Keeping the ethos of community media relevant in a changing world was at the heart of the discussion that took place during the Mapping Community Media workshop on Saturday 24th November. Dr Katie Moylan and I wanted to get a group of community media practitioners and academics together who are interested in the social role of community media.
The idea was to spend some time informally mapping-out ideas about how community media in the UK might be better supported as a recognised and valued social-engagement practice?
The challenge was to speed-through some exercises that might help to frame the wider discussion about the ethos of community media, and to think about the many different ways that community media works, and how community media is understood as a set of participatory-focussed practices.
About forty people came to the University of Leicester, on what was a dull November morning. Many had travelled some distance, coming from Bristol, Portsmouth, North Wales, Sheffield, Sunderland and London.
The underlying proposition for the workshop was that the community media movement needs to widen its research remit so that it can better support community media practitioners with evidence that can be used to assess the social impact of community media practices.
With my work supporting the Community Media Association, I’ve recognised that community media activists and practitioners in the U.K. need an independent and validated evidence base when talking with UK government, regulators, local government, NGOs, funding bodies, civic development groups, and so on.
So the purpose of this workshop was to start a discussion that kick-started a conversation in which we could think about how, as researchers and practitioners, we can identify:
- What the social impact of community media is?
- What the role is that community media plays in social integration, diversity, access to information & representation?
- What the role is that community media plays in sustainable development?
- How community media imaginatively, creatively and inclusively respond to social change?
- How technology is changing and how we can think about media participation in relation to these changes?
- What the future business models might look like?
- What the concerns might be of future generation of community media practitioners and advocates?
Lightning Presentations
We started the session with quick-fire Lightning presentations. Juan Padro of Leicestershire County Council shared his insight into the needs of local authorities, and the new ways that they are thinking about asset-based approaches to engagement (ABCD), and thereby changing their approaches for working with different communities at a grassroots level, which is different from the traditional top-down approaches that have dominated public services in the past. As councils have their block-grant funding removed, they are having to think of new ways to support public services, and work with different groups who might deliver them in different ways.
We were also lucky to have Tom Greenwood with us. Tom gave a presentation about the Participation Action Research model (PAR) that was used by the researchers involved with the Civil Futures report that had been published earlier in the week. Tom explained how participation-focussed research can help to get a better understanding of the needs and the capabilities of communities, as it allows people to express and discuss their concerns directly, with a minimum amount of filtering from the researchers themselves.
John Coster is a community media practitioner who promotes documentary media as a way of engaging people based on the topics that they are concerned about. John shared his model of open access learning, and the roles of the open educators, issue experts, engaged members of the public and open students. John shared his insight into using documentary media as a tool for changing the perceptions of different groups of people, so that they are more able to openly discuss, through collaboration and mutual engagement, the shift from being a receiver of messages, to be an active co-producer of media stories and discussions.
Russell Todd wasn’t able to make it over from Wales, but he sent an audio file that described how community development is a relevant process that community media is in many ways aligned with. The adage that community media is ten percent media, and ninety-percent community rings true, and Russell’s experience as a community development advocate related to many of the experiences of the practitioners in the room who face similar challenges: such as volunteer management, engaging with government agencies and authorities, and planning for social change and social gain.
Dr Katie Moylan, our host for the day, shared her insight into the cultural work of community radio programmes, and the way that the diversity of content that comes through from many community radio programmes enables forms of self-representation that are outside of the mainstream view of how media works. Community media, as Katie explained, enables voiced-based identity, the sharing of experiences and has the scope to enable a strong sense of identification amidst the increasing levels of transcultural exchange.
Finally, I gave a short overview of my thinking about community media, and that the starting point for our work to understand the process of socially engaged communication has to come from understanding people as social creatures who want to make a meaningful engagement, despite the potential for chaos and disorder. The challenge I wanted to address was how might we strike the right balance between building walls that are strong, fixed and permanent, and allowing space for creativity and change to happen?
Loneliness and Community Media
The first of the workshop exercises focussed on the government’s loneliness strategy, and what role community media could play in alleviating the wider social problem of isolation and social anxiety? We wanted to identify what loneliness is, and what the key drivers are that have fuelled the increased sense of loneliness across all levels of society.
The challenge for social policy makers is to drive a meaningful change in the functioning of our social lives so that people report that they feel less isolated and insecure. This seemingly simple concept, however, has massive implications for the way that the UK economy is run, the way that our public services are delivered, and the policy-making processes that is used to come up with ideas that will tackle these problems.
The question I wanted to ask, subsequently, is what role does community media play in framing the issues and problems associated with loneliness, and what potential insight do community media advocates and practitioners have to offer that can support potential solutions that will alleviate these problems?
In my mind, the first stage of thinking about this problem would be to understand the ethos of community media itself, and the way that community media can be demonstrated as contributing to social change?
The initial discussion task that was set for each of the workshop groups was to think about how community media can contribute to both our understanding of loneliness, and the alleviation of the sense of loneliness that many people feel?
