Community Media
Community communication in the UK; video, local TV, film, and photography. Heinz Nigg and Graham Wade. London und Zürich 1980.

Articles

Book review by Elizabeth Garrett. Youth in Society. Sept. 1980
(Elizabeth Garrett then was a postgraduate student with the Open University and a committee member of the Aberdeen Broadcasting Association and of the Independent Broadcasting Authority's Educational Advisory Council)

The world is on the edge of the greatest technological revolution of all time; or so we are told. Yet, most of us haven't even begun to cope with the implications of the much simpler communications media already available. In this book, Heinz Nigg and Graham Wade give us a chance to look at a range of initiatives in the UK - photography projects in Birmingham and London, the Liberation Films group, the East London Basement Project, the ambitious (but doomed) Channel 40 experiment and the West London Media Workshop. These six projects use a combination of video, cable television, film, and photography to illustrate how groups of people can become involved in community communication. Using a variety of techniques, the authors recreate what happened in each project, giving us not only the practical details but also the flavour of what it must have been like to be there.
The audience for this book should be a wide one. For me its appeal is that it operates on several levels. If I were a typical community worker, keen but without much time for theorising, I should be inclined to skip the introduction and go straight to the real life material. It is easy to read and I would be sure to find something that put a new slant on my experience. This sense of being in on the action is there for everybody, but the book has more for those of us with time to take a broader view. It raises issues that no student or theorist should ignore. As a course book for beginners it has more potential than most such texts and even the most jaded communications expert would be stimulated, I should have thought, by the freshness and clarity of its presentation.
However you approach it, this is a book to make you think, but it is also a book to make you feel. This for me is one of its great strengths and where it scores most heavily over more conventional research. We are let in on the despair as well as the excitement of the participants in the different experiments.
The authors face up to the uncertainty, the insecurity, the inconsistency, the messiness of most community projects and have resisted the temptation to sum up and assess in a pseudo-scientific way. (...)
It is good to find a book about the media which gives some thought to its own medium - it never ceases to amaze me how many books on communicating actually communicate so badly! In this compilation both text and illustrations are used well to reinforce and emphasise what the authors believe to be important. (...)


Book review by Steve Bassam. TV + Home Video (1980)

(...) The video projects are of particular interest. Situated in Tower Hamlets, North Kensington, Milton Keynes, these projects have done much in their localities to break down barriers to organisation on a wide range of issues. The project workers provide a service of skills that enables community organisations and groups the means of self expression on issues and problems that affect them.
In practical terms this has meant advertising video's existence, explaining its use, advising on how to use it, teaching groups how to get the best results from it, and generally how to script and edit tapes; and finally explaining and involving groups in discovering the best method of distributing and showing tapes to audiences. Community video workers in this form become an "enabling link helping a group of people put their message across to whatever audience they want to reach".
What Nigg and Wade's research indicates is that video is a medium of rich potential, that is just waiting to be released. They make it clear that where ex- and un-professionals have become dedicated to introducing some control over the usually authoritarian medium of TV, and where monopoly of that resource can be broken down, spirited initiatives are possible. Community media implies that low-gauge video is far from being just a toy invented to enable the nuclear family better use of programmed TV schedules.
Community media chronicles the problems that face the projects at present. It leaves the reader with two contradictory feelings. Optimism that here is a method of communication that is capable of challenging the 'status quo' management function of modern TV, and pessimism that there's no real chance of this, because in no way is the money available to mount the challenge. But as my mother once reminded me, from little acorns...

Buchbesprechung von Rolf Käppeli. In: Cinema Nummer 3/1980

(...) Nigg und Wade's Buch ist keine trockene Abhandlung. Die beiden reportieren ihre eigenen Erfahrungen, die sie als Teilnehmer einzelner Projekte gemacht haben. Sie lassen die neuen englischen Medienpioniere ausführlich selber zu Wort kommen, in Interviews, Berichten und Bildern, das Prinzip der community media work gleichsam aufs Buch übertragend: die Betroffenen nämlich selber zu Wort kommen, sie am Entstehen eines neuen Medienproduktes teilnehmen lassend. Die einzelnen Projekte, in ihrem sozialen, psychologischen und geschichtlichen Entstehungsprozess konkret dargestellt, laufen fast wie ein Film vor den Augen des Lesers ab. Nigg und Wade berichten bis ins einzelne technische und psychologische Detail, ohne dass einem beim Lesen langweilig wird; denn bei der Arbeit mit Medien in kleinen Kommunikationsnetzen sitzt der Teufel tatsächlich oft im Detail. Ab und zu erfährt man Dinge, die aus zeitlicher Distanz trivial erscheinen: etwa, dass Video sich nicht sehr gut geeignet habe, um auf Veranstaltungen hinzuweisen; ein Flugblatt hätte dem Zweck besser gedient. Dann aber spürt man wieder, wie wichtig hier jeder kleine Lern- und Erfahrungsschritt für die Entdecker der Community Medien ist, dass sich da eine Art von offener politischer Medienschule ereignet, die allerdings kaum noch etwas mit unserem Begriff von Schule gemein hat.