The future of civic media, which is community-oriented interactions, depends on its uses today.
This community could be as small as two friends or as large as global organization. To participate in these groups is civic engagement. Exploring this is exactly what is going on at the Center for Future Civic Media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Center is a joint effort between MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies programs.
The center was recently founded by funding from the Knight Foundation.
I’m fascinated by the ways people are interested in and engaged with forms of civic media.
How do we choose to use Myspace to communicate rather than phone calls, or phone calls instead of face to face communication, and how does this change the way we function in terms of time, interpersonal encounters and day-to-day well-being?
What is happening now is not the interesting part; what we do with what is happening is.
“People are realizing that the Internet is more of a tool than an informational source,” second-year biology student Ziyad Khesbak said.
The idea behind the Center For Future Civic Media is to use these community integrating tools such as online communities and cell phones and bring these types of organization back to the local and personal level in real space.
We can connect and organize on national levels, but what happens when we do this on a small scale is in some ways a new frontier.
“(Civic media is) about creating a sense of community at the local level, having people understand their lives connected with other people,” said MIT professor Henry Jenkins and co-founder of the Center for Future Civic Media. In Los Angeles, we have the opportunity to network with and experience a vast number of communities, cultures and locations.
Hopefully we can learn to use forms of civic media in these more local communities.
“As a student (online local communities are) really great because it’s so easy to organize things without ever leaving your room,” Khesbak said.
In some ways we are using these tools already, organizing events online that take place in real life, and playing Scrabulous on Facebook with people sitting next to me.
“How do we (use media) and bring it back to the local level and engage with people in communities where we eat, sleep, work and vote, as opposed to the communities that scatter that are national in scope? How do we restore that sense of connectivity that people have?” said Jenkins. “That is civic engagement in its larger sense. “
At the Center they will be doing research and field work and experiments, figuring out the best ways of using media that help communities on a local level and finding with ways for these beneficial uses to become more widespread.
“In my ideal world everybody would be contributing and creating their own media in any creative form instead of always being on the receiving end,” said third-year Design | Media Arts and Ethnomusicology student Richard Caceres.
“I would love to see the power taken away from the few companies who distribute most of the media, which is what’s happening already, with YouTube (and other user-content generated sites),” he said.
By taking ownership of the media we use, we get to determine the types of experiences we have through this media.
“(Civic media) is ultimately a tool and what can be done with it is only what people want to do with it,” said Khesbak.
Civic media is wider than the technology it encompasses and I believe it’s a study as much about humans as it is about technology.
“New technologies (that) allow us to participate in a more profound manner requires that we assume greater responsibility for our actions, which is really what it means to be engaged in a community,” said Colleen Kaman, a researcher at MIT Center for Future Civic Media.
E-mail Rood at drood@media.ucla.edu.