Please visit the new home of Community Media in Transition. The RSS feed is still the same.

What started here as a blog to discuss technological developments and innovation in PEG Access TV is now transitioning towards my M.A. thesis project at Emerson College to further explore these and other issues. While the project is not set to “officially” begin until the Fall 2007, I’m working on a number of things in the meantime, including gathering relevant background information.

More importantly, I’ve gotten the thumbs up to make this thesis project as collaborative as possible = excellent. In other words: if you currently work or have worked at the intersection of PEG Access TV and new media technologies please consider participating in this collaborative research project.

Ways To Participate:

1. Wiki: The fine folks at Emerson’s Instructional Technology Group set me up with a wiki for my thesis. Please help build it!
2. Blog: This blog is soon moving to cmediachange.net, where I hope to blog more regularly beginning as soon as it’s up (hopefully later this week). If you are interested in blogging for the site, please email me @ colin_rhinesmith (AT) emerson (DOT) edu.
3. Del.icio.us: tag your bookmarks with cmediachange.
4. Flickr: tag your photos with cmediachange.
5. Propose your own ways to participate on the wiki or here on this blog.

(In related news) In early March, Felicia Sullivan (Organizers’ Collaborative) was kind enough to speak with me for a Community Media in Transition podcast. I haven’t had much time to work on the video, but I’m hoping to post the audio and video very soon (by tomorrow).

Lastly, I would like to thank everyone who has participated in this blog or who has linked here. Through this site, I have seen real enthusiasm and excitement around this topic. I hope this next phase will be another opportunity to contribute to the larger conversation about the unique and vital role of PEG access TV and the communities they serve.

This graphic (above) was created and shared by Jason Daniels during our discussion following a previous post. Jason wrote,

“i hope to be able to discuss a more complex and engaging image with you, but here is my start. http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=39603114&size=l“

In thinking about this image in the context of an “alternative networked public sphere”, it would be great to see another graphic showing how individuals and communities on the web are connecting to public access centers.

For example, how might individuals and groups using blogs, podcasts, video blogs, wikis, and other social networking tools – connected through a community communications center – be represented within this graphic? What could we learn from it? How could we use it “in thinking about how best to leverage these tools for community purposes” [1]?

Thanks to Jason for sharing this graphic and his experience/creativity in this area.

Ben Sheldon produced this short video (above) featuring interviews with attendees at the Alliance for Community Media NE region conference.

Click To Play

This video is a project for a graduate course I am taking at Emerson College this semester titled “Studies in Digital Media & Culture.” The assignment was to create a two-minute video based on the main concepts from our recent critical paper assignment. My paper, “PEG Access Internet as Alternative Networked Public Sphere”, attempts to build on concepts from Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Yochai Benkler and others, with the purpose of exploring the role of PEG Access TV in an networked society.

For my thesis, over the next year, I hope to argue that a PEG Access Internet model provides a unique portal (unlike other online spaces) that can provide access to public, educational, and government information about issues taking place in local communities.

I hope that this blog will provide an opportunity to further share and explore these issues. And I welcome comments from those of you who know much more than I do about what a PEG Access TV model might look like on the Internet of the future.

Click To Play Video

Ben Sheldon, CTC Vista Project/Digital Bicycle, talks about Mapping Access and the evolving community media landscape. From the website:

“MappingAccess.com is a tool for acknowledging the ubiquity of Access Television and providing a means for stations to better work together. Awareness of one another is the first step.

In order to provide such a powerful tool freely and accessibly, MappingAccess.com is designed to empower stations to submit and maintain information about themselves. By self-empowering the MappingAccess.com’s users, our developers can best develop and improve the tools themselves.”

Produced by Colin Rhinesmith.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by cmediachange with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

I sat down with Ben Sheldon today (pictured right – photo by Ben Sheldon) for the first Community Media in Transition conversation.

Ben is a CTC Vista Project Leader at UMass Boston and formerly of Lowell Telecommunications Corporation. You can listen to a radio interview from WUML in Lowell with him talking more about the CTC Vista Project.

Next week, I’ll be posting a short video with excerpts from our conversation. So please check back then.

In the meantime, here’s a peek into our conversation:

Ben is involved in a number of projects focused on moving Public Access Centers forward into a online participatory space in order to realize community media’s potential and possibility for distribution and collaboration.

I asked Ben to tell me what Mapping Access is and to explain his role in the project and its development. He talked about how Mapping Access, using Google mapping technology, has helped to create a better picture of the existing community media landscape. He also talked about how Mapping Access is connecting public access centers across the country by providing them with an online forum for communication and collaboration to benefit access centers and the communities they serve.

Ben also talked about how open source technologies like Drupal – the power behind Mapping Access’ Content Management System – provide unique benefits to community media projects like Mapping Access.

I look forward to sharing video from our conversation next week.

Stay tuned . . .

I wanted to post an update here, since my first post a few weeks ago. I hope that you’ll stay with us here at Community Media in Transition. This is an exciting project – one that I do not believe exists in quite the same way.

Let me explain:

The current plan for this project is to conduct interviews – I’d prefer to call them conversations – with a number of innovative public access producers and access workers who are using new media distribution and open source technologies (see more on the about page).

I am looking forward to speaking with a number of folks doing some exciting work in this space: including Jason Crow from CCTV, Media Policy Blog (and other projects), Ben Sheldon of Mapping Access, Producer’s Forum, and the CTC Vista Project, and Jason Daniels from LTC, Digital Bicycle, and the 100 Second Film Festival.

Mapping Access has quickly become a wonderful resource for this project. Through the site, I’ve been able to find a number of innovative access centers across the country using new media and open source technologies to engage their producers, members, and their communities.

On this blog you will find a number of my conversations, both audio and video podcasts, with these and other folks.  I hope you will join us to participate here in the discussion.

Welcome to Community Media in Transition. What’s this all about?

Television with Antenna” – public domain image (above) from Wikipedia