Human Communication

Human's need for communication

Introduction

The introduction of cable television in the United States represented an unprecedented opportunity for citizens to exercise media policy-making power but required that they translate, general federal, guidelines into solutions tailored to local conditions. This moment thus provides an example of bottom-up, vernacular policy making that challenges top-down approaches to policy. This issue explores the processes of local policy translation including metaphors of outcomes constructions of community identity, and, power, and, struggles over locally dominant understandings of the community within local political-economic conditions. It also draws conclusions about the conditions within which a media-minded public can emerge and organize itself for reform, the relative power of utopian and dystopian rhetoric in citizen policy making, the conflict between citizen activism and bureaucratic governmental, and the mechanisms by which citizens might secure policy advantages relative to economically and politically more dominant parties. Therefore, all issues related to Human Communication will be discussed in detail.

Discussion

In 1926, as the pay-for-airtime advertising model was becoming increasingly entrenched in American broadcasting. If the public's access to the airwaves had to be controlled from a content perspective, the public's role in policy making, uniformly contained, and, circumscribed. There were frequent citizen-led policy initiatives at the local level in the early days of wireless, or seeking to reduce noise pollution and interference, but these early policy efforts, largely superseded by the Radio Act of 1927, which placed most regulation of broadcasting into the hands of federal officials once and for all. Despite this federalization of media policy, the public continued to have a nominal role in broadcast regulation under the system of local trusteeship established by the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), as guarantors of the trustee's performance. It was the citizens' job to alert regulators if a licensee was not broadcasting in the public interest, making local listeners the ostensible arbiters of appropriate content. However, even this watchdog role for the public was largely illusory since, first; citizens had no standing before the Commission to challenge license renewals prior to 1966. Secondly, the ultimate decision about whether broadcasts were in the public interest remained with regulators in Washington, not with the local community itself.

In light of this long history, it is nothing short of astounding that, in the late 1960s, a window opened in American media for ordinary citizens to take significant control of both content and policy for the first time in decades. This was the social, economic, political, and technological rupture known as community-antenna television (CATV) or, more commonly, cable. Thanks to changes in Federal policy pertaining to the negotiation of rights-of-way in local jurisdictions around the country, the public now potentially had a say in the terms and conditions of local cable television franchises. Although this power, structured by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) constraints, it provided an important new role for citizens in shaping media policy by identifying and negotiating for local communicational needs and desires. In addition, the provision of public, educational, and government access channels on those local ...