E-Media Tidbits

Silly Jilly via Flickr (CC license) What if we are "Wii bowling alone" -- and like it?

I'm still at MIT for a conference of the Knight News Challenge winners, hosted by the Center for the Future of Civic Media. I've also been staying with my friend Lisa Williams, a longtime citizen journalist and founder of Placeblogger. I've been having an ongoing conversation with Lisa and others here about why it can be so difficult to get many people in a community engaged with local issues (government, programs, culture, etc.) -- let alone getting more than a select few contributing their own local citizen journalism.

Having worked on a community site that's faced its own struggles with community engagement, I have to ask: Do most people really care much about local community news?

I realize there's enormous lip service given to the value of community news and info -- by journalists, news organizations, and even most community members. Most people say they value it. The may even think they value it. But if they really valued it, wouldn't far more of them make more effort to find it, read it, share it, and preserve and expand it -- as well as to create their own?

Williams posited in a conversation yesterday, and I think she has a point, that in fact perhaps most people really consider community news and civic information to be a nice-to-have, rather than an absolute necessity. There's a dissonance between people's values as they envision or proclaim them, and as they live them.

Similarly, in a recent comment to E-Media Tidbits, Lee Rozen observed, "Many of the residents of the suburbias have a limited feeling of community about their real world place of residence, let alone seeing an online community focused on place as something important to them."

My colleague Adam Glenn, who's sitting next to me, just made a good point: "I think people really do care about community information, like who's selling their house or whose dog just died. But do they think of that as 'news?' Probably not." In other words, that information comes through conversation, but not necessarily "media" (online or otherwise).

...I'm not saying any of this is correct or true. But I do think that if we're going to keep exalting and promoting civic media and community news and info, we should closely and --above all --skeptically examine how much they matter in the real world, to real people. That's about observing behavior, not just asking people what they think or believe.

What do you think -- and even more importantly, what do you actually see and do in your own life and community? Might community news and info matter to journalists and a handful of bloggers and local activists far more than to communities at large? If it went away, how much would people's lives really change?