October just started, and it is that time of the semester when final project proposals are due. This is the case for my Introduction to Civic Media course, taught by CMS professor Sasha Costanza-Chock, where I am interested in understanding the daily media practice of immigrant communities in Boston.
For the past few years, my research has focused on media use among immigrant communities in the United States. Specifically, I have been looking at media activism and media practice in social movements for immigrants’ rights. Inspired by one of the earliest exercises in our Intro to Civic Media course about creating a model of digital inclusion, I am interested in understanding how immigrant communities, are already using media on a day-to-day basis. My previous research in this area has confirmed that there is no single “magic tool” that immigrant youth are using when communicating and networking with others. Instead, many media practitioners in the immigrants’ rights movement use a wide variety of media at their disposal, often entire media ecologies, in order to accomplish their goals. What’s more, for older generations, traditional media is still very central.
Yet, in many cases the emphasis around the emerging domain of civic media can be the creation of “cool” new tools, usually based on a set of values inherited from designers and creators. I can’t deny that cool new tools are, well…cool. Brilliant people more technically gifted than I are able to create some amazingly cool products, that push the boundaries on what is possible with media and technology. I am a strong believer though, that civic media should not only be about new flashy tools. Coming from a background in Chicana/o Studies, I am urged to understand the structural underpinning across dimensions of socio-economics, culture, and identity which motivate people to use, consume, and create media. Largely informed by my own background as an immigrant, much of the focus of my academic study has been driven by a yearning to understand the cultural and societal conditions of immigrants in the United States, more recently as it pertains to media.
At the risk of entering a debate around semantics about what “civic” is, I think it is unwise to assume that people aren’t already using different sorts of media in civic ways. This understanding of communities, especially marginalized and politically underrepresented communities, reeks of deficit thinking, where technologists assume that a community is lacking in some resource and the solution is thus to provide those resources. In some cases, the resources dropped into communities deemed to be lacking or in a state of deficit can be cool new tools. Of course, that is not to say that structural inequality and inequity found in communities does not matter, because it does. Also, in some cases, new technologies and media are just the right recipe for a particular community context that allow for transformational development. However, greatly influenced by Dr. Daniel Solorzano at the UCLA School of Education, I am particularly interested in understanding the strengths, resistances, and cultural capital that communities do have and build from that instead of adopting a deficit thinking model that supports a “have-nots” mentality. A great inspiration for these ideas has also been scholar Tara Yosso, and her work “Whose Culture Has Capital?: A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” These are some of the frameworks that I am interested in using when understanding media use, consumption, and creation in community contexts.
Furthermore, from my own experience, the civic aspects of our lives cannot be easily separated and compartmentalized into neatly defined categories. A day job, or several, can have an impact on the free time needed to be engaged in a community, which can in turn impact a multitude of many other things. Media use and consumption is scattered in bits and pieces throughout this complicated web of socio-economic, cultural, religious, language-based, personal factors, among many many others. This complex web is a needed reminder for myself, because unlike my colleagues and I, most people are not Media Studies scholars, obsessively trying to understanding the role of media in, literally, everything on the face of the earth. With such a media-centered approach, it becomes very simple to overemphasis cool tools and forget that people still have to commute to work, feed their families, go to school, and somewhere in between (or at the same time) use, consume, and create media.
I am interested in understanding those dynamics in the everyday lives of people, because I have found that the most sustainable forms of media practice are those that can be seamlessly integrated into our daily lives. I am a fan of fancy cool tech tools, especially many of those that come out of the MIT Media Lab. However, it becomes difficult to move past the notion of “civic” as an isolated action and into a sustained practice when tools are created in vacuums that are devoid actual applicable, real-life contexts. Over the course of Intro to Civic Media, I would like to delve deeper into the task of understanding day-to-day media practice in immigrant communities, whatever that may entail. I have done this to some degree with my interviews of media practitioners in different immigrant’s rights movements in the United States, but I am interested in exploring quantitative methods that could supplement my qualitative analysis. One approach to this task could involve gaining access to different data sets in certain neighborhoods in Boston, based on internet service providers, newspaper subscriptions, and possible radio and television audience data. If these are out of date and/or insufficient to satisfy the study, then I will consider gathering my own data in a systematized way, perhaps through surveys. Following the gathering of data and figures, I would like to explore imaginative ways of presenting my findings, perhaps using GIS mapping graphics. I am still not sure how this would look for daily media practice? Would we see a trend of certain newspapers being read along certain subways lines? Furthermore, since I am interested in the day-to-day media practice of particular Boston neighborhoods, such as East Boston, then I may have to explore qualitative methods if a strictly data-driven approach is deemed insufficient. My hope is to take an initial snapshot of daily media practice in order to lay the groundwork for future studies about media ecologies, collaborative design, and just plain understanding.