Abstrakt
Community media praxis shows the importance of locality and community, concepts which have a long history of interconnectedness, although the meanings of these concepts have turned out to be quite fluid. For instance, more contemporary reconceptualisations of community have supplemented the once dominant structural-geographical component with non-geographical and cultural components.
Combined with the emphasis on globalisation, this raises the question about the status of place, and how to avoid the risk of the erasure of place. In community media praxis, this also raises the question how the notion of the local and small-scaled is articulated, and how it works for and against these media organisations.
The introduction of glocalisation has been a first attempt to strengthen the importance of the local and place, but its unavoidable emphasis on the global (as a starting point of analysis) nevertheless generates a one-sided perspective, which is not helpful to understand the way community media deal with locality and community. Globalisation needs to be complemented by an inversed analytical approach, in which the local is taken as the point of departure, and the global is added as a second component.
In this way, glocalisation gains a mirror image called translocalisation (Appadurai 1995), which allows me to focus more on the dynamics of the local and the global, using the local as a starting point. The concept of the translocal allows developing a perspective on community media that shows how this diversity of media organisations (a hybrid mix of four theoretical approaches and practical objectives, which each have separate labels: community, alternative, civil society and rhizomatic media) is dealing with locality and community, and how they are trying to escape the confinements of the local.
In order to illustrate the translocal nature of these participatory organisations, two case studies will be analysed.