Dan Gillmor, Citizen Media, and The Threat to PEG Access
Dan Gillmor, author of “We The Media“, founder of the new non-profit Center for Citizen Media, and new Berkman Center Fellow spoke at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School today on the first day of his fellowship at a Berkman luncheon series conversation with the Berkman gang and friends.
Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices has a terrific summary of Dan’s talk on his blog, which you can also listen to live here. One of the great things about working at the Berkman Center is being able to get in on these great conversations with leading thinkers like Dan, Ethan, and many others, while using my background in audio production to engineer (webcast) and record these events for all the world to listen.
While listening to Dan’s talk today on Citizen Media, I couldn’t stop thinking about the legislative threats to Public, Educational, and Government (PEG) access channels going on in Congress right now. The idea of Citizen Media seems intimately connecting with the concept of Community Media Access Centers like BNN, LTC, CCTV, and the thousands of other PEG access channels and centers around the country. Community Media is Citizen Media–both online and offline.
If we loose PEG access channels and Community Media Centers like CCTV (that offer some amazing media education and production courses, as well) then where will people go in their communities to create their Citizen Media? Will moving to a future online without cable access to community voices really be the same? PEG channels offer some of the few opportunities left in our communities to reach a wide audience.
I later asked Dan if he considered reaching out to Community Media Centers in his development of a Center for Citizen Media? He admitted that he didn’t know enough about them, but was very interested in the fact that Community Media Centers with PEG access (like CCTV and others) provide opportunities for members to take media education and production courses, allowing people to make their voices heard in their communities through local television.
If we are facing a future without community access to television than Citizen Media ought to look to local models like Community Media Centers and PEG access channels–right now–as offline models for a new participatory online culture. Conversations are happening in our local communities on PEG access. It’s time to give community media access the respect it deserves, so we don’t look back years from now saying, “Wow, maybe we should have done more…”
(Thanks to Isaac Meister for the photo taken of Dan Gillmor at the Berkman Center)
