Hi,
My name is Mary and I am a junior at Wellesley College. I am a History major and Middle Eastern Studies minor. When I saw this course listing I became very excited. This area of media is not one that I know a lot about, but have wanted to learn more about for some time. I’d also heard great things about the MIT Media Lab and the Center for Civic Journalism from professors at Wellesley. Before I get to my personal definition of Civic Media, I’ll let you know a bit about my media interests and why I took this class.

My background in media is primarily broadcast journalism. I spent the past two summers interning at TV stations (in Topeka, KS and Chicago, IL) in both reporting and producing. I got interested in media in high school in Topeka, KS. I started to write for the school newspaper and reported for a local cable-access TV channel. I really enjoyed doing both of those activities, so I decided to continue with journalism in college. I am now a producer and reporter at Wellesley College TV, and we are using social media (YouTube, Facebook) to broadcast our programs as well as collect feedback from viewers.
Through my classes at Wellesley I became very interested in how social media has affected the uprisings in the Arab world during the past year. Last year I took a seminar at Wellesley on Resistance and Dissent in the Middle East and North Africa. The Al Jazeera network and tools of social media in uprisings were two topics that I enjoyed learning about. I’m excited that we will be covering the Arab Spring in week 10 of class through case studies. I’m not exactly sure what I’d like to do after I graduate from Wellesley, but I know that my interests are strongly focused in media. I’m not sure yet whether that means becoming a broadcast journalist, a television producer, a newspaper writer, a media business employee, or a professor who researches media.

Through this class I would really like to learn more about what “traditional” television news channels are doing to incorporate civic media into their broadcasts. This past summer I interned in Chicago, IL at a PBS station. PBS has limited resources, so the incorporation of amateur videos from YouTube allowed them to expand coverage greatly. They also developed a user comment system and started blogging tools for viewers to add their opinions and share what they’d like to see on the show.

I’d also like to look at civic media from a comparative perspective, for example how civic media affects democracy in the US vs South Africa, or how civic media functions in non-democratic countries like China or Iran. In the reading we did this week, entitled “What is Civic Media” which was a transcript summary from the launch of the MIT Center for Civic Media, Ethan Zuckerman had an interesting point. He said that “citizen journalism tends to work best in moderately repressive nations, not so well in highly repressive ones and only to a limited degree in countries with little or no repression.” I’m interested to study this idea more in coming weeks.

Now for my definition of civic media:
“Any medium that creates information flow to a community or communities in order to foster participatory spirit in decision making.”

A few examples of these mediums include:
• Websites that host amateur videos
Sites such as http://www.youtube.com and www.vimeo.com allow anyone to upload videos, within certain limitations of course. For example, this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjd6CGckke0&NR=1
Is amateur footage from January 26, 2011 of a protest in Cairo, Egypt. Once uploaded to YouTube, a man on the street with a cell phone now has the capability that an Al Jazeera news crew does.
• Blogs or news organizations with a partisan focus
http://www.dailykos.com/ is an example of a partisan focus blog. The daily kos happens to be Democratic. Its motto is “news, community, action”, something that definitely falls in line with the definition of civic media.
• Not for profit organizations with a single focus
http://www.gpace.org/category/blog/
GPACE is a non-profit organization located in my hometown Topeka, KS. They produce reports that focus on clean energy, energy efficiency, and stopping the construction of nuclear plants with the promotion of wind farms.
• Traditional news organizations that incorporate social media and civic media material into broadcasts/ online material/ use “Tweets” as quotes in newspapers rather than interviewing someone
http://stream.aljazeera.com/about
Stream by Al Jazeera is a show on Al Jazeera English that relies completely on social media tactics rather than traditional information news gathering. It allows viwers to upload videos, write suggestions for coverage, and create their own stories that could make air using a tool called “Storify”.
http://www.youtube.com/user/AJstream?feature=mhee#p/u/56/m5qEmBdXuOY
• Organizations whose mission is freedom of information, often regardless of how the information they are spreading was obtained.
http://wikileaks.org/ is the prime example of this type of medium.
As for organizations like Wikileaks, I haven’t yet decided my opinion on them yet. I can see positive aspects of freedom of information, and believe that governments should be transparent. But when those documents could compromise the safety of American troops or civilians, I’m not sure that the value of releasing those papers is worth it. However, I also don’t feel informed enough to make a decision about wikileaks. Hopefully this class will help me to come to a conclusion.

This definition of civic media will of course change over the course of the semester as I learn about the subject.Again, I’m very excited for the opportunity to take this class.