Community Media Development Challenges

This paper sketches issues of concern for the development of community media as a field of participatory engagement. It is argued here that there is a need to reconceptualise community media using pragmatic models of community development that are able to account for shifting and changing technologies, practices and expectations of social representation and communication. This paper suggests that the present framing of the participatory model of community media engagement needs to be understood in more ways than a deterministic ‘trade-off’ between industry and civic expectations. The prospect is raised of a pragmatic and generative approach to community development using forms of community media as a tool for social interaction and sustainability. Drawing on the pragmatist tradition of Dewey and Rorty, the suggestion here is that attention has to be given to the changing framework of expectation in which community media’s relevance is being questioned in the shift from the arbolic to the rhizomic, the participative to the generative, and the media studies model of analysis to the community development model of accomplishment.