[cr-india] Exploring local and community media within the Asia Pacific

[George(s) Lessard]

Exploring local and community media within the Asia Pacific
www.smallvoices.org

The idea for this project came to me not long after September 11th 2001. 
Watching the mainstream media use the tragedy in New York to highlight and 
accentuate racial difference and perpetuate simplistic stereotypes was really 
disappointing for me. I felt, and still do, that much of the good work we as 
independent media makers and activists had done to break down these clichéd 
representations and understandings had been unravelled with one 24-hour 
marathon of live and devastatingly emotive footage. In the week following I was 
continually surprised by the broad cross section of people I came across who 
did not seem capable of viewing the event in any way critically and in the 
context in which it had occurred, blinded it seemed, by the fact that this had 
happened to 'good, white Americans'. I think the media played a huge role in 
initiating, encouraging and perpetuating this mindset.

So I started thinking about the way that the dominant media perpetuates 
stereotyping by speaking from a very particular point of view; either 
intolerant or tokenistic of anything that stands outside of a certain sphere of 
understanding. And I started dreaming of idealistic ways to address this 
problem on a worldwide scale!!

I'm interested in community media because it is authentic and representative of 
a certain group and culture, and does not attempt to speak or cater for an 
entire race or more of people. Basically, because it is about encouraging and 
empowering people to talk about and report on the issues that they are experts 
on: the ones that are directly of interest and effect to them and their sphere 
of the world. Post 9-11, I began to wish there was some way for local stories 
from local points of view to be accessible to a wider audience of people than 
just their immediate community - some way of ensuring better networking and 
information sharing between community media nodes - that would allow more 
people to directly experience other cultural points of view, and in this way 
reduce the kind of typecasting encouraged by the corporate media.

So I had this optimistic notion that if I could travel around, working with and 
investigating the motivations of different community media outlets and 
reporting on them, I would be able to paly a role in exposing different 
perspectives to broader audiences, while at the same time act as a kind of 
'pollen bee' between community media sources.

In this regard, I do feel a particular responsibility toward the region that I 
live in. I believe there are many cultural misunderstandings at play here 
(especially between Australia and Indonesia - infamously known since 9-11 as 
the "largest Muslim population in the world") that, without efforts made to 
overcome them, have the very real potential to escalate into a more serious 
form of separatism in the near future.

So the smallVoices project is basically me, travelling through the Asia Pacific 
Region, talking to independent and local media makers about their work and 
reporting this back through interviews, profiles, essays and conversations on 
the smallVoices website. I plan to engage with a range of organisations, all 
operating within different sociopolitical situations and systems of media-
ownership.

The project is designed to enable those who use the dominant media as their 
major source of information to gain a more direct insight into grassroots 
movement within our region, and to encourage a greater understanding and 
awareness of local issues and motivations.

It is also for small voices to hear about other small voices: for the networks 
between community media makers to strengthen so that information can be shared 
more easily. A strong network of community media outlets will provide a 
powerful antidote to the great cultural divides that are, often unknowingly, 
perpetuated and encouraged by the corporate media.

 

Comments and feedback of the site are welcome

marni at smallvoices.org

I'd like to acknowledge and thank the crew at the myspinach web server 
(www.myspinach.org) for all the amazing work they do in providing tech support 
and server space to cultural and human rights projects...and for hosting 
smallVoices.-- 
  :-) Message ends, Signature begins (-:
  George Lessard, living @ 61.10N 94.05W
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"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly
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"If you think you are too small to make a difference, 
try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito..." African Proverb
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Koichi Tohei [who documented Aikido] 
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