FROM VTR TO CYBERSPACE: Jefferson, Gramsci & the Electronic Commons by Mark Surman (msurman@io.org) ************************************ 1. INTRODUCTION "Those of us who recognize that change comes in increments of one, five, ten, and twenty-five, need no convincing that public access TV will provide the nucleus for a post bureaucratic, vaguely anarchic video pajama party." (Kika Thorne -- member of the SHE/tv video collective) I spent most of my younger years looking for anarchy and the joys of a video pajama party. But I never found them _ at least not in the flat bland-lands of television on which I grew up. As someone who started working in the electronic glitz biz at the tender age of 16, my TV world was filled with mindless American violence imports, poster girl posting technicians, the dawn of the three minute pop music commercial, and a great deal of frustration. For one moment in my early TV years, I naively attempted to insert peace activism into the virtual violence that I sent over the airwaves for a living. I produced one little low tech commercial, advertising one very small peace event. It ran once and then it was pulled. The only answer I ever received to my million "whys" was a big "because". Ever since, I have been trying to bring my activism to every communications space that would give me a few minutes to speak my mind _ alternative print, computer networks, television. Where TV land is concerned, I have realized that there are a myriad of openings through which one can sneak ones activism into "the box". You can go out and buy a Fisher Price PixelVision camera and document your dissent _ but it is unlikely that many people will see what you have done. You can go to journalism or film school, move to New York or Hollywood, and try to "change the system from within" _ but this is a dangerous and personally painful journey. You can spend six months writing an arts council grant and make a relatively high quality magnum opus of electronic resistance _ but it may only show to nine other activists at a far off film festival. Or, you can start making activist television right now, for free, and broadcast it to thousands of eager viewers by using your local community access TV facility. For the past five years, I have been using community television as my activist intervention into the television realm. In theory, the community channel is the utopia of social change media freaks. It's free. You get trained on how to use the equipment (so you don't have to spend all that time and money going to TV school). There's no censorship of your ideas. Everybody from the community has an equal opportunity to use the channel. Your programs inhabit a spot on the TV sets of thousands upon thousands of channel surfers. Sounds like the perfect place for an anti-big-business-anarchist-cooking-show, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it's not. Because that's just the theory _ and we all know about the tenuous connection between theory and what actually happens. In reality, the Canadian community channel is only a good place for activism as long as you don't offend anybody too important. I have helped air programs showing political protest, civil disobedience, the propaganda value of the Gulf War media coverage, and the beauty of human powered art vehicles. But try doing a show about representations of sexuality. [SIDEBAR -- Nadia Sistonen's The Crux of The Gist of The Biscuit, which showed a vagina smoking a cigarette, is a among a handful of programs pulled from Toronto community channels over the past few years for being "offensive".] Or, even better, try making a media activist show that criticizes the cable company that runs your local community channel. No way. This gap between the way the community channel is supposed to work and the way it does work hasn't stamped out my interest in access TV, it's just made me shuffle sideways a little. I have shuffled to places that take the good parts of community television and combine them with new ideas, and new ways of organizing. And I have looked at the ways that creative activist TV producers all over North America have made the best of access channels where they live. I have also started to experiment with a model of an open, uncensored, grassroots, people-controlled media system that exists outside the realm of television _ the Internet. Although it doesn't allow me to send videos out to the world, the Internet does fulfill many of my activist communication desires. It lets me share my ideas with people all over the world. It lets me find information that is so unique, so activist, so challenging to "the way things are" that it would probably never make it into a bookstore. In these ways, the Internet is a bit like an internationally linked, text-based community access channel without the censorship problem. But the Internet certainly has its problems too. It's hard to get around, it's not free , it's generally male dominated, and you've got to own a computer. In my activist communication dreams, I'd like to bring the best parts of the Internet and the best parts of the community channel together. Which brings us to the "crux of the gist" of this paper _ how to create a perfect world for activist videomakers and anyone else who wants to express themselves electronically. Well, maybe not a perfect world, but a better one at least. I would like to suggest that it really is possible to merge the best parts of the Internet and the community channel to create a more democratic and sustainable system of public, grassroots communication. To figure out how, we will have to look back at the original dream of community television and listen to the people who dreamed it. We should also explore the problems that this dream had when it came of age, and what activist video producers in the 1990's have done to deal with weak points of community TV. And of course we should think about he Internet, about all of the people who swear by it and at