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About this research
This website is a platform
to share ideas and information relating to the Community Media
Sector and informal Media Education. The aim is widen the debate
of how community level media activity is conducted, and to assess
the role it plays within society.
In
general terms, mass media can tend to promote a certain kind of
disposability of knowledge and information, whereas community
media has the potential to reverse this trend and become more
concrete and tangible. Media is so pervasive in modern industrial
societies that an active reading and understanding of media messages
is vital if informed decisions are to be made about the messages
we are fed. Community media activity encourages not only an understanding
of reading media messages, but also promotes the platform and
skills for, those who were once considered 'audiences', to be
producing their own media messages as an alternative - moving
from passive consumers, questioning reading to active producers.
The
foundation principle of the democratisation of the media runs
through the heart of community media activity, sometimes overtly,
and other times much more subtlety. For all these reasons we thought
it necessary that research is carried out in this fluid sector,
to try to attempt to understand and harness the potential positive
impact it can have on participant groups. This research does not
claim by any means to be completely exhaustive, and more work
needs to be done by other researchers to explore other elements
of this complex corner of the media world.
Your
comments on any of these issues is most welcome.
If
you would like to provide any feedback, include any relevant writing,
information or news stories, or have any questions relating to
this area of work, or would like to share stories about your own
approach and thoughts to community media, please feel free to
e-mail
me.
Thank
you.
Shawn
Naphtali Sobers
Firstborn Creatives
- Director
University of the West of England - Senior Lecturer in Media
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