Media and Community Building
5/27/2001
Rationale
Communication, in all forms, is crucial to building and maintaining communities. From the beginning of recorded history, different forms of communication technologies have played important roles in uniting and empowering communities. One form is geographically based, including neighborhoods, city-states, nations, and empires. Another form is based on interest and/or class such as ethnic/cultural groups, gender, race, professional associations, labor unions, and political movements. In the current period, there is a growing movement of community and labor activists who seek to use media and communication technologies as tools for social goals.
People forming communities need to develop community-based infrastructures that will enable people to become not just educated consumers of existing media but skilled producers, equipped with the knowledge and skills to tell their own stories and mobilize their own constituencies, as well. There are now countless projects all over the country where such goals are being realized, especially as these technologies converge.
Students must demonstrate a clear understanding of the roles that traditional and more recently developed forms of media and communication technologies have played and can play in building and maintaining healthy communities. These media and communication technologies can be used in dialogue, outreach, education, organization and mobilization - crucial to fulfilling what the CPCS mission statement spells out as "foster[ing] the public good and aid[ing] the transformation to a more just society." The knowledge of different options offered in today's multimedia world, and the ability to determine which of these are most applicable to a given community building project are important tools that students can use in this regard.
Competency
Compare and contrast a range of existing models and best practices in the use of media and communication technologies as tools for community building, and discuss their application to community projects and/or organizations.
Criteria
- 1. Discuss the ways in which media and communication technologies have contributed to building healthy, dynamic communities.
- 2. Identify and describe a range of media and communication technologies that can be used in the service of community building.
- 3. Discuss the promise and challenges of the digital convergence of audio, video and computer-based technologies in relation to community-building efforts.
- 4. Discuss how media and communication technologies can be used by communities facing cultural exclusion, low-literacy, language barriers and/or disability.
- 5. Assess and critique examples of the use of media and technologies in community building efforts and describe the elements of "best practices" in these examples.
Standards
- For this criterion, the student should demonstrate a basic understanding of how media and communication technologies play a role in building and maintaining communities. The student should select two well-known issues or events – one historical and one contemporary – and discuss the role of at least two different media in facilitating or inhibiting communication and community building in each case. (For example, a discussion of the American Revolution might describe and discuss Tom Paine's Common Sense and also the role of the town crier.) The student should write a two-to-three page essay on this topic and/or make a brief oral presentation.
- The range of media and communication technologies should extend from simple newsletters and the use of local area networks to more large-scale efforts, utilizing community-based as well as commercial mainstream mass media. Working alone or as a group students should describe examples of three technologies such as Internet-mediated communications (e-mail, listserv, or website), direct mail, telephone solicitation, billboards, leaflets, printed bulletins or newspapers, radio, and/or television and prepare a 10- to 15-minute presentation, with examples, which would include:
- A brief description of the technologies - what they are, how long they have been in use, how costly they are (in terms of human labor, money, etc.) for a community-based organization to use them.
- Three examples of the technologies being used in the service of community building (a leaflet, an excerpt from a cable access program, a print out of a web page, etc.).
- At least one example of each of the technologies being used for commercial profit, and a comparison of the content of that example with the content of the three examples cited in part b.
- The student must describe issues faced by communities dealing with digital convergence such as over-crowded, strained infrastructures with more bandwidth-intensive media and the efforts made to improve the speed and volume of these networks such as wireless technology, DSL and cable modem. The student must research two issues– one obstacle and one success – and discuss the implications on community building that each presents. The student should write a two-to-three page essay on the topic.
- The student must identify and discuss two examples of community building efforts that have overcome cultural exclusion, low literacy, language barriers, and/or disability. The student should write a two-to-three tpage essay on this topic.
- The student must analyze and critique two case studies of "best practices" – one from a prepared source and one constructed by the student, based on a site visit, interviews, and observations. These case studies should be compared in a 5- to 7-page paper that covers the following items:
- The name, origin, and purpose of the community group or organization
- A history of its use of different media technologies, with descriptions of each one, and how the organization tackled each one, the costs to the organization of using that technology (in terms of time, labor, money)
- A discussion of which resulted in positive outcomes (in the eyes of the organization and/or of the student) and which resulted in negative outcomes
- Critical analysis from the student: What would you have done differently and what do you suggest the organization consider for the future?
Examples of Demonstration
- A student may take a course related to the social uses of media and technology (at CPCS or elsewhere) which contains units on the following topics:
- A consideration of the social uses of a range media and communication technologies, which explores historical and contemporary examples of such uses by non-profit organizations and/or communities in their work.
- An examination of technological methods and applications of media and communication technologies, ranging from the telegraph and printing press, through the Internet and wireless local area networks, with special attention paid to the technical aspects of "digital convergence" and its implications for underserved communities.
- An analysis of the media and technology tools used in creation, presentation, and dissemination, with an emphasis on cost-effectiveness in relation to non-profit organizations.
- An exploration the uses of media and communication technologies by populations in the US who are generally excluded from positive coverage in the mainstream commercial mass media. Such an exploration would consider "alternative" and "community" media by these groups, as well as novel utilizations of communication technologies by disabled, low-literacy adults, and people whose first language is not English.
- A student who wants to demonstrate this competency through independent study may proceed by reading an text on media and communications technologies, as well as a number of specific studies of the implications of media and communications technologies as they relate to community building. The texts should be approved by the evaluator. Then, working alone or in a group, a student may undertake an independent study project that wouldwould:
- Identify a community-building effort: such as a union trying to organize and also build up public support, or a neighborhood group trying to gain adherents and lobby public officials and the public in general, etc.
- Review how at least three similar efforts have used different media and communications technologies — both in the present day and in the past — and write up a three-to five-page summary of those efforts, making reference to the literature reviewed above.
- Establish an internship with the organization to monitor the implementation of their strategy, keeping a regular journal with at least eight one-page entries, to chronicle the successes, challenges, failures, etc.
- Write a final, three- to five-page paper analyzing every step in the process and concluding which aspects were the most successful, where unexpected outcomes emerged, and what might have been done differently.
- Demonstration of this competency through prior learning would entail documentation of work on a project similar to the one outlined above, such as participating in a media or outreach campaign, or an internal organizing or capacity-building effort. The campaign or effort should be one which took advantage of at least three clearly identifiable media or communication technologies and which addressed at least one of the frequently excluded populations identified in Criteria 4 of the competency. Documentation should be fairly extensive and should include examples of the implementation of the campaign or effort (i.e.: newsletters, mailings, web pages, radio PSAs, etc.) Where appropriate, the student may augment this documentation with a summary of the campaign or effort reflecting on its original objective(s), the strategy developed to address it/them, the media and communication technologies used, how one or more of the populations listed in Criteria 4 was included and/or addressed, and an assessment of the overall effort.
