FROM VTR TO CYBERSPACE: Jefferson, Gramsci & the Electronic Commons by Mark Surman (msurman@io.org) ************************************ 3. UNCLE GRAMSCI AND THE ACTIVIST VIDEO MAKERS After a year with the Klan and right-wing preachers knocking at her door, Wendy O'Flaherty decided to institute a limited access policy at her Calgary community channel. She stated that "...a policy of restricted public access to the community channel is preferred to unrestricted access, with access being given to disadvantaged and emerging groups and to individuals and peoples with alternate material." This January 1973 statement marked the end of the open electronic commons in Calgary, and reflects the approach to community access television that has been taken throughout Canada. It is an approach that is in theory committed to alternative programming but which does not guarantee free access to the community channel. This idea of creating media spaces that are open only to those who are shut out by other media can be linked to the thinking of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci argued that the power of dominant forces in a capitalist democracy is maintained by cultural means _ by elaborate and unconscious transfers of common sense that lead most people to accept our economic and political systems as "the way things are", as the natural order of things. [SIDEBAR -- This is Gramsci's theory of hegemony. For more on this, see Appendix One: What Is A Hegemony Anyways?] The only way to create a social transformation in a society where culture is power, is to fight back with culture. Thus, Gramsci envisioned counter-cultural' projects created by people who had come together in coalitions opposed to "the way things are". Such projects would emphasize the ideas and perceptions of average people, and would be specifically open to those who wanted to take an oppositional stance. Gramsci, in his belief that social transformation must happen at the grassroots, stressed the importance of popular media in the struggle for cultural change. >From his prison cell in the 1930's, he argued that a "new literature" could not ignore popular forms like the serial novel or the detective novel. Although very few of the early access advocates would have gone so far as to associate themselves with an Italian communist, those who argued for "limited access" were talking about very Gramscian ideas. As opposed to the Jeffersonian electronic commons approach _ which implied that open access would automatically equalize society on its own _ the limited access approach saw the community channel as something that would specifically serve counter-cultural movements. It also stressed that media should be produced by the grassroots rather than about the grassroots _ that the marginalized should make their own images. This approach to community television saw itself in direct opposition to the way the major TV networks were constructing our imaginary worlds. The link between these Gramsci-style ideas and the development of community television is the National Film Board of Canada's Challenge for Change program. Between 1966 and 1975, Challenge for Change attempted to use film and video to "... help eradicate the causes of poverty by provoking basic social change." To do this, the NFB put film and video cameras in the hands of social activists and marginalized communities, made films showing people how video could be used for social intervention, sponsored access television pilot projects and published a newsletter that served as a philosophical focal point for people interested in media as activist project. Challenge for Change emphasized two points throughout its existence _ that people who wanted social change needed a media culture that was just for them and that these people should be making their own media. This social change media philosophy was a major contributing factor to the development of grassroots-oriented, limited access policies at Canadian community channels. Following the lead of Challenge for Change and grassroots-minded community channel staff like O'Flaherty, both the cable industry and government regulators embedded social change catch phrases like "citizen participation" and "community self expression" into documents relating to community television. With these impressive philosophical and regulatory underpinnings, it is hard to imagine how the Canadian community channel could have gone wrong as an outlet for social change media. But, in many ways, it has gone very wrong. With the limited access approach, the power to decide what is alternative, what is community and what gets on the channel all lie in the hands of the cable company staff. >From the perspective of some social change access advocates, putting decisions about "what gets on" into the hands of community TV staff was the original strength of limited access. Most of the people who ran Canadian community channels in the early seventies came either from social activism or from Challenge for Change, or at least were people who had been caught up in the grassroots rhetoric of the time. These people were able to use limited access to keep conservative or well established groups out and bring marginalized groups in. But many early staffers eventually left community television, or they started to become more conscious of what would offend their employers. George Stoney, the original head of the Challenge for Change program, saw a direct link between this "employee consciousness" and the move towards more conservative programming. "I went up there in 1982 for a panel at a Canadian cable television conference, and when I screened all of the programs entered for awards I was appalled at how uncontroversial and essentially dull most of it was. It could have been made in the Queen's parlor. I divined that this was because it was all made or facilitated by cable company employees. Although most of the coordinators came out of a good Canadian tradition of social animation they couldn't help but look over their shoulders to see how the company that was providing their salaries was responding." In addition to the drift away from Challenge for Change idealism and towards "employee consciousness", the type of people who cable companies hire has also changed over the years. Early community channel staff tended to be people with activist or social science backgrounds, whose training was primarily in people and ideas skills. Television technical skills were often picked up along the way. This bias was stated in the CCTA's New Communicators: "When cable managers advertise a program staff position they would be wise to stress people skills. They would of course say 'a knowledge of television would be an asset'. That is not intended to play down television skills. It is to stress that television skills are more readily accessible than the community skills or human qualities the job demands." The importance of people skills over technical skills for programming staff was also mentioned in the CRTC's 1975 brief outlining its new community channel regulations. But this bias didn't last long. The Canadian community channel today is looked upon as an easy first job for people just out of broadcasting college. These people have brought with them the aesthetics, values and working styles of broadcast television. They have also brought ideas about "professionalism" and "technical quality" which are not very compatible with putting TV into the hands of "the people". These "professional" broadcast values have had a profound effect on the day to day operation of community channels, and on the nature of access itself. Some of the traditional myths surrounding TV are: (1) television production equipment is hard to use and breaks easily; and (2) only professionals should be making TV. These are exactly the myths that community television tried to undermine from the beginning. But any undermining that had occurred was quickly undone by the new cadre of "community TV broadcasting professionals". Many community channels have rebuilt myth number one _ "this stuff is tricky" _ by instituting long, drawn out, hierarchical training programs that frame the technical end of TV production as a secret art. As these courses are often mandatory, a group wanting access may have to spend a year and a half learning how to use studio equipment before they are able to touch the portable camera and editing system that they wanted access to in the first place. Also, these mandatory courses mean that activist media makers with years of previous training or experience have to spend valuable time jumping through training hoops. Myth number two _ "professionals only" _ has been brought back to life by cable companies who have introduced "paid volunteers". Community channels who use this system put new volunteers on boring, low profile productions until they are "good enough" to work on higher profile shows, for which they are paid. Such professional hierarchies totally destroy any fiction of grassroots TV production that may have been left over from old community channel rhetoric. This move towards the "professionalized" community channel _ especially the introduction of paid volunteers _ was helped along by the introduction of sponsorship by the CRTC. Since 1986, community channels have been able to sell PBS style advertising billboards at the beginning and end of each program. On an obvious level, this development has flushed the non-commercial nature of community access down the drain. On a subtler level, it has led to the professionalization of production mentioned above, as well as aesthetic uniformity and censorship. Rogers Community 10 in Toronto is rumored to bring in more than $100,000 a year in sponsorship revenues. With that kind of money flowing in, it is essential that they provide "high quality" programming for the sponsors. In community TV land, "high quality" is usually a euphemism for traditional broadcast aesthetics, boring topics and a ban on controversy. As sponsorship revenue must stay within the community channel, Rogers pumps the money right back into professionalization projects like the purchase of high tech, hard to use equipment and the payment of "volunteers". Such "professionalism" is a guarantee of "high quality". Another factor which has contributed to the Canadian community channel's shift away from its social change roots is an overemphasis on the mandate for local programming. When the CRTC defined the role of community television, it put local community programming on par with the ideas of access and citizen participation. This made sense at the time, as most media images reflected the metropolitan location of the people who made them. Except for local news, most of the programming that Canadians saw in the early 1970's came from Toronto, Montreal, New York or Los Angeles. The local aspect of the community channel was intended to counter-balance these dominant metropolitan images. But, as Raymond Williams argues, there are dangers to this local focus of community television. "The community emphasis is so right, in its own terms, and could so notably contribute to solving the problems of urban information flow, democratic discussion and decision-making and community identity, that it is easy to overlook the dimension that is inevitably there, beyond the community _ the nation and the world with which it is inevitably involved." E This overlooking of that which is beyond the community is exactly what has happened in Canadian community television. The local aspect of the CRTC mandate is stressed by some community channel staff to the point that geographically-generic, yet underrepresented ideas _ like feminism, peace, environmentalism _ are often denied access because they don't specifically identify themselves as "local". Although the shift in staff, the opening up of sponsorship and the overemphasis on the local aspects of programming are key factors in the erosion of the social change focus at community channels in Canada, the central problem is still who ultimately controls "what gets on" _ privately owned cable companies . "A fundamental problem has always dogged community access television (in Canada): It is a democratic concept with a democratic structure. The community channel is and always has been under the direct control of the licensee." This is unlikely to change soon, as cable regulations put the responsibility for community channel content in the hands of the cable operators. It is the cable company that will be sued or lose their license if libelous, obscene or copyrighted material makes it to air, not the community member who produced the show. This means two things. Cable companies are very conservative about programs that push any of these boundaries, shutting out people who want to criticize the corporate media by "sampling" copyrighted images and people who want to explore sexuality through their programming. The cable companies are also unlikely to give up control over the content as long as they are held responsible _ meaning that a totally open access channel is almost an impossibility without regulatory changes. Strict cable company control of community TV in Canada has been linked both to the blandness of the channel and the disappearance of "citizen access". In Dot Tuer's recent article on the Canadian community TV landscape, she describes a boring and uncontroversial evening of programming from the highly professionalized Rogers Community 10 Toronto. It included: "...the Canadian Club Speakers Series, the Cancer Society Fashion Show, Festival of Festivals Trade forums ... and the Lemon-Aid phone-in show on cars." Hardly the radical programming advocated by early access prophets! Frank Spiller, one of the architects of the CRTC's 1975 community channel policy, talks about the disappearance of access in a 1982 report entitled Community Programming in Canada. "One has the sense, after looking at what has actually happened, that while a genuine effort was actually made to provide citizen "hands-on" access in the early years, this has progressively declined so that today such a form of access is the exception rather than the rule." Spiller's comments describe the central problem of community television in Canada _ it was set up as a Gramscian activist project to promote social change, but it has become as timid, and often as inaccessible, as other privately controlled media. Of course the Canadian community channel is not a complete wasteland. There are people in the cable industry who live out the original ideals of Challenge for Change and access, but they are far from the dominant voice in how community TV is run. One must remember that the limited access approach of Canadian community television originally offered itself up as a solution to the problems of the American electronic commons. As such a solution, it has not fared well. It has not been able to sustain itself as a "social change media space", as a place totally dedicated to the media empowerment of marginalized communities. The reason for this may have something to do with the total abandonment of the electronic commons and guaranteed open access. A mix of free speech and social change ideals may have proven a better approach. To see how such a mix is possible, we should take quick and creative walk with Gramsci on the electronic commons. ************************************************** 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. **************************************************