Citizen media - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The term citizen media refers to forms of content

Content (media and publishing)

In media production and publishing, content is information and experiences that may provide value for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. Content may be delivered via any medium such as the internet, television, and audio CDs, as well as live events such as conferences and stage performances...

produced by private citizens who are otherwise not professional journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

s. Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...

, participatory media

Participatory media

Participatory media include community media, blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, participatory video projects and videoblogs...

and democratic media

Democratic media

Democratic media is a form of media organization that strives to have the principles of democracy underlying not only the production of content, but also the organization of the entire project.- Definition of the term :...

are related principles.

Principles of citizen media

Citizen media is a term coined by Clemencia Rodriguez

Clemencia Rodriguez

Clemencia Rodriguez is a Colombian US-based media and communication scholar recognized for her role in establishing and promoting the field of alternative media studies in English language media studies, notably through her work on 'citizens' media,' a term she coined in her 2001 book Fissures in...

, who defined this concept as 'the transformative processes they bring about within participants and their communities.' Citizen media refers to the ways in which audiences can also become participants in the media using the different resources offered. In the modern age, new technologies have brought about different media technologies which became the ground for citizen participation.

There are many forms of citizen-produced media including blogs, vlogs, podcasts, digital storytelling

Digital storytelling

Digital storytelling refers to a short form of digital film-making that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story."Digital storytelling" is a relatively new term which describes the new practice of ordinary people who use digital tools to tell their 'story'...

, community radio

Community radio

Community radio is a type of radio service, that offers a third model of radio broadcasting beyond commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting. Community stations can serve geographic communities and communities of interest...

, participatory video

Participatory video

Participatory video is a form of participatory media in which a group or community creates their own film. The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories...

and more, and may be distributed via television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

, radio

Radio

Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

, internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

, email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

, movie theatre, DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

and many other forms. Many organizations and institutions exist to facilitate the production of media by private citizens including, but not limited to, Public, educational, and government access

Public, educational, and government access

Public, educational, and government access television, refers to three different cable television specialty channels...

(PEG) cable tv channels, Independent Media Center

Independent Media Center

The Independent Media Center is a global participatory network of journalists that report on political and social issues. It originated during the Seattle anti-WTO protests worldwide in 1999 and remains closely associated with the global justice movement, which criticizes neo-liberalism and its...

s and community technology center

Community technology center

A community technology center or CTC offers resources to help bridge the digital divide, primarily through the public accessing computers and the internet. These centers are a key part of what is now being referred to as digital inclusion programs. Many centers provide training that ranges from...

s.

Citizen media has bloomed with the advent of technological tools and systems that facilitate production and distribution of media. Of these technologies, none has advanced citizen media more than the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

. With the birth of the Internet and into the 1990s, citizen media has responded to traditional mass media

Mass media

Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...

's neglect of public interest

Public interest

The public interest refers to the "common well-being" or "general welfare." The public interest is central to policy debates, politics, democracy and the nature of government itself...

and partisan

Partisan (political)

In politics, a partisan is a committed member of a political party. In multi-party systems, the term is widely understood to carry a negative connotation - referring to those who wholly support their party's policies and are perhaps even reluctant to acknowledge correctness on the part of their...

portrayal of news and world events. Media produced by private citizens may be as factual, satirical, neutral or biased as any other form of media but has no political, social or corporate affiliation.

By 2007, the success of small, independent, private journalists began to rival corporate mass media in terms of audience and distribution. Citizen produced media has earned higher status and public credibility since the 2004 US Presidential elections and has since been widely replicated by corporate marketing and political campaigning. Traditional news outlets and commercial media giants have experienced declines in profit and revenue which can be directly attributed to the wider acceptance of citizen produced media as an official source of information.

Many people prefer the term 'participatory media' to 'citizen media' as citizen has a necessary relation to a concept of the nation-state. The fact that many millions of people are considered stateless and often without citizenship limits the concept to those recognised only by governments. Additionally the very global nature of many participatory media initiatives, such as the Independent Media Center

Independent Media Center

, makes talking of journalism in relation to a particular nation-state largely redundant as its production and dissemination do not recognise national boundaries.

