Anyone Can Do YouTube, but Not Everyone Can Do Public Access: Urban Politics, Production Tools, and a Communications Infrastructure to Call Home

摘要

Scholars have recognized how new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have reduced and transformed barriers to producing and circulating community-based media. Yet community media projects tend to apply these technologies within established communities whose histories have been shaped by broader socio-spatial factors. This article draws from critical geography and studies of technology and infrastructure to reconceptualize the problem of media accessibility. Rather than programs for addressing disparities in technology or training, community media projects would benefit from recognizing how significantly their media production activities rely on local communication infrastructures and a collective sense of home. This article uses a case study of public access television in San Francisco to demonstrate how cable and telecommunications policy, urban redevelopment, and community-based media groups co-constitutively determine a scale of political extensibility by providing broader access to decision-making arenas beyond local TV programming.