aspects of their production, community media audiences use an ethic of care in the construction and participation of community media. A similar type of care is also found among audiences in commercial sites, but this usually occurs after rights have been infringed or audience trust has been lost. For example, online communities have pressured YouTube to enact communication rights according to a perceived mutual responsibility between the patron platform and its users:

The ethic of care in community media, on the other hand, is pre-emptive, something that occurs not in relation to corporate behavior, but as a foundation principle that enables the user to know what he or she is dealing with before he or she gets involved.

The ethical consumption of community media suggests that the consumer has at least some power to effect social change by making choices based upon his or her moral values. The individual and collective aspects of production operate in tandem with those of consumption. Although consumption is an individual act, the systems that enable such a choice to be made are collectively organized, either as a cooperative venture or through a central body. The Fair Trade label, which is applied to products such as coffee and crafts, promotes “good” labor and environmental production practices, encouraging ethical compliance in work. The labeling system also entails an educative role, in that consumers need to be informed of the consequences of their purchases in order to make a choice in favor of fair trade. As the choices consumers make are subjective and based on a changing environment and culture, their ethical choices are not statically fixed, but are part of the changeable moral system associated with the condition of postmodernity⁵ (Bauman, 2001; Littler, 2009).

If a “Fair Trade-like” ethical system were applied to community media, it would require effective navigation methods, adequate visibility, as well as efficiency in the networks that define and aggregate community media into a global movement. If there are real differences between the ways in which community media function and behave by comparison with media from other sectors, then the issue is how to make those differences explicit. Producers and consumers both have to navigate through the available and abundant content on the Internet. Whether they post content on a particular site or enter into a public discussion forum with friends, all citizens need to make informed decisions about their engagement in the new media landscape. This may involve solutions such as labels or classifications that alert audiences and producers when they come across a community media outlet that offers privacy assurances or encourages open-source technologies. A more subtle approach would be navigation tools (such as search engines) that show how social networks, linking, and recommendations already enable ethical choices for media engagement.

Conclusion

Questions of access and participation in production alone are insufficient for understanding and defining community media in a digital media age. Community media theories inherited some of the blindspots of Marxist theorists, who focused on who controls the means of communication or the social contexts in which media are produced, rather than on media audiences or consumption. As David Morley points out, this body of work has a tendency “to prioritize the study of ‘production’ to the exclusion of the study of all other levels of the social formation” (1989, p. 33). As the boundaries between audiences and producers collapse, the dynamics of consumption, navigation, and networks must now be taken into account.

Why not assist audiences and producers to know community media through an ethical choice label or system? Studies of Fair Trade commodities highlight the contradiction inherent in ethical choices: that even critics of capitalist market practices must participate in commodity culture. Critical scholars have frequently dismissed consumer movement ethics as complicit with market capitalism – the very system that created the class inequality that the consumer seeks to redress by buying better products (Littler, 2009). Consumers can also exhibit willful ignorance, avoiding or not seeking out information on some products in order to avoid the potential inconvenience that comes with knowledge and responsibility (Brown, 2009). Such limitations deserve consideration in relation to community media choices, especially when individual choices implicate universal communication rights and the traded goods are not material products, but information flows. Issues such as these require further testing and theoretical enquiry.

The implications of these ethical issues are not simply theoretical, however. If scholars, policymakers, and practitioners continue to describe community media only in terms of media production, then the risk is that community media will be lost in a sea of participatory or user-generated content, and this vital rebalancing of the media system will remain marginal. The answer for community media makers and users does not need to be an embrace of mainstream distribution channels or a compromise with the institutional structures of the third sector. The defining features of community media can remain intact, including dedication to communication rights and/or to small-scale organizations. Yet the question of visibility must be addressed; for making values and methods clear to the consuming/producing public will only become more important in the future. What we are seeing is the arrival of ethics in the realm of consumer products that is not led by the labor movement – producers, as the Marxists and critical theorists assumed – but is “fuelled in large part by moral and material revulsions generated by the affluent lifestyle itself” (Soper, 2008).

I have only touched upon the many issues involved in community media consumption here. The intention of this chapter, however, has been to re-examine debates on media production as a guiding framework for understanding community media and to raise some doubts as to their applicability in the new media environment. Critical media studies, including Raymond Williams's account of the means of communication as a means of production, retain valuable insights into what it means to include so-called “ordinary people” in the media production cycle. Community media have enabled participation and emulation and have brought amateur innovation into the media system. The rise of the Internet, which has been judged as “too nano” in the past (Downing, 2007, p. 3), has meant that such forms of production can no longer be ignored.

To truly take community media seriously, however, we need to ask difficult questions, to do with ethics and with how certain structures and even technologies (open source versus proprietary software, for example) shape the media environment. Although these issues are being addressed within the community media sphere, definitions based on production alone fail to take account of community media's role in maintaining communication rights.

NOTES

1 Specifically, the UNESCO debates on the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) centered on the free flow of information, particularly news values that reinforced the dominance of the global North and West, the impact of foreign ownership in poorer countries, and the difficulties of maintaining cultural integrity against the tide of international media, in other words “cultural imperialism” (see MacBride, 1980).

2 See Rennie (2011) for a full history of SYN.

3 John Downing (2001), for example, writes that using any binaries as starting points in distinguishing alternative and mainstream media would be ultimately false and unhelpful in reinforcing the marginality of alternative media.

4 Jean Burgess and Joshua Green (2008) use the example of the backlash toward Oprah Winfrey's YouTube channel by users who saw the site turning into a “one-way” channel for a big media company, which could edit front page-featured videos, thereby exploiting user-generated videos for its own interests.

5 By “postmodernity” I mean the state of living in a society where the defining principles of modernism – rationality, hierarchy, and the assumption of absolute knowledge – are no longer in place. In the works of Bauman (2001) and Littler (2009), consumption (rather than production) drives economic and cultural life, contributing to a moral complexity that is a distinctively postmodern phenomenon.

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FURTHER READING

Coyer, K. (2006). Community radio licensing and policy: An overview. Global Media and Communication, 2(1), 129–134.

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Streeter, T. (1986). Technocracy and television: Discourse, policy, politics and the making of cable television. Urbana–Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.