A MEMORY OF OUR MEDIA, PAST AND FUTURE1

Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron

I’ve been invited to do a short presentation for the opening session

of Our Media 5 Conference in Bangalore. The main reason for this is that I
am here the only one that has had the opportunity of attending the four
conferences of Our Media / Nuestros Medios organised in the past. I’ve
been part of the initial group that met in 2001, and I’ve witnessed the
growth of the network and it’s expansion to other regions. This gives me
the opportunity to be more conscious of the risks and opportunities that
the network has to face from now on.

This is the fifth conference. We started in 2001, in Washington DC,

with a one-day pre-conference, previous to a larger congress of the
International Communication Association (ICA), which is mainly an
organisation of scholars from the United States. About fifty people, mainly
from North America, South America, Australia and Europe, met for the first
time with the idea of creating a network of academic and activists to
discuss and work on issues of community media, alternative media,
citizen’s media or radical media, as you would like to name it. Clemencia
Rodriguez and John Downing, the organisers, were instrumental to put
that group together, with the help of other colleagues such as Nick Couldry
and Chris Atton from England.

In 2002 we met again, this time in Barcelona (Spain), and the group
was enriched with the participation of new colleagues. We did this meeting

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Paper presented at the opening session of the Our Media 5 Conference on “Democracy and Citizen’s Media” - Bangalore
(India), 5-9 December, 2005
 Our Media 5 – A memory Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron

once more as a one-day pre-conference to a larger congress, this time of

the International Association of Media and Communication Research
(IAMCR). The obvious reason for doing the first two conferences along with
a larger event, ICA or IAMCR, is that most of our colleagues from
universities in Europe, North America and Australia, could get funding for
their air tickets. Otherwise it would have been difficult to meet. Some
other colleagues from Third World countries benefited from a grant that
Our Media got from the Ford Foundation for the first two years, which was
later renewed for a third year. Our website was established with the help
of John Higgins, and many colleagues contributed with documents and
photos.

New and interesting developments took place in 2003, when we

Latin Americans suggested meeting for the first time in a country in the
southern hemisphere, in Colombia. Our Media 3 meeting was not
organised along with a larger conference, but together with a national
communication conference with active participation of Colombian
communication scholars, activists and students. For the first time we had
real local partnership: the Universidad del Norte, in Barranquilla. This
meant a whole new development for Our Media, since the organisation of
the conference was shared with local institutions and the participation
largely increased in numbers. We had more interaction with Colombian