We Have Seen the Audience, and it is Us: Moving from Community Media to Public Media 2.0

When conference organizer Yolanda Hippesteele asked me to moderate a panel at the NAMAC conference, she suggested that I play upon a phrase that we used in a recent Center for Social Media white paper: "The people formerly known as the audience."

This phrase, coined by New York University media scholar Jay Rosen to describe the shift that journalists were experiencing in the Web 2.0 era, first surfaced in an imaginary manifesto authored by the newly empowered users. "The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable," it reads in part. "You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here."

This power shift has only intensified since Rosen’s 2006 post. Distinctions between media users and makers have blurred, as have distinctions between individuals and outlets. Large swaths of the population use social media platforms to relate their daily activities, to communicate with friends and allies far and near, to express, amuse, position and assert themselves. Online, the dynamics of community formation are now more mediated, more visible, and more actionable than ever before. To demonstrate the complexity of such connections, I brought to my panel a printout of a graphic by designer Marian Bantjes. Titled "Us Vs. Them," the image explores a wide range of affiliations around which communities form, and the ever-looming possibility of their decay:



But these technoutopians often leave a crucial question unanswered: tools for what, to build what up or tear what down? In other words, if media consumers are no longer merely "the audience," what roles are these densely connected "formerly-known-as" users now playing?

At the Center for Social Media, we have been examining one particular role: that of inhabiting a "public." Not just a set of eyeballs, a network, or a community, a public is a group of people who are connected by their stake in a shared issue. In strong democracies, publics routinely use media platforms to learn about, debate, and act upon those issues. Publics, we argue, are the raison d’être for "public media"—previously associated strongly with broadcast outlets, but increasingly shifting to participatory platforms. Community outlets such as media arts centers and cable access stations can serve as facilitators and distributors of such public media, although not all of their productions fit the bill.

My fellow NAMAC panelists also share an interest in participatory media practices, and described a set of complementary roles for users. For example, Thomas Allen Harris framed audiences as archivists and historians through his participatory photography project, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photography and the Emergence of a People. Adrienne Russell described audiences as producers and curators of community media via her involvement in Deproduction’s open source cable access project, Denver Open Media project. Both Brian Reich and Lina Srivastava spoke from their experiences of catalyzing audiences into political action.

In true participatory fashion, the panel then drew audience members into the discussion. Here are some of the other new audience roles that we identified together.

To keep pace with these changes, community media and arts centers must also adopt and adapt to new roles: as trainers not just in the technical aspects of production, but in storytelling, aesthetics, and effective online communication; as hubs for partnerships with other local nonprofit and media organizations; as conveners of both publics and networks. They can also serve as lobbyists, as keynote speaker Craig Aaron persuasively argued, crafting both arguments and productions that show why community arts and media continue to serve vital civic functions, and that access to high speed broadband is now as crucial as access to the airwaves has been over the last several decades.

Numerous inspiring examples of such evolving roles were on display in the panels and discussions at this year’s NAMAC conference. Take one: Appalshop’s Thousand Kites project, a "community-based performance, web, video and radio project centered on the United States prison system." (In prison slang, a "kite" is a letter.) What began a decade ago as a call-in radio program that allowed families and friends to convey messages to prisoners has now become a national, multiplatform hub for criminal justice organizing. It was the prisoners’ families who began using the show to connect with one another around shared issues—Appalshop provided the context and the platform. A related documentary, Up the Ridge, explores human rights violations in Appalachia’s Wallens Ridge State Prison. The film has become a tool for screening discussions and actions about the relocation of prisoners to places far from their families. An associated theatre project weaves stories by local prisoners, family members and correctional officers into an ever-evolving performance tailored to individual communities.

Thousand Kites represents what we might call "the-projects-previously-known-as-community media." It takes the local and demonstrates national and even global implications, making connections between the treatment of these prisoners and those incarcerated by the U.S. in Guantanamo.

Deproduction’s Executive Director Tony Shawcross has even bigger ambitions. In a recent post titled "Community Media's Path Out of Obscurity" on the MediaShift IdeaLab, he writes:

There is an opportunity for PBS stations, public access stations, and other non-commercial media to behave as a unified network, distinct from the commercial networks in our commitment to our local communities. Imagine each local PBS or public access station serving as a conduit to accessing the very best in user-generated or pro/am content nationwide. We can go beyond sharing content, and share open-source software designed to put our communities in charge. Alone, even the largest community media organization lacks the budget to provide online services and features that rival most corporate media institutions. However, by cooperating in the development of open source tools like the Open Media Project, we collectively have the resources to surpass the online experience of any commercial media institution.

Such aspirations marry the new practices that Rosen was celebrating to a civic purpose—creating the conditions for what we at the Center for Social Media term “public media 2.0,” and what media reform group the Free Press is calling “new public media” in a recently launched campaign. Visit Newpublicmedia.org to find out how the people formerly known as the audience—that is, all of us—can fight for the media that we need and deserve.

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