Tomorrow I will be interviewing Jason Crow, access coordinator at Cambridge Community Television (CCTV) and creator of the Media Policy Blog, to get a community media perspective on local efforts to fuse media activism and new digital technologies with social change. CCTV is a leader in community access television and at the forefront of a new wave of innovation concerning digital platforms and increased access to autonomous media. Jason will no doubt have a lot to contribute to this discussion and I’m looking forward to hearing his thoughts on where we are headed in terms of technology and activism.

I’m just finishing Dan Gillmor’s “We the Media” – a really interesting read. He is definitely coming from a journalist’s perspective—an intriguing mix of a mainstream journalist’s perspective and a tech-saavy media democracy advocate—but has a lot of really great insight into placing new technologies into their social context and exploring how different groups with different goals and mindsets use and respond to new technological trends, specifically the expanding realm of citizen reporting and open publishing.

I’m looking forward to being able to devote more time to this study after next week when my first session of summer classes ends and to get out and talk with more people working on media projects. I’m also thinking it may be time to re-read “Free Culture” by Lawrence Lessig, to revisit some of the themes around creative control and copyright and see how those concepts may apply to this study on a local level.

Check back for my thoughts on my conversation with Jason after tomorrow.

I’m setting up this blog to serve as a forum and an archive for a project I’m working on this summer for school. Using Boston-area media activism and innovation as a case-study, I’m researching and writing a paper on the varying concepts of “tactical media”, the in-built politics of digital media technologies, and how both of these are being used locally for social change.

It is my hope that in addition to providing a place for me to organize my thoughts this blog can develop into a discussion that includes a larger community of people interested in Internet politics and technology for social change.