Efectos de las turberas en el cambio climático

In Chapter 5 I introduced the idea of participation in community generated content within the context of the social practice of community reporting as co-created in part by the organisational level strategies for domestication of social media. The literature review revealed that within the context of community-based ICT initiatives it has long been recognised that the capacity for local communities to follow an empowered path is likely to be directly affected by the economic sustainability challenges and associated wider political contextual constraints that such initiatives face (Loader & Keeble, 2004). Domestication is

From my interviews with staff supporting the Community Reporter Programme, the challenge of economic sustainability was looking likely to impact on future access to the techno-cultural capital dimension of enabling and sustaining participation in the two regeneration areas. In Salford, there was evidence of a particular concern around the capacity to sustain the Social Media Centre which works to co-create participation and the empowerment discussed within this chapter. Teresa in particular talked to me about this issue:

“...it does feel like a luxury in a way to be able to have this centre where people can just come and be themselves and build these really nice informal relationships with people.”

“...it would be nice to think that there were social media centres as part of the Community Reporter Programme because I do think they offer a support outlet, I think physical space is really important, however being realistic and coming back to I mean money it may not be the easiest to sustain in the way that its funded..”

The short term and time limited nature of funding for community development projects and within regeneration generally, was in particular associated with concerns around having raised hopes and then having to withdraw the technological cultural and economic capital and spaces which are implicated in the co-creation of participation and empowerment value, potentially leading to a path of disempowerment and disenchantment:

“..I feel like for change to happen, there needs to be so much work done at a really you know...delivered in a really committed way for the long haul and you can’t just dip in and out of communities and attempt to make a difference and it is a real problem I think again coming back to the funding, the way that projects are funded there isn’t kind of a long term view, even with us we’re funded for 18 months and really you know what can you do in 18 months. You can’t expect to regenerate a person or a community... In terms of us and how we maybe, I just think people need a lot of support and we’ve only been here a year and for our work to come to fruition we’re going to need some more time... and ideally we’re going to know that we’ve got that time because otherwise what you do is you start panicking and take your eye off the ball and go and try and bring some money in from somewhere else and then you don’t deliver on your promises that maybe you set out to people. You’ve made me all depressed now. What are we doing? I sincerely don’t want to be another thing that comes in with a great bang and then just disappears off the radar because that’s just really letting people, it’s really messing with people’s sense of commitment, you know why give anything to this because it’s just going to be another thing that disappears and I really don’t want us to be that...” (Teresa’s heartfelt response to a question around impacts of the Community Reporter Programme within the realm of empowerment and regeneration).

“I think one of the problems is always, the idea of community development and community work is this idea that you want to build something and support people so that when you take a backward step it still continues to go on...So the hope would be of building up so people can continue but I also guess that another issue as well is that what the Community Reporter Programme offers is the people but we can also offer a space but we can also offer access to resources and we can also offer a sort of place to publish content. So it’s like if you have to take back any one of those would people then? It’s like people can have great ideas for making films but if they don’t have any resources to continue, so I guess there’s that element” (David).

One ex-member of staff also felt that the need to chase funding was taking attention away from critical reflection on what was already being built up in Greater Manchester. Staff interviews revealed that training and formal qualifications were likely to be the route to continuity, which David suggested would be likely to change the nature of the ‘audience’ currently engaging with the phenomenon of community reporting. From my own experience of participating in both an informal and a formal qualification form of community reporter course, and through interviews which revealed informal training as a crucial player in participation and empowerment, I did feel that such a route would be likely to disrupt the arrangements working to co-create the ‘feel good’ and ‘reconnecting’ factor. However, at the same time, rewards and recognition including in the form of qualifications were being called for by community reporters and qualifications were identified as important with regard to progression onto careers such as journalism. Importantly, the focus groups revealed, along with my talks with community reporters, that potential for following an empowered path was likely to lie in offering a flexible interpretive path which could be constrained should a pure qualification route emerge.

