The Need for Community Media Centers

Community access means that citizens have the way in to creating and distributing content, meaning, to share with their close and local community.  But what of a world where all you need is a laptop and a youtube account?  Where is the local community located and who are your neighbors?  Community access organizations need to begin to rethink their position as mere pass throughs of content from the community to the TV.  Community access centers need to embrace, learn, use and teach new technology tools as part of the access they provide to their visitors, viewers and content creators.

Imagine the Burlington City Council in 1989.  They were called Aldermen and they were not sure it made sense to record their meetings on to tape.  These meetings were recorded and then the tapes were brought to a closet and played back on the air at odd unknown hours.  Maybe you watched as you skimmed by on your cable TV surfboard.  If you did tune in, you might not have known what they were discussing and certainly not any history of how they got there.  Click the remote, fast forward to today.  The Burlington City Council is aired Live on television.  It is subtitled so you know immediately what you are watching and often waht the agenda item is that they are discussing.  Got twitter?  You can follow councilors and reporters who are at the meeting and even ask them to clarify what they are discussing.  Need to speak up?  Leave the house and run on down, city hall is within biking or walking distance of most  Burlington residents, and add your comments to the public forum.   What if you could text in your comments to the city clerk?  Well you can email your councilor, and quote them word for word off the TV.  You can fact check their statements instantaneously and provide corrections.  "You say Peak oil isn't relevant to local politics, well why spend uptmillions on a new 6 lane highway to be developed for 2025 when...."  What if these corrections could be added in real time to the meeting, what if the nature of political representation and participation is changed fundamentally by the use of technology.  Remember the Alderman and their reluctance to let cameras in to the council chambers?  Rumor has it sometimes they would finish their meetings at the local bar.  Maybe this isn't true, but how do you think cameras might have changed that?

As we continue along in the world, participating in the process of reason and reflection,  as we are swept along by challenges and changes brought by technological inventions, we must keep our sites clear on the heart of what allows all of the changes, technology and reason to sound.  The people that make up our lives and the circles of communities made up by those people speaking, learning and creating the history are what we need to build our community access stations in to community media centers.