A different way of understanding Citizen Media emerged from cultural studies and the observations made from within this theoretical frame work about how the circuit of mass communication was never complete and always contested, since the personal, political, and emotional meanings and investments that the audience made in the mass-distributed products of popular culture were frequently at odds with the intended meanings of their producers.

Radio

World Wide Community Radio

Community radio

has been driven by participatory methodologies with rich examples of community radio

Community radio

providing a non-profit community owned, operated and driven model of media.

The Public Broadcasting Service

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

(PBS) in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

initiated by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967

Public Broadcasting Act of 1967

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 set up public broadcasting in the United States, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and eventually the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio .When Lyndon B...

sets aside some public broadcasting

Public broadcasting

Public broadcasting includes radio, television and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. Public broadcasters receive funding from diverse sources including license fees, individual contributions, public financing and commercial financing.Public broadcasting may be...

funding for producing electronic television program

Television program

A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...

ming. Traditionally, PBS radio affiliate

Affiliate

An affiliate is a commercial entity with a relationship with a peer or a larger entity.- Corporate structure :A corporation may be referred to as an affiliate of another when it is related to it but not strictly controlled by it, as with a subsidiary relationship, or when it is desired to avoid...

s have not made concessions for private citizen programming or production.

Stations like WBAI
WBAI
WBAI, a part of the Pacifica Radio Network, is a non-commercial, listener-supported radio station, broadcasting at 99.5 FM in New York City.Its programming is leftist/progressive, and a mixture of political news and opinion from a leftist perspective, tinged with aspects of its complex and varied...

, KPFK
KPFK
KPFK is a listener-sponsored radio station based in North Hollywood, California, United States, which serves the Greater Los Angeles Area, and also streams 24 hours a day via the Internet...

, KPFK
KPFK
KPFK is a listener-sponsored radio station based in North Hollywood, California, United States, which serves the Greater Los Angeles Area, and also streams 24 hours a day via the Internet...

, and Pacifica Radio Network have program models which allow citizen participation in aspects of the station, including production.

Many low power Federal Communications Commission
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...

(FCC) non-commercial educational
Non-commercial educational
The term non-commercial educational applies to a radio station or TV station that does not accept on air advertisements , as defined in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission . NCE stations do not pay broadcast license fees for their non-profit uses of the radio spectrum...

(NCE) license holders are considered community radio
Community radio
Community radio is a type of radio service, that offers a third model of radio broadcasting beyond commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting. Community stations can serve geographic communities and communities of interest...

stations (including high school radio
High school radio
High school radio within the United States is almost as old as radio broadcasting itself. Simply defined as a radio station, with its studios located at a high school and usually operated by its students with faculty supervision, stations fitting this description existed in the mid-1920s...

and college radio), with various levels of participation by the public.

Television

With the birth of cable television

Cable television

Cable television is a system of providing television programs to consumers via radio frequency signals transmitted to televisions through coaxial cables or digital light pulses through fixed optical fibers located on the subscriber's property, much like the over-the-air method used in traditional...

in the 1950s came public interest movements to democratize this new booming industry. Many countries around the world developed legislated means for private citizens to access and use the local cable systems for their own community-initiated purposes.

Public Access Television (PEG) in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

is a government mandated model that provides citizens within a cable franchised municipality to get access to the local Public-access television channels to produce and distribute their own programming. Public-access television programming is community initiated and serves as a platform to meet local needs.

Community channels in Canada also provides access for citizens to distribute their own programming content, as well as community television in Australia.

Community technology center
Community technology center
A community technology center or CTC offers resources to help bridge the digital divide, primarily through the public accessing computers and the internet. These centers are a key part of what is now being referred to as digital inclusion programs. Many centers provide training that ranges from...

s are private non-profit organizations found in the US that serve to increase access and training in technology for social applications.

Internet

Affordable consumer technology and broader access to the internet has created new electronic distribution methods. While the corporate media market enjoyed a long period of monopoly on media distribution, the internet gave birth to countless independent media producers and new avenues for delivering content to viewers.

The technological development of Content Management System
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

s (CMS) in the late 1990s, which allowed non-technical people to author and publish articles to the internet, spawned the birth of weblogs or blogs, Podcasting
Podcasting
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...

