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Wide Angle 21.2 (1999) 126-135


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Alliance for Community Media Keynote
July 10, 1999, Cincinnati, Ohio

Patricia Aufderheide

[Figure 1]  

Pat has got it right. Her words to the national gathering of the Alliance for Community Media, here reprinted, prove her to be as wise about what Public Access is all about as the venerable Everett Parker, and equally plainspoken.

Like Parker in addressing a previous national assembly, Pat stretches our concept of what Access can and should do. Assaults on our territory by commercial giants and local politicians have kept so many of us on the defensive that we have failed to realize what new powers we have at hand with the internet and interactivity. Pat reminds us by finding among our own member organizations examples of innovation that should inspire us all.

Pat's definition of "community" is one I embrace wholeheartedly. Not even in the earliest days of trial-and-error recording with crude substandard black and white video in the basements of mom-and-pop cable systems were we content that our signals were going no further than the franchise lines. Even then we "bicycled" our tapes around the country, dreaming of a time when there would be a better way. I recall quite clearly that at the first national gathering of Public Access pioneers back in 1977 we agreed our efforts were "a rehearsal for the time when we can speak without concern for the artificial limitations of municipal jurisdictions." Today we have the technical means to just what dreamed about. What Pat does here is to challenge us to take full advantage of those means.

--George Stoney [End Page 126]

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today to some of the people I take as my personal heroes, people who are carving out real opportunities for real people every single day, even when none of the hardware will cooperate. The reason I think of you as the heroes of everyday life is that you have decided, for whatever demented reason of your own, to assume the challenge of helping to inhabit the frontier region of television: noncommercial space. You have looked at one of the most powerful engines of capitalist accumulation in history and said, "Oh thanks, I'd rather do the local cricket match," and "I'll take the zoning commission. Oh, yeah, and the guy with the hygiene problem too."

Just thought I would let you know that I'm not totally romanticizing the task here. But really: it's an important and guaranteed-to-be-unappreciated thing to create noncommercial television. Most of us think we know what "television" is: it's commercial TV, and it's so predictable, in its general outlines, that at least in my house, I'd like the last click of the clicker to be a little recorded announcement that says, "Honey, why are we subscribing to cable?" It would save me having to say it every time. [End Page 127]

But the fact is that more people than ever before are subscribing to cable. And they are about to find out that they don't really know what "television" is anymore, because the paradigm that we've all been waiting to change for so long finally is changing.

You are a big part of our hope that, as we stand on the so-called cyberfrontier, and everybody's doing land grabs, there will be electronic, imaginative public domains out there. That there will be creatively cultivated public places in media. That people are given the chance to be respected, and to use the new possibilities, not just be used by them.

If there are open spaces, public domains, public conversations, it won't be thanks to any of the major players. As you know, the period of great uncertainty, of confusion and disorder, of dueling paradigms, and old media versus new media--all that stuff--is coming to an end. The Telecom Act [of 1996] for better and for worse created enough of a regulatory structure for us to see dimly into the...

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