INDEPENDENT MEDIA by Steve Anderson & Michael Lithgow

Unbeknownst to most Canadians, cable companies and local community groups have been wrestling for control of community channel assets. Community groups want space on the TV dial and production resources; cable companies want to call the shots, control the programming and move their community channels in the direction of commercial television. Approximately $80 million, collected annually from Canadians and earmarked for community programming, is at stake.

Meanwhile, the digital revolution is transforming citizens into media producers, and every home computer into a virtual television station. In such a radically altered media environment, what will become of community TV in the 21st century?

Community television is a throwback to a time when cable technology was new and the web was not yet born. It allowed anyone to create a program that could be seen on cable. Community television was the YouTube of its day, but things have changed. Downloading and streaming have precipitated a complicated restructuring of the television industry, brought on in part by new viewing habits.

While traditional TV now seems to be on the wane, some things are harder for the Internet to replace. Most television shows require more than one person to make. The Internet cannot replace the studio space, hands-on training and possibilities for in-person collaboration and mentorship that community television allowed for. And it won’t replace the sense of place provided by a community production studio – a space where people can work and create together.

The Internet has become an engine of innovation, choice and free expression because it is a relatively open platform for citizen engagement and free enterprise that facilitates free association and collaboration, which then produces exciting projects like Wikipedia, Firefox, and citizen-powered events like ChangeCamp (www.changecamp.ca).

As noted in previous columns, various projects in the ‘terrestrial’ world are integrating transparency, openness and participatory decision-making. The new push by groups in many cities to revamp community media centres looks to be part of this larger process of physically rendering the Internet.

Community media centres are attracting interest because in many ways they are a physical mirror image of the Internet. Here’s a description of the soon to be launched W2 Community Media Centre in Vancouver: “W2 will bring together hybrid art forms, community art practices, individual human development and community cultural development in a single environment.”

Like the Internet, W2 will allow community members to engage at a level with which they are comfortable and to freely develop their own ambitions and capacities. Community media centres are, in a sense, the next phase of social media, bringing to life the collaborative potential of the Internet in physical production spaces that mirror the complicated technological capacities of commercial studios.

In reconsidering the role of community television in Canada, the CRTC is asking Canadians what they think should happen with community channel policy. CACTUS (Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations), an innovative group based in Ottawa, is putting forward a proposal for community channel money to be used to create community media centres across the country.

CACTUS is proposing that a portion of the $80 million allocated to community channels be used to create a fund that community groups can apply for to set up community media centres. The best part of the plan is that cable companies are already spending this money. With CACTUS’s proposal, Canadians won’t have to pay another dime; the media centre proposal will tap into available funding.

As the desire for open systems and practices gains momentum, we can look to these and other hubs of open collaboration as evidence of an exciting new social nexus – a network of networks, you might say, much like the Internet.

Steve Anderson is the national coordinator for the Campaign for Democratic Media. steve@democraticmedia.ca

Michael Lithgow is the co-founder of CACTUS and a long-time community television advocate and organizer from Vancouver. He now lives in Montreal.