One member of staff felt that embedding skills for self publishing would address concerns regarding continuity after the life of the project commenting that, “...with social media skills because they’re self publishing skills it can just reshuffle and present itself in a different way if funding for a particular project closes down” (Anonymous). This research participant also related teaching people to set up their own blogs, for example, as “...getting rid of that centralisation of publishing and ideally making those skills and that empowerment sustainable on that kind of level”. However, another member of staff called into question the empowerment and sustainability potential of free and open source software on which the community sites are based. Because of the “nature of open source” he explained: “I think you

that:

“I think it’s often you’ve got to be careful of just saying well just because something’s free, sounds daft but it can actually be more expensive in a way because...people then have to work out how to use the programmes and jump through all the hoops.”

Paul E, a long standing community reporter, expressed that he found the Drupal software, on which BoftheBlog in East Manchester is based, limiting in terms of the extent to which he could control the way his content was being presented. Again Paul raised the idea of something not necessarily being good because it is free and presented his experiences of the software within the frame of the Community Reporter Programme with a sense of loss of control, leading him to set up his own community reporter site, which he has had to pay for:

“You can do it for free of course, but I want a bit more control, because if you do it for free you’ve got no control whatsoever. And then you’ve got people like MCIN who’ll give you a bit of space of somewhere to post it on, so again you are reliant on what they’re using...For me it’s appalling. I hate it with a vengeance.”

Some of the staff and one of the volunteers supporting the programme related building the capacity to download free software to enhancing accessibility. The increasing accessibility of technologies for media content creation and sharing were also being spoken about in relation to opening up opportunities to participate and enhancing the potential for people to follow a more empowered participatory path:

“...the technology that’s available, the prices these days you could set up a media company with a half decent multimedia laptop and a HD video camera for under a grand...I’ve got a mobile phone, Nokia E71, which is currently recording this interview as well. That has the facility to take pictures, film video, voice recorder as well. Your journalists on TV they’re just there with their mobiles recording people, celebrities or whoever just because the technology is there.” (Keith).

“...a lot of people from these sorts of areas don’t have a lot of money. Yeah, they may have enough to scrape by with their dodgy copy of Windows and the internet but, like I say, things like Wordpress and, you’re going to ask me to name some aren’t you? Wordpress, all these free sites and Blogger and stuff like that, yeah, and YouTube accounts. Yeah, I think it’s good” (Mike C).

“… it used to be very expensive once upon a time, being a photographer because it was film and you couldn’t afford to make mistakes. But, now you can take a hundred photographs and if you don’t like them, you just bin them. Or you can take a hundred photographs and one of them might be great. So, a lot of people don’t even realise that” (Tony).

“And the cameras you can get today are wonderful and quite cheap, some of them. You know, cameras, now, these little cameras are fantastic. You can run around, do all sorts and once upon a time, like I was saying about photography before, now everyone can become a film maker. Everyone can make a film. You don’t … it could be about anything. It could be a short, two minute film, or something like that, 30 seconds, but you can do it. That is, thank God for this technology that we have got. It’s opened my eyes and it’s brought out creativity in me” (Tony).

“Now video cameras are going to get to that stage. You press go and you film stuff and you don’t worry about the vision levels and the white balance. It’s all been done before you, and the same levels; it’s all been done for you. And what that means is that ordinary people can do stuff” (Mike S).

At the same time the community reporting world particularly in the Salford context also exposes people to technologies that are less accessible in relation to affordability, implicated in shaping the value associated with participation.

“It’s a chance to use expensive equipment that you wouldn’t get the chance to if you were just doing our own camcorder and that. Some the cameras that I’ve used here you would never get the opportunity to use because they’d be far beyond the working man’s pocket” (Richard).

However, there was some evidence of an ethical dilemma with regards to introducing less accessible technologies and the skills to use them if they could not then be readily transferred into people’s everyday homes and lives.

“We do lend equipment out but sometimes there’s that balance of you know telling people they can do this and then people finding they haven’t got the equipment they need to do it. So that’s an issue, that’s the practical bit of it, they might well not have the equipment to go and do it themselves” (David).

