Understanding Community Media. Howley, Kevin (ed.) (2010). Los Angeles: SAGE Publications. pp. 410.
Understanding Community Media, a new compilation edited by media scholar Kevin Howley, fills a gap in current literature as it provides a contemporary overview of the area of study that is often referred to as community media, but as Howley notes, other nomenclature has also been used to refer to it including “participatory,” “alternative,” and “citizen” (pp. 2-3). However, according to Howley, what this book attempts to do with its wide-ranging collection of articles, many of which are written as case studies, is “to capture the multidimensional character of community media through an examination of a geographically diverse field of countervailing structures, practices, and orientations to dominant media” (p. 3).
The book contains seven major sections (“Theoretical Issues and Perspectives,” “Civil Society and The Public Sphere,” “Cultural Geographies,” “Community Development,” “Community Media and Social Movements,” “Communication Politics,” and “Local Media, Global Struggles”). Each section contains four to five articles. They can be read singularly or the book can be read as a whole to gain an understanding of the theoretical undergirding of community media thought and praxis during a timeframe after 1970. Understanding Community Media is an ideal textbook for a community media course. Parts of the book could also be utilized to add valuable readings to a “Media and Society” course or other media courses, as well as to those in other fields, such as political science. The book is appropriate for use in upper undergraduate or graduate offerings.
Howley writes an introduction to each section of the text that provides an analytical and theoretical context and previews the chapters that follow. Understanding Community Media presents research from both newer and experienced academics, as well as articles from the critical perspectives of experienced media professionals and/or activists in the various areas of community media. The book summarizes research and insights into community media praxis. Furthermore, the work is international in scope with writings about community media from countries in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, and Africa.
The research in this book explores community media in diverse forms, including radio, film and video, music, print, and the Internet. The case studies provide pedagogical examples that can be used in the classroom to illuminate the role of media in community development. In addition, the areas of media and politics, as well as telecommunications policymaking and law, are examined in the book and add fuller dimension to the study of community or alternative media. For example, the book’s first section, “Theoretical Issues and Perspectives,” has five chapters: first, a case study of two community radio stations in Australia based on fieldwork conducted in 2004-2005 (pp. 23-31) followed by a theoretical article that analyzes citizens’ media practices in relation to three key concepts in democratic theory: public sphere, civil society, and citizenship (pp. 32-40). The last three chapters covered are: “Community Arts and Music, Community Media: Cultural Politics and Policy in Britain Since the 1960s” (pp. 41-52); an article titled “Collaborative Pipelines” that uses leftist media theory to examine the tension between the economic/commercial and social/political potential of interactive digital technologies (pp. 53-62); and, the last chapter, “Notes on a Theory of Community Radio,” which uses articulation theory to discuss the utility of community radio in the United States (pp. 63-70).
The second section, “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” contains five chapters that “interrogate the relationship between civil society and community-based media…and consider how community-based media enable or constrain the formation of more egalitarian and diversified public sphere(s) in a variety of geographical settings” (pp. 75-76). Not all case studies presented in Understanding Community Media are of the same strength or rigor as reflected in the second section. In this section, a well documented study titled “Reimagining National Belonging With Community Radio” focuses on two examples of community radio in the former Yugoslavia, Radio Mars in Slovenia and Cross-Radio from the former Yugoslav region, by describing how the two stations “function as a space of multicultural belonging, debate, exchange of opinion and grounded community decision making.” This section presents a weaker case study, “Evaluating Community Informatics as a Means for Local Democratic Renewal,” which attempts to show political influence of an online community through an eight-month, online participant-observation study of a listserv group in suburban Birmingham, United Kingdom, and using semi-structured interviews of only ten members from the listserv subscriber base of about 130.
The third section, “Cultural Geographies,” contains five chapters and “explores the relationship between place, collective identity, and cultural production” (p. 127). The introduction explains that three different chapters in this section examine cases of community-based media use by Aboriginal peoples in Canada; Arab and Muslim communities in Sydney, Australia; and the Edmonton Small Press Association in a community in Alberta, Canada. Two other chapters explore what may be viewed as sub-cultural groups’ subversive use of dominant cultural media, including an indigenous New Zealand group’s use of broadcast television in overcoming disenfranchisement, and an Orthodox Jewish community’s use of new media technologies to uphold their traditional values, beliefs, and practices (pp. 131-32).
The fourth section, “Community and Development,” has four chapters that “illustrate how, through the use of participatory communication practices and techniques, community media create spaces in which diverse, sometimes competing interests can work collaboratively to achieve common ends” (pp. 185-86). Several geographical areas are highlighted in this section’s chapters, including a rural area of India and Accra, the capital city of Ghana.
In “Community Media and Social Movements,” the fifth section of Understanding Community Media, five chapter authors “illuminate the role that grassroots and community-based media play in producing and legitimating oppositional discourse, creating a shared identity among movement participants, and sustaining and enlarging social movements over time” (p. 233). Grassroots movements are examined in Columbia; Mexico City, Mexico; and two U.S. cities—the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, and Chinatown in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The last two sections in Understanding Community Media encompass the areas of community media, politics, and policymaking and are titled respectively, “Communication Politics” and “Local Media, Global Struggles.” In section six, “contributors focus on questions of communication policy; the regulation of traditional, new, and emerging technologies; and the prospects for media democracy in the 21st century” (pp. 283-84). One particularly strong chapter in this section comes in chapter 28, “The Rise of the Intranet Era,” which presents a case study of the Champaign-Urbana Wire-less Network (CUWiN), a community Intranet built using open source Local Area Network (LAN) technologies to bring services to isolated communities “ranging from the mundane, such as e-mail, Web hosting, and file sharing, to the more innovative, such as streaming micro-broadcasting video chat rooms, temporary device-hosted LANs, and audio and video telephony” (p. 329).
Howley states in the introduction to the seventh section, “Local Media, Global Struggles,” that the chapters of the last section of Understanding Community Media “demonstrate the progressive possibilities of globalization: the provision of structures and practices, like those associated with community media, that are transparent and accountable to local populations; the critical importance of reciprocity in supporting and sustaining efforts to protect human rights; and, finally the deep commitment of community organizers, media activists, independent journalists, and other segments of global civil society for promoting and defending human dignity” (p. 345).
All section introductions, written by Howley, and each chapter, written by individual authors of Understanding Community Media, have extensive bibliographies, which will aid those desiring to do further reading or re-search in these areas.
GRACE JACKSON-BROWN
Missouri State University