|
I was in Tacoma, Washington in July for the Alliance for Community Media (ACM) Annual Conference. Doug Cain and I attended to represent the Minneapolis Telecommunications Network. The ACM is an organization that represents public, education and government access cable organizations. People who work or volunteer for access television from all across the country attended the conference. Some of the attendees came from as far away as Europe. J.C. Bagdadi of the MTN staff received a great honor at the convention. He was the recipient of the Jewell Ryan-White Award for Cultural Diversity. He was unable to attend the conference, so he gave a video acceptance speech and Doug accepted the award for him. At the conference there were workshops on a wide variety of topics, from the nitty gritty duties of running a public access TV station, to technical information, public policy issues, media activism, and production tips. I attended a series of workshops on Media Literacy issues. Media Literacy teaches people skills that help them confront TV and other media as equals. Media use a variety of strategies to get your attention and impact the very way you live your life. Commercial media builds an audience of consumers; media literacy aims to build an audience of citizens who can think out their own answers and questions. Media are the things between us and reality, and they construct and shape an interpretation of reality. Public Access Television allows people to make their own "medium," to put themselves between audience and reality, and to speak with the awesome power of electrons and pixels. The discussions at the conference strengthened my belief in the power of |
public access, and how important our work is in supporting it and making programs for these channels. The keynote speaker, Fernando Ferrer, was the former president of the Bronx in New York. When the cable company told him that there would be no public access television in the Bronx, he fought back. The cable company was intimidating, but Ferrer was born in the Bronx, and he said that as a Bronx native he had seen much worse. He said it was important for political leaders everywhere to stand up to cable companies and insist on a share of the cable bandwidth for citizens. He also spoke about the responsibility elected officials have to welcome all communication on the channels, even if it may anger or offend them. The theme of the conference was "Connecting Media, Cultures and Communities." The logo of the conference featured a computer circuit uniting a drum, a salmon, a mountain and a coffee cup. The drum is the symbol of the ACM. Television, after all, is not much more than a technically complex drum. The mountain was Mount Rainier, which sets the sense of place, for if you look up in Tacoma you cannot miss the grand snowcapped volcano. The salmon and coffee cup are symbols of the local culture but are also things we eat and drink. We consume food, but we also consume media. You know how sick you can get when you eat something that disagrees with your stomach - too much unhealthy media can also make you sick in the head. It is easy to find all the food poisoning you can take on TV these days. Public access is one of the few places on TV where you'll find home-grown organic brain-food, and if you make your own show you get an opportunity to eat your own words and find out how tasty they can be. -John Akre |
