My final project took me in an interesting direction. I decided to look at Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) in the UK. I had no idea about the vast difference between their structures in the UK versus the US. When I think of the term public broadcasting, I immediately think of PBS. As important as PBS is to the fabric of American culture, PSB’s are far more important to the general public in Britain. I have attached my Powerpoint presentation on my in-depth look at the importance of PSB’s in the United Kingdom. Click below to download the presentation:

phillips_alternativemediaproject

There is a wonderful organization that helps build community through their efforts, called the Association for Enterprise Opportunity. They were recently highlighted as a resource on a recent episode of the Today Show. Click below to view the segment:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/25326829#25326829

They also recently published a document listing the top ten reasons why microenterprise matters more than ever to America. Click below to view the document:

Top 10 Reasons Microenterprise Matters

Their website is http://www.microenterpriseworks.org/. As an owner of a small business, I wish I had known about this organization sooner. This is certainly a viable way to help foster community from the ground up.

In my search through the Internet, I found a great book on community networks. It is dated (published in 1996), but it still applies to our discussion for this week. It’s definitely worth checking out and is now available online at http://www.scn.org/ncn/.

Dallas has a great community radio station, KNON 89.3 FM. This radio station has everything under the sun, from talk radio to jazz and reggae. It definitely has some of the most diverse programming in Texas! Here’s the link to their website:

http://knon.org

There is no doubt that cable access is under attack from both big business and government. I found a great web site, http://saveaccess.org, that documents the many instances where public access is being reduced or eliminated completely. I found many of the posts to be absolutely shocking. Shame on all of us if we let community media disappear!

How would someone define the word community?  A community could be almost anything; as there are many definitions and uses for the term. “The word community is derived from the Latin communitas (meaning the same), which is in turn derived from communis, which means common, public, shared by all or many. Communis comes from a combination of the Latin prefix com, which means together and the word munis, which has to do with performing services” (Wikipedia). Many common definitions define community as a society linked by common interests, however the word “community” has evolved to include individuals with shared characteristics without regard to their location or degree of interaction.

Community was first introduced to society by German Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies through the term Gemeinschaft (usually translated as community). Gemeinschaft is an association in which individuals are oriented to the large association as much if not more than to their own self interest. Furthermore, individuals in Gemeinschaft are regulated by common beliefs about the appropriate behavior and responsibility of members of the association, to each other and to the association at large; associations marked by “unity of will” (Tönnies, 22). Tönnies saw the family as the most perfect expression of Gemeinschaft; however, he expected that Gemeinschaft could be based on shared place and shared belief as well as kinship, and he included globally dispersed religious communities as possible examples of Gemeinschaft.

The Encyclopedia Americana defines an ideal community as one that:

Emerges as an intellectual concept when social change threatens to destroy a locality’s isolation, traditionalism, and solidarity…. [This] leads to a newer form — including occupational and professional groups, neighborhood groups, and ethnic and political groups — becomes the functional equivalents of the older, ecological, isolated community, and they make it possible for their members to avoid the problems of a multidimensional mass society. Their members can find a focus for their social relations, loyalties, and interests.

While Howard Rheingold focused on consumer communities in his book, The Virtual Community, he could be describing any community when he talks about the “social glue that binds the WELL into something resembling a community” as 1) social network capital, 2) knowledge capital, and 3) communion. Social network capital is knowing there is a network to support you. Knowledge capital is the “on-line brain trust representing a highly varied accumulation of expertise.” Communion is making connections with people you may not have known without the community.

Together, these provide what Marc Smith calls ‘collective goods.’ “Every cooperative group of people exists in the face of a competitive world because that group of people recognizes there is something valuable that they can gain only by banding together. Looking for a group’s collective goods is a way of looking for the elements that bind isolated individuals into a community.” In that respect, the collective good makes the community compelling.

There is no doubt that the word community has evolved in relation to how people interact today.  Like people though, times change and so do the ways we live and act towards one another. As long as people continue to change the way we live in our communities, the term “community” will also evolve.

Works Cited

“Community.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 09 June 2008. 05 June 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community>.

“Community.” The Encyclopedia Americana. 1998.

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community. 09 June 2008. <http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html>

Smith, Marc and Peter Kollock, Communities in Cyberspace. 1999. The University of California. 09 June 2008. <http://research.microsoft.com/~masmith/CinC_Introduction.htm>

Tönnies, Ferdinand (ed. Jose Harris). Community and Civil Society. London: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

I just wanted to place a link to Angela Siefer’s article, discussing the future of community media. She succinctly articulates the issues that community media folks are dealing with, along with a number of solutions for the future.

http://angelasiefer.com/communitymediatransition