aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Marginalizing our media

A friend sends this article from the New York Times about “a gender-bending camp, low-budget soap opera” on the Public Access channel in the Bronx called “Strange Fruits.”

Given what Congress plans to do, this may be the last of the genre of MSM stories that define Public Access Television as irrelevant hokum but it is not the first.

In 1991 I was the Executive Director of a Community Television Center (my preferred term) and I reviewed a couple of stories on Public Access, one from Entertainment Tonight and one from MTV. I’ve posted them on YouTube because I note that we’re beginning to hear the same kind of commentary on the citizen-produced media of today.

Here’s Nicholas Carr on the User Generated Wasteland (note again the terminology, we’re all “users” like drug-addicts or parasites; I prefer citizen produced media) explaining that because he doesn’t see a business model for this stuff, it’s illegitimate.
Here’s Slate, more lovingly but still inherently condescendingly, in an article titled The Fab Four Million on how we’ve revived the art of lip-synching. There are more of these kinds of stories everywhere, I should start a category to track them.

Meanwhile, here’s a sample of the kind of crap the cable networks fill their time with, then mock us for watching. Someone please tell them that we know the local church choir is not the technical equivalent of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but that does not stop us from appreciating the joy, and artistry, of a community coming together to raise its voice in song.

They may stop us again this time, but I for one am confident that one day one way or another we will find a way to have our non-commercial, non-mediated voices heard.