all of the activist projects that have used it. With all these perspectives, we just might be able to figure out a strategy to get ourselves a hip new, totally open, people-centred, accessible, egalitarian, grassroots, electronic communications system. Or, something like that. But first we should take a quick look at where all of this electronic democracy stuff came from. In the late 1960's, there were a bunch of people who saw social change flowing from the mouth of a twenty year old electronic pipe _ cable television. The cable industry, government bureaucrats, academics, liberals and progressives in both Canada and the US all gathered around the cable hearth to argue that the proliferation of this "new" technology could "...rehumanize a dehumanized society, ... eliminate the existing bureaucratic restrictions of government regulation common to the industrial world and ... empower the currently powerless public." The revolutionary potential of cable technology was attributed to its ability to open up more bandwidth _ to offer more channels _ than off-air TV. Another new technology _ the 1/2" portable videotape recorder (VTR) _ was making similar if smaller utopian waves at the same time. New technology made video recorders cheap enough and light enough that average middle class people could buy their own camera and VTR to make home TV. Hand-in-hand with the increased bandwidth of cable, it was often argued that VTR could lead to a new age of people-centred communication. Of course these predictions were nothing new: "...every step in modern media history _ telephone, photograph, motion picture, radio, television, satellite _ stirred similar euphoric predictions. All were expected to usher in an age of enlightenment. All were seen as filling the promise of democracy." But some of the ends to which all of this rhetoric was taken were new. While the general utopian buzz implied that more bandwidth and cheap VTR's in and of themselves could create a brave new world, there were people who argued that specific political and economic models were needed to make this techno-democracy dream come true. Community access TV advocates argued that the prophesied social changes would only occur if there were specific structures aimed at promoting information democracy. The structures in question were community access channels and the TV production equipment needed to fill these channels with grassroots programming. There were two general approaches to the access channel. One saw community television as the electronic equivalent of Jeffersonian democracy, as an electronic commons where equality, free speech and democratic dialogue would abound. The other saw the community channel as a Gramscian "activist project", a place that would specifically help those who had been left without a voice by the corporate media world of network television. [SIDEBAR -- Antonio Gramsci was an Italian communist who talked about hegemony and counter-hegemony, or how domination and resistance work in capitalist democracies. I am using the phrase "activist project" in place of the more academic phrase "counter-hegemonic project". Later in the paper I will also substitute the phrase "counter-cultural" for "counter hegemonic". The point of all this is to avoid alienating academic language. For a more detailed explanation of hegemony and counter-hegemony, see Appendix One, What is a Hegemony Anyways?] Although both visions of community TV floated around North America in the late sixties and early seventies, Canadian and American community channels eventually took diverse paths, tending towards one or the other of these visions. American access channels moved towards the Jeffersonian electronic commons _ open to everyone without discrimination. A warped version of the "activist project" _ open only to "disadvantaged communities" _ has dug itself in at Canadian community channels. Today _ more than twenty years after people started building community channels _ a new generation of technological utopians, Jeffersonian democrats and Gramscian activists seem to be coming out of the woodwork. They're talking in much the same language about much the same thing, but this time in relation to the Internet and the new broadband multi-media networks that have been dubbed "superhighways". The Internet and the superhighway are not the same thing. Once built, the new broadband superhighways may or may not resemble the current Internet in terms of form, access and freedom.[SIDEBAR -- The new techno-utopians _ like their predecessors _ are predicting that more bandwidth will change the world, although this time around they think we need 500 channels instead of 20 to do the job. The Jeffersonians see the Internet as the perfect model of an electronic commons and want to ensure that model makes it to the "superhighway". The Gramscian activists are trying to ensure that both the Internet and the new broadband networks contain spaces that promote voice and access for marginalized communities. The important question that faces both the community channel advocates of twenty years ago and the access advocates of today is: how do you bring the best of both these visions together? At a time when new networks could change the nature of both community television and the Internet, how can we develop grassroots media ideals and visions for the future, while at the same time maintaining the good principles and practices of the past? To start answering these questions, we should go back and talk to Thomas Jefferson. ************************************************** For a complete version of this paper -- including pictures, sidebar commentary and a full bibliography -- contact Mark Surman (msurman@io.org) This paper is COPYRIGHT MARK SURMAN (1994). Permission is granted to duplicate, print or repost this paper as long as it is done on a non-commercial (ie. keep it free)and as long as the whole paper is kept intact. **************************************************