We wanted to draw from the government’s strategy document, what the assumptions are about community engagement and social communication? This is important because the model of civic communication that is founded in the governments strategy also frames the potential solutions that are developed, along with the support and resource implications that follow from this.
Social Gain and Community Media?
It’s always worth reviewing our baseline assumptions. Does community media have a role in tackling these kind of social problems? If we believe this is the case, then why is it that community media is not more directly mentioned or discussed in the context of the civic engagement strategies that are being developed at a local and a national level? The next workshop exercise carried forward these questions, and sub-divided them into five strategic areas:
Media Production and Organisation Practice
- What sort of media production practices and forms of media engagement practices do community media groups, advocates and practitioners employ to undertake work in this area?
- How can these practices and forms of engagement best be identified, evaluated and understood?
- What would an accessible and purposeful evaluation and reporting process look like?
- How might the outcomes of these forms of evaluation be deployed?
Community Development Practice
- What sort of community development practices and forms of community engagement practices do community media groups, advocates and practitioners employ to undertake work in this area?
- How can these practices and forms of engagement best be identified, evaluated and understood?
- What would an accessible and purposeful evaluation and reporting process look like?
- How might the outcomes of these forms of evaluation be deployed?
Social Policy & Planning Practice
- What sort of social policy practices and forms of civic engagement practices do community media groups, advocates and practitioners employ to undertake work in this area?
- How can these practices and forms of engagement best be identified, evaluated and understood?
- What would an accessible and purposeful evaluation and reporting process look like?
- How might the outcomes of these forms of evaluation be deployed?
Ceativity and Innovation Practices
- What sort of creative problem-solving and innovation practices and forms of creative engagement practices do community media groups, advocates and practitioners employ to undertake work in this area?
- How can these practices and forms of engagement best be identified, evaluated and understood?
- What would an accessible and purposeful evaluation and reporting process look like?
- How might the outcomes of these forms of evaluation be deployed?
Access and Digital Inclusion Practice
- What sort of digital access and inclusion practices and forms of civic engagement practices do community media groups, advocates and practitioners employ to undertake work in this area?
- How can these practices and forms of engagement best be identified, evaluated and understood?
- What would an accessible and purposeful evaluation and reporting process look like?
- How might the outcomes of these forms of evaluation be deployed?
Discussion Frameworks
Obviously, it’s not possible to answer all of these questions in detail at one workshop event, but they helped to provide a framework for our discussions. The depth of thinking and conversations that took place in the groups was really good to see and hear. The next step is for Katie and me to summarise the notes that were made and look for themes that we can group together to make this process more manageable.
I feel more confident as a result of this process, because the responses to the questions during the workshop means that we can state with some certainty that the community media ethos directly focuses on the idea that access to media is a significant route to social and personal empowerment, and that if we want better social outcomes then we need to support different types of media services and projects that supports, represents and reflects our communities’ identities and capabilities.
To do this, however, people must be able to make better media for themselves and have to be meaningfully and deeply involved not only in the content production process, but in the decision-making process for running our own media organisations within our communities.
Follow-On Questions
One of the follow-on questions for me, moreover, is how can these guiding principles be noted, understood and evaluated in order to inform progressive or inclusive policy objectives?
- What are the key terms and areas of interest that have been identified?
- How do these issues coalesce or diverge?
- Who is doing what in which places, and from what perspective?
- What is the community media specific thread that runs through this?
Decentered Media Podcast Recording
After the formal sessions I’d organised an informal discussion as a Decentered Media podcast recording. I’d booked a table at Six Degrees Coffee Shop on London Road, which is a community project that focusses on providing a good quality space for relaxed social interactions. In the podcast we talked about how we can develop support for community media practices, and what we need to do to inform different communities about the work of community media.
There are practical implications for the research communities, for the practitioner communities, and for the policy and government communities that include:
- How do we go about reinforcing the network of community media practitioners, community development advocates, teachers and researchers that are include in the Community Media Association’s work?
- How do we encourage stronger and more meaningful ways to working in partnership with existing research-focussed groups to identify resources to support mapping and evaluation?
- How do we more effectively organise and communicate the value of community media so that we can inform other research and social policy development priorities?
- What’s the next stage for turning this into a more detailed mapping exercise of existing research and policy development work?
Overall Takeaways
If there are four specific points that I remember from the day is would be:
- Focus on the policy development process. If we understand how policy development works, then we have an increased chance of influencing and shaping it.
- Focus on celebration of the work of community media in all its forms. If we create a climate of openness and free expression, then we will find strong and deeper examples of social engagement more easily.
- Use the critical-mass of the community media movement to bring about change. No one group will achieve this, but if we play our role as an alliance of social groups with the same intent, then we can achieve more together than we might achieve as our individual parts.
- Finally, focus on meaningful content. Everything we do is made meaningful because it matters, and it matters because it is meaningful.
In a word in which cynicism and magical thinking too often dominate for our expectations, and embedded feelings of entitlement mean that we feel increasingly trapped behind ever higher and deeper walls of conformity, then finding ways to extend and explore what is creatively meaningful deserves more of our attention, whatever form this comes in.
