So, New America Media is on a slide in the Women’s Voices and Media Policy panel, the Free Press presenter is talking about the importance of the internet. She continues saying how after spending time on these non-mainstream sites, she can’t go back to mainstream media. There is an analogy about over-produced music versus indie rock. Interesting.

Free Press: “What we (public) want from Internet: neutral net, open architecture, high-speed [US is 15th in the world when it comes to Internet speed!], ubiquitous, low cost and close the digital divide. Corporations want to control/take over Internet, i.e., Comcast blocks BitTorrent and AT&T censors live Pearl Jam lyrics criticizing Bush administration.”

Josh Breibart of People’s Production House, is giving his take on media policy. He says media literacy should have a media policy component—good idea. He offers an icebreaker: Start with asking people to draw pictures of their experiences with the Internet to understand it. This video: The Internet is Serious Business is a good tool for explaining how it all works. Breitbart suggests building community, a la Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Collective.

Mari Castaneda, professor at UMass Amherst, did a course on Spanish-language media and wanted to use it to look into media policy. In this course, her biggest goal was to engage Latinas as media activists, using a transnational lens since many of the students were from Puerto Rico. She says Spanish-language media is controlled by only two corporations, as opposed to the five for English-language. Seems like a lot of work here is addressing the digital divide in the Latino community. Interesting stats about children’s access to the Internet: 30 minutes a day versus 30 minutes a week. Castaneda also talks about difficulties of having immigrant women deal with FCC since it is all in English. Also, says Spanish-language radio is often extremely sexist, in a violent way. Interesting: How is Latino sexism being perpetuated in these national Spanish-language radio programs?

This is all super relevant to the work of New America Media, especially regarding projects like LA Beez—part of our digital divide initiative—trying to get ethnic media on the web. But I think we should do more organizing around this on the youth media side as well. How can we organize young people to make sure their communities have digital access? – Neelanjana Banerjee