Creating Technology for Social Change

Civic Media: Growing Awareness and Participation in an environment of Change

As part of his Intro to Civic Media course , Sasha has asked us to answer the question, “What is civic media?” The characteristics of this area are messy, changing, and incredibly important. Changes in media tech and business have put important issues at stake: our awareness and participation in society and the world.

As a new research assistant in the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media, I will be working to improve our understanding of civic media and to develop new technologies to make it possible. Up to now, my own interests have been more cosmopolitan, literary, and religious than civic. I came to MIT brimming with the enthusiasm of several years developing new tech startups and education initiatives. In this course, I hope to gain an informed perspective on the ideas and trends behind civic media. As an aware but uninvolved observer, I am eager to write about it for the first time.

Before the startups, I wrote about literature and politics. Our readings on civic media feel unfamiliar, carrying weights of responsibility and urgency which are foreign to my experience. In the 1984 Tanner Lecture, Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer explained that literary writers and artists often struggle to produce an individual creative achievement while also responding to the responsibilities of being within society. Civic media has no such struggle, no tension between artistic expression and the ethical demands of material realities. The writers in our bibliography see civic media as a utility rather than art — as necessary as water or electricity, a basic part of the society its proponents desire.

The Knight report on Informing Communities (2010) articulates the societal aspirations of civic media. Its writers aspire to a democracy in which people get to know their neighbours, coordinate effectively around shared activities, solve problems together, and keep their governments accountable. In contrast with this vision of happy, friendly, vigilant citizens, the Knight report also warns readers that corruption, isolation, and outright disaster could result from failing civic media. Residents might not know to flee a hurricane. Pollution might overtake the water supply. Alienated individuals might never be supported by their neighbours. Corrupt politicians could exploit the people without any reason to fear a dwindling percentage of voters.

As a special interest organisation, the Knight Foundation can be expected to frame civic media as a chance of utopia giving way to catastrophe. But it is not the only group with that viewpoint. The June 2011 FCC report on the Information Needs of Communities agrees:

we find ourselves in an unusual moment when ignoring the ailments of local media will mean that serious harm may be done to our communities—but paying attention to them will enable Americans to develop, literally, the best media system the nation has ever had (7).

Civic media, as seen by these players, is an important area of innovation which affects our awareness and participation in our societies and world. I also think discourse on civic media suffers from a strange double vision which involves discussing foreign countries differently from their own.

1. Change & Innovation
We are currently in a period of rapid change in the business models and technologies of information. The change is so fast that the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is unsure if government regulation can keep up (FCC 6). Technology innovation is participating in this change, yet it is important to recognise the driving role played by a changing business environment. These have affected the civic experience of ordinary people most clearly in their access to local information.

The Bay Citizen, a community news organisation in the San Francisco Bay area, is an example of a news organisation with an innovative business model. Unlike most newspapers, this nonprofit’s funding comes from grants, donations, membership, and corporate sponsorship as well as more typical funding channels such as advertising and syndication. Since its launch in May 2010, it has won many awards and is cited in The Economist report on the news industry as a primary example of innovation in the journalism business.

The Bay Citizen is a nonprofit response to a common experience throughout American communities: local news has declined in availability. The Economist argues that this decline has resulted from the lower value of advertising revenue online than on print. According to the FCC report however, the decline in local news began in the late 1980s. During the 80s and 90s, many local newspapers were sold to investors who maximised profits by cutting staff and reorganising the papers to a regional level (FCC 36). By the time news advertising revenue began its dramatic drop in the mid-2000s, leading to the closure of many regional papers, local news had already started to disappear. Since traditional news organisations appear unwilling to develop local news, innovative community-driven business models such as The Bay Citizen are trying to fill the commercial gap.

If changes in technology and business are the environment of civic media, then its two major themes are awareness and participation. Here are some examples:

2. Awareness
Global Voices is a group of editors and volunteers who translate news from around the world into English, and into their own languages. They are using the Internet to sample regional posts from bloggers and citizen journalists and make them available to the rest of the world in a timely fashion. Global Voices is coordinated by an international group which rarely meets, and yet it often provides the most timely news from regional voices in emerging situations like the Arab Spring or the recent Tsunami in Japan. By doing so, Global Voices aims to help improve reader awareness to include regional views worldwide.

Hypererlocal news services aim to improve awareness about local places as local news reporting dwindles. According to this 2007 report by Mark Glaser on PBS MediaShift, hyperlocal news services permit anyone to submit photos and stories, with limited oversight. They are cheap to establish, which makes them attractive to community organisations and the news business alike. Nevertheless, the primary challenges of a successful news project remain obtaining content and finding readers.

3. Participation
For the proponents of civic media, awareness of one’s own community and world is insufficient. They want us to become active in decision-making, to hold organisations accountable, and to work together to improve our communities. One example of this is the Safecast project, a response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Volunters associated with Safecast have developed an iPhone-based geiger counter; they are now mobilising people to drive throughout Japan to map out radiation levels. The project is informing the public about health risks as well as exposing the Japanese Government’s insufficient response. In this way, data collection is building a movement and developing the information which will be used to challenge the Japanese government to respond more adequately.

4. Us and Them
Our civic media readings are unsettling in the ways they draw boundaries and apply uneven standards to United States versus other groups.

Firstly, terms like “citizen journalist” feel worryingly exclusive. Although I was a guest in the UK for the past five years, I chose to be actively involved in community life and political discourse. I recognise that the language of citizenship evokes an idea of shared responsibility at the heart of civic media. However, I believe that good media includes voices of the underrepresented. I know Sasha shares these values.

Secondly, most of our readings appear to argue that the purpose of civic media in America is to make society stronger, while the purpose of civic media elsewhere is to support government opposition. Of our readings, only The Economist considered the media ecosystems of non-US countries on similar terms to the US and UK. Furthermore, many of these arguments are grounded in American historical mythology. I look forward to revisiting this question later in the course.