Global citizen media, taking steps toward a global public media 2.0

written by Pat Aufderheide and Jessica Clark

Several new reports from the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), part of the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, showcase strategies that can build capacity for public media 2.0. But it won't be easy.

Citizens are seizing upon social-media tools, faster than oppressive forces in their society are. While war-profiteering governments are adding social media tools to their toolkits, the large majority of innovation in social media use comes from citizens opposing injustice, inequality and government lack of transparency, says a new CIMA report. Digital Media in Conflict Prone Settings offers a realistic yet hopeful analysis on this growing international trend.

For instance, just this week in the South Caucasus, a conflict zone where citizen journalism is on the rise, a new Women's activist blog network Women's Forum came onto the scene. The blog is offered in three languages of Azerbaijani, English and Russian and deals with women's rights in the region.

As well, CIMA has just released several thoughtful reports on the need for media literacy internationally, in order to build citizen awareness of how to make media responsibly and how to understand and analyze it critically. As citizens increasingly turn to social media tools to create alternatives to information sources that often are government-controlled or unreliable, the need for media literacy rises. Center director Pat Aufderheide spoke at the launch of the media literacy reports, calling attention to the need for copyright education as part of media literacy.

Internationally and in the Global South, the CIMA reports show us some of the same trends identified in the Center's white paper Public Media 2.0: Dynamic Engaged Publics. Media practices are increasingly participatory and collaborative, making the line between professional and amateur different.

Just as acutely as in the Global North and particularly in the U.S., the question is whether these trends will or can result in a healthier public culture and a more engaged and active citizenry.

The challenges in the Global North and South are often different. Strong democratic governments in developed economies have traditions of investment in some kind of public media, and can draw on that history as they develop public media 2.0. In the Global South, often citizen media acts in opposition to government, and without relationships to established media—which might be co-opted. Supporting citizen media in the Global South may become an international challenge. Certainly citizen media makers can draw on standards and practices established by organizations such as our partners J-Lab and the Knight Citizen Network. And without government policies that protect freedom of speech and encourage an independent press, citizen media work must always work in an unstable and embattled environment, in which international support for independent media voices is critical.