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Community Arts and the Information Technology Revolution In the midst of the chaotic re-definition of our multiple cultural identities, and perhaps because of it, two significant technological advances in human communication have emerged. Relatively in-expensive means for sophisticated media production, and equally in-expensive means for the transmissions of these artifacts from many different people to many different people. Until the desktop multimedia computer and the internet, electronic media production and distribution was the province of either the wealthy, or the few lucky folks who successfully gathered enough of a communities resources to make a public airwave accessible. It was, and to some degree continues to be, the realm of technical and creative experts. The languages of technigue and construction of multiple media artifacts has not reached deeply into the broader culture. The development of these technologies promises an exponentially growing sector of the population will have the means of delivering sophisticated media stories to each other. The tools will become increasingly transparent, driven by voice commands, and with elements of production organized by automated processes into easily accessible databases. But as we know, technological revolution does not have intrinsically revolutionary cultural or social value. Those values develop over time as the users discover a more intrinsic role for the tools within the structure of their making society. The use of new media tools and the internet could develop as the home of the re-production of a commercial culture, where everyone send ads to each other to try and convince each other to purchase their labor, goods or services; the global cybervillage as a global mall. Or, as many of the cyber-utopians have promised, it could be the basis of a transcendent re-alignment of all human society and economic activity-the global cybervillage as a global village. Each of the stories these artifacts would represent are enormously different. The likely scenario is both mall and global village, and neither. Huge public debates are shaping up around the economic and political implications of these models. For artists and educators working with new technologies in a day-to-day contact with a curious public, the real issue is how to proceed with storymaking. Many people, who believe that these technologies do provide some important tools for human interaction, are fighting to have the culture of cyberspace and new media production include a principle of "cultural grounding." To some degree, the world wide web "grounded" itself in that much of the explosion of use of the web had to do with people telling stories about themselves, often sharing intimacy and ideas with strangers across the void of internet connectivity. In these early years of making culture using these new technologies, it is hard to find work that demonstrated the kinds of sensitivity and critical intelligence that community arts practice has sought to address. Adding to the dilemma, many of the practicing community artist facilitators have invested so heavily in encouraging people to reject passive media consumption and make work and receive feedback in face-to-face, social surroundings, that the idea of the "mediation" of these information technologies seems like a step backward. They also have been concerned with the still relatively high cost of the tools. The important differences between old and new media has not been fully explored within the community arts movement.
Joe Lambert is Director of the San Francisco Digital Media Center and Program Director for the Digital Clubhouse Network
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