Greetings Economists,
On Sep 8, 2008, at 12:19 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
he whole fetish of "community" radio needs to be junked. The
"community" is an imaginary thing - and more phantasmic than in
Benedict Anderson's sense. No one can say who this community is, how
members are distinguished from nonmembers, what its interests are.
It's a stupid joke. It's an excuse for amateurism and self-
indulgence. No wonder listeners are dropping like flies.
Doyle;
But I don't agree. The blockage in Pacifica is the loggerheads of
competing business models in the contemporary U.S. culture, but the
over all sense of what you argue here is completely at odds with how
business develops on the internet. The amateurism of social sites,
for example where I participate like Flickr are above the scale of
professional photographers in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
The amateurism offers value in ways that has not been recognized
before in terms of the tools of media communication. This clash about
business models (old media versus say Google) in media goes on and on
in my view because the forces generating community political forces
are being refreshed by media technical change.
I can define what groups are in many ways without being able to say
what the group is exactly, because much human thinking is 'fuzzy'.
And the value in the community requires the kinds of tools to 'mine'
the data as it were.
I'm not going to assume we can answer these questions here. I know I
have my means in the Bay Area to act to build community forces. So
the enduring nature of this debate not settled in 20 years at KPFA
will carry me along.
You can't junk community radio any more than you can reverse the tide
of social networking on the internet. But these will not be resolved
by quick answers, but I'm sure community is rising and old media is
declining. In that sense it is a slow agonizing defeat for old media
which I don't enjoy watching manifest itself year in year out.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
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