(audio blogs), Vlogs (video blogs), collaborative wikis, and web-based bulletin boards and "forums".

Citizen Journalism
Citizen journalism
Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...

websites which encourage members of the public to publish news that is relevant to them.

The social development of Independent Media Center
Independent Media Center
The Independent Media Center is a global participatory network of journalists that report on political and social issues. It originated during the Seattle anti-WTO protests worldwide in 1999 and remains closely associated with the global justice movement, which criticizes neo-liberalism and its...

s (IMCs) introduced collaborative Citizen media with concepts of consensus decision making, mandatory inclusion of women and minorities, non-corporate control, the anonymous accreditation. IMCs have been founded in over 200 cities all over the world.

Commercial models that use these new methods are being born and acquired by media corporations on a daily basis.

Video

Participatory video

is an approach to and medium of participatory or citizen media that has become increasingly popular with the falling cost of film/video production, availability of simple consumer video cameras and other equipment, and ease of distribution via the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

.

Although videos/films can be produced by a single individual, production often requires a group of participants. And, so participatory filmmaking includes a set of techniques to involve communities/groups in conceptualizing and producing their own films. Chris Lunch, a preeminent contemporary author on participatory video and executive director of Insight, explains that “The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns, or simply to be creative and tell stories.”

Participatory video was developed in opposition to more traditional documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

approaches, in which indigenous knowledge and local initiatives are filmed and disseminated by outside professional filmmakers. These professionals, who are often from relatively privileged backgrounds use their artistic license to design narrative stories and interpret the meaning of the images/actions that they film. As such, the film is often created for the benefit of outsiders and those that are filmed rarely benefit from their participation. The objectives of participatory video are to facilitate empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social, racial, educational, gender or economic strength of individuals and communities...

, community self-sufficiency

Self-sufficiency

Self-sufficiency refers to the state of not requiring any outside aid, support, or interaction, for survival; it is therefore a type of personal or collective autonomy...

, and communication.

The first experiments in PV were the work of Don Snowden, a Canadian who pioneered the idea of using media to enable a people-centered community development approach. Then Director of the Extension Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Memorial University of Newfoundland, is a comprehensive university located primarily in St...

, Snowden worked with filmmaker Colin Low

Colin Low (filmmaker)

Colin Archibald Low, CM, RCA is a Canadian animation and documentary filmmaker.Born in Cardston, Alberta, Low attended the Banff School of Fine Arts and the Calgary Institute of Technology, now known as the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology...

and the National Film Board of Canada

National Film Board of Canada

The National Film Board of Canada is Canada's twelve-time Academy Award-winning public film producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary, animation, alternative drama and digital media productions...

's Challenge for Change

Challenge for Change

Challenge for Change was a participatory film and video project created by the National Film Board of Canada in 1967, the Canadian Centennial...

program to apply his ideas in Fogo Island, Newfoundland, a small fishing community.

By watching each other’s films, the villagers realized that they shared many of the same concerns and they joined together to create solutions. The villager’s films were shared with policy-makers, many of whom had no real conception of the conditions in which Fogo Islanders lived. As a result of this dialogue, policy-makers introduced regulation changes. Snowden went on to apply the Fogo process all over the world until his death in India in 1984. Since then, most of the development of the participatory video technique has been led by non-academic practitioners in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and Canada.

Participatory videos are distributed online and offline. Online, they are uploaded and shared through vlogs, social software

Social software

Social software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a...

, and video publishing sites.

Participatory video can be particularly effective when utilized in addressing community health concerns.

External links

The VideoVoice Collective does research and evaluation on participatory video.
Center for Citizen Media
Media Democracy Day
Media Democracy Project
Center for Media and Democracy
Demosphere Project — The wiki & global project to develop a community based media framework using open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

and interactive software. (Wikinews article)
McChesney, Robert
Robert W. McChesney
Robert Waterman McChesney is an American professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication. His work concentrates on the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media play in democratic...

, Making Media Democratic, Boston Review, Summer 1998
Inclusion Through Media: First hand accounts and critical analysis of work across the Inclusion Through Media prgramme edited by Tony Dowmunt, Mark Dunford and Nicole van Hemert.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Principles of citizen media

Radio

Television

Internet

Video

See also

External links