Martin Williams on Thirdcoast!

The Thirdcoast Festival have Martin Williams on their frontpage – hurray! Martin trained me up in my first week in the BBC. He does creative features for Resonance FM – and tries to infiltrate the BBC with creativity too ;-)

Here's hoping being featured by Thirdcoast gives him the recognition he deserves (like an award or two!).

London Chinese Radio Media Literacy Project

London Chinese Radio is doing a project on Media Literacy. I've been roped in to making some content for it too, and I'll not be in London for much longer so I'd better get the finger out!

Media Literacy can be difficult to define. The whole concept is based round community strengthening. But the name is quite daunting, as much for people who take part in community Radio as anyone.

At the first meeting on the project, no one really had an idea. For some, literacy meant to do with books and literature. After a while, the idea of ability was generally accepted.

Then there came the problem of media. If you weren't a media student or practitioner, then media was too distant a term.

Yet everyone thought "Online Literacy/ability" was important to them.
This does point to the age range of our users, plus the fact that immigrants tend to use the internet a lot (speaking from personal experience here!).

It's a good project – but without even a studio, it's a real pressure to reach the proposal's full potential.

I feel without a building, it's difficult for the broadest community value to be maintained at a clear level. When we all go home and use our own facilities to make our own content, we use our own values and goals. That's what podcasting and blogging is about. Podcasting is like YouTube – you can chose to only use established broadcast content if you like. Blogging is personal, though builds up a sense of community in who comments on, links to, and quotes your blog.
But community radio is about good old fashioned community centres, in a geographical location. The common language of community media should be the place and the way of life.

But all that's separate from the problems of East-West – we white Europeans might not give a toss what the people in the Chinese Embassy think. But for people from the PRC, the embassy staff are to be respected (I'm more "laugh/cry" about them, but anyway). Likewise the difference in production values.

And of course, all us media types have huge egos, and every one of of thinks "I'm right"!