At a meeting tomorrow, I’m supposed to reflect briefly on this question:

Citizen Media: Enthusiasts claim that new media, with their anti-top-down structure, tend to more democratic. Critics claim that they just make for finer niches of communication and more opportunities for marketing and consumerism. Not enough attention has been paid to how these new ventures can create more public space and invigorate public media. In what ways can these media be used to create a more robust public?

Since four others are also slated to speak and will probably cover the main points, I think I will focus on kids. I’ll say:

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Eleven of my undergaduate students, all from a program called Leaders for Tomorrow, are in residence on campus as of today. They are being paid, and in return they owe 180 hours of community research over the next six weeks. Each student will complete a project of his or her own–but all their work will generate products (articles, maps, video documentaries, etc.) for the Prince George’s Information Commons website. The goal is to make that site into a serious venue for information and discussion for a community (pop. 850,000) that has no independent and comprehensive news sources of its own. Once we have enough high-quality material on the site, I’m hoping that it will gain critical mass; other community groups will want to participate as well. Of course, I won’t just wait for that to happen. I will actively promote the site as a place for groups to put their work.

My students are still choosing and planning their projects, but they are likely to interview citizens about their recollections of local history; create maps with health data; develop interactive software for the site that will be open-source and available for others to use in their communities; locate all the music venues in the County and sample snatches of music to create an audio map of the musical life of the community; conduct a content-analysis of the Washington Post‘s coverage of the County over time; study the potential for free wireless Internet access; and chart changes in particularly interesting places (among other projects).

I’m at the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, where many people believe in the importance of “place.” That means (I think) that they value geographical communities that are distinctive, rather than anonymous and standardized. They believe that citizens ought to devote attention and passion to participating in the governance of such places. In The Public and its Problems (1927), John Dewey wrote that the home of democracy is “the neighborly community. … We lie, Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.”

I had been thinking about “place” in a slightly different way since last Sunday, when I watched an excellent anti-violence hip-hop video produced by Bomani Darel Armah and some youth at Martha’s Table in Washington. Watching it, I thought: This is very cool. It may not have quite the slick production values of an MTV video, but it’s close enough that it could compete for the same audience. There are barriers to distributing it widely–namely, the big media companies that prefer to sell violent and prurient images of young Black people–but even a kid who was pessimistic about reaching a mass audience would enjoy making this video, because it’s so good.

So hats off to Bomani and his talented students–but what about the rest of us: teachers and students who are unlikely to produce something so cool? We can’t motivate ourselves (let alone groups of students) by promising to produce excellent hip-hop videos. Yet we need audiences for our students’ work, peers who will respect and admire what they’ve made, even if it doesn’t look or sound professional. (See my students’ work, for example.)

The solution is to create videos, news articles, artworks, and other products for communities: for groups of people who know one another and have common experiences and concerns. If a cultural artifact is addressed to a community, then it needn’t be excellent to be valuable and valued.

Affinity groups that are distributed across the country or the globe can function as communities, but only if they are small. If you’re a socialist model-train enthusiast or a gay Esperanto-speaker, you may be able to create cultural products for people who know one another even if they don’t live nearby. However, society is not sufficiently segmented to allow most of us to join such small affinity groups.

Places work better. Everyone in a geographical community can have shared experiences and overlapping social networks, simply by virtue of living or working together.

Unfortunately, many locations aren’t “places,” in this sense. We should transform large, anonymous buildings, such as standard high schools and shopping malls, into more distinctive and human-scaled institutions. There is real momentum in the movement to make high schools smaller and more communitarian.

I believe all of the above, yet I’m worried about relying too heavily on very local places as the venues of democracy. Like it or not, the scale of life has grown. Markets, governments, and institutions are big. We can’t return to a past of stable urban neighborhoods and small towns, where everyone knows your name. Although high schools should be turned into communities, students will eventually have to take their democratic skills and attitudes into the broader world, where professional expertise, slickness, capital investment, and economies of scale usually triumph. It seems to me that democratic participation at a large scale creates dilemmas that we have not begun to address.

These are notes I took during the Free Culture conference last weekend. … Most participants were relatively young adults who create ?alternative? news and culture. They are also concerned about the legal and economic aspects of mass communications. Most start with some anger against what they perceive as a unified system composed of big media companies and the policies of the US government and international bodies (e.g., media licensing systems, copyright laws) that together sustain social injustice?poverty, racism, patriarchy, and so on. Using music, poetry, and images, they speak an eloquent and fairly sophisticated New Left language of resistance, subversion, an opposition. A repeated visual motif in their presentations is a woman of color with a raised fist. See for example Third World Majority?s website, with its compelling video clips.

However, several participants believe that a message of opposition and resistance has a limited appeal. Relatively few Americans see themselves as oppressed; and if an organizer makes them angry with eloquent, angry rhetoric, the feeling soon fades. A better way to broaden and sustain motivation is by giving people a positive vision of alternative media that they can themselves participate in creating. In other words, making ?content? is the best route to political mobilization.

Using available technology, people can create powerful, compelling material. For instance, Downhill Battle is trying to build software that allows anyone to produce and view video programming at virtually no cost. The idea is to enable millions of young people to view ?TV? that they have made for one another, instead of programs created by highly paid professionals at big companies. As one person from Guerilla News Network says, ?Let?s just build ourselves. Let?s not wait for public television to come back. Let?s not wait for a grant.?

Looking forward, new technology could make young people and other excluded Americans more sophisticated about policy. If the law forbids or frustrates their desire to make and share free content, then they will not have to be mobilized to fight back; they will mobilize themselves–and in a spirit of confidence rather than resentment. Alternatively, the creation of new media technology could actually make policy irrelevant. The law might not be able to block people from creating their own media.

Questions raised during the conversation:

1) Will people really prefer ?alternative? media if they have a choice, say, between amateur video clips and MTV? One answer is that they will prefer the alternative stuff, because it?s better. The most popular blogs, for example, are independently produced; corporate blogs are relatively unappealing. Another answer is that most people will prefer MTV, but it?s still important to support a minority voice.

2) Where can funding come from? There?s a lot of dissatisfaction with foundations as the source, because then everyone is on ?an allowance? from powerful organizations. (Plus, foundation funds are pretty limited.) Although most people at the conference are strongly anti-corporate, they are interested in sustainable, independent business models.

3) Why are the most popular blogs still produced by highly educated white males? The technology is cheap and open?not perfectly so, but as close to perfect as we are likely to see. Neither policy nor technology stands in the way of equality in the blogosphere. Nevertheless, a privileged group tends to dominate. Maybe the demographics will change over time. Or maybe media technology and policy are not the only important reasons for inequality.

4) Is it most helpful to frame the struggle for ?free? or ?independent? or ?alternative? media in radical leftist terms? I am not hostile to a leftist political conversation in which people consider new media forms as tools to get the social and political outcomes they want. It is also true, however, that many people on the center and the right (including the radical right) do not like the mainstream mass media and would support ?alternatives.? So if the goal is really an open, non-corporate media system, it might make more sense to build a left-right coalition.