Teresa clearly felt that capacity to transfer technologies and skills into everyday lives was vital seeing value firmly in the process of content creation rather than the product. Below she is referring to video orientated activities which were taking place at the time, introducing people to complex editing software to which I have referred earlier:

“I know Gary always talks about technology in the pocket and I think we’ve been maybe a bit guilty here of setting the bar too high, too soon, so with the new batch of community reporter training, I mean I know again (anonymous) done it because he’s a film maker and so he likes you know good quality product at the end, he likes good quality content and it is very satisfying for people to be involved with that process and come out with something that’s really nice in the end but I think that if it’s not something people can do in their own home then I’m less interested and so we have this bit of kind of tension here, that (anonymous) likes to raise people’s aspirations by getting them involved in this generally but I’m much more interested in saying you

you’ve done it on your camera, on your mobile phone, I’m much more interested in having a go and the process of having a go and starting to think more about of like, ‘oh look I could do something about that or what if I took a photo of that. I want people to engage at that level and I don’t give as much of a toss about what they actually produce...”

The contextual differences between the Community Reporter Programme in Salford and Manchester, linked to financial resource issues, illuminates what I mean by contingent empowerment. One ex-member of staff, for example, talked to me about her perception of stark differences between content production levels in Salford as opposed to in East Manchester. In East Manchester she felt that a lack of support and adequate physical meeting space in comparison to Salford, was acting as a barrier to the motivation among community reporters to produce content emphasising her view of the pivotal role played by the physical meeting space within the Salford context. This view also re-emphasises the possible loss of the Social Media Centre in Salford as a potential arena of disempowerment. The planned expansion of the programme across the North West was also linked by one community reporter to a concern regarding moving attention away from the Greater Manchester domain of community reporting.

This extract from one community reporter interview also reflects a view of a contingent relationship between advancing technologies and organisations like PVM in co-creating enhanced opportunities for ‘people’s media’ within local regeneration areas:

“When that woman came down to the community café a couple of years ago to talk about the fact that the BBC were moving to the Quays, she was from the BBC, right? A man with a huge camera on his shoulder that was interviewing people, okay? She’s a professional. Well, she was only asking questions that we could have come up with. She was filming people and she had equipment then, but now, PVM have got cameras... It was going back to the office and it was being edited. But really we’ve got the gear to do the editing, at the PVM centre” (Mike S).

“So putting that stuff together, and also there were graphics, there was stuff about the unemployment rate in Ordsall and, you know, it being a deprived community. Well okay, I think we can do that. So that’s the thing, isn’t it? What separates professionals from amateurs? It’s partly about experience and training and skills and confidence, but also it’s about having equipment and I think if technology developed to be smaller, to be more portable, to be more accessible and, the vital element, being easier to use... Because the thing is if you’ve got a video camera and there’s six different buttons you have to push

before it will work, then it’s daunting for people. That’s two things. So I think technology is the key, and especially if an organisation like PVM can be the channel for that, if they can get hold of the stuff and bring it to the people and then provide the training and the backup, it really can be people’s media in the future” (Mike S).

When approaching the potential value for empowerment from an employment frame a further question emerged through research participants regarding whether the integration of the social practice of community reporting would lead to employment for ‘ordinary’ people such as the volunteer community reporters interviewed within this research. Paul E, made a particularly poignant point in this regard viewing that:

“..there’s very few success stories whereby this person went on to become, you know a reporter with the BBC or a camera man with...you know I want to see that sort of thing happening. I mean they’ve been going quite a few years now and, so, where are the success stories...whether you want to become a journalist, a cameraman, a photographer, I want to see real success stories where a person had got a job from it, is working in you know media, with the BBC, ITV or a newspaper...” (Paul E).

When I asked an anonymous public sector representative of the New Deal for Communities partnership in Salford about the economic angle of the programme the response seems to provide further grounding for Paul’s concerns:

“Employment is probably, you couldn’t really measure...it’s giving people an opportunity, it’s not really giving them a job. I mean Peoples Voice Media is a social enterprise at the end of the day, they can’t really afford the luxury of taking on lots of people...”

...some of them have gone on and even if it’s not full time employment, they been able to sort of be agency or be contracted in to do pieces of paid work and again you know it’s that relationship, you know they’ve got the link with the University, they’ve got the link with media city and the BBC, so these