Equity of Access, Equity of Content

With the government increasingly paying attention to the 'digital divide'; the growing gap between those you have access and exploit new technologies and those who don't (either because they don't see the need, or don't have access to skills and equipment), and the emergence of local and community TV, it strikes me we need to pay attention not just to attempting to provide skills and access but also equitable access to rich media content production. A couple of resources stand out as moving in the right direction.

Participatory Video

and Our Video

Comments

[Lloyd]

Thanks for these links Helen - I'd love to see you expand on what you think "equitable access to rich media content production" means.

If you haven't already been to one, I think you'd enjoy coming to a London Girl Geek Dinner (being a girl is more important than being a total geek) - the next one is at the Pitcher & Piano in Bishopsgate on April 24th details and sign up page here:

http://www.thehughpage.com/London_Girl_Geek_Dinner

[Green Fairy]

I guess what I mean is that if we do see in the future a publicly funded alternative/compliment to the BBC, in the form of a Public Sector Publisher, and if either IPTV (either on TV or PC) has the penetration to offer equity of access to programming or if the necessary coding and spectrum is made available for Ultra local TV content through digital terrestrial TV (i.e. TV channels at street or community level) then giving those people and communities to broadcast their own programmes – to each other and to wider communities of interest – seems to me like a good idea.

Shoreditch TV, recently launched has some compellingly grim, ultra local content on it, but it’s produced by a fairly slick TV post production crew. Not only is this not really financially sustainable in the longer term if funding isn’t continually pumped into it, but I’d argue that this sort of ultra local rich media is only really meaningful to the community - if the community itself has had a hand in creating it. I’m not talking about focus groups or consultation, but co-design and co-production of local content.

I think you can sacrifice a lot of quality on programming if the content is sufficiently compelling and why not, given the much lauded democratisation of the internet, do the same with Telly? Hand held digicams are becoming cheaper and cheaper, you can get freely downloadable editing software…Offer kit like this in the same places you might offer free internet access and who’s to say what you might end up with… And from the regulators point of view... who’s to say what you might end up with? ;-)

Not sure if that's definitively answering the call to 'equity of access to content production' by any means but I guess a bit more of where I'm coming from.

[Green Fairy]

Oh and thanks very much for Geek dinner link...!