I have to come clean: I don’t really know anything about civic media. As a graduate student in MIT’s science writing program, I am permitted to take only one elective each semester and CMS.860 was just one of many classes that got shoehorned into an ambitious course-shopping schedule.
I have experience in journalism (cue bio at right), but no formal education. At the beginning of class on Wednesday, my definition of “civic media” would have been “whatever bloggers do.” By the end of the night, I had learned civic media includes Julian Assange, QR codes, certain programming languages, the FCC, KONY2012, humanitarianism, my iPhone, maps… The conversation was enlightening.
So, my definition of civic media required some initial research and reflection. In the end, I like Beth Noveck’s approach best: Civic media makes participation an everyday lifestyle.
In class, we tried to list ten essential principles of civic media. (A good description of the exercise itself can be found in Erhardt’s post). Our arguments/discussions/criticisms/what-have-you often generated around the differences between three distinct concepts:
* what civic media should be
* what civic media must be
* what civic media actually is
My definition, I think, falls into the first category. It is an ideal that civic media strives to attain. It is a long-term goal. It also touches upon a lot of the real world examples we mentioned in class, from grassroots efforts to data visualization. Even particular forms of civic media that do not involve my direct participation, like Wikileaks, can reach my “everyday” life (i.e., expand my access to knowledge about current affairs) and/or publicly demonstrate how ordinary people can impact the media, which is in and of itself personally empowering.
This definition also folds in quite a few of our group-generated core principles, including:
* 1 (being participatory)
* 2 (promoting action)
* 6 (empowerment to create), and
* 8 (self-criticism)
It doesn’t really address accessibility, but I’m not sure that’s truly a core characteristic of civic media. One could probably find examples of groups who are cut off from any given civic media tool, and then we would be caught in an endless debate about minimum levels of accessibiity.
The question now, of course, is how on earth we build something that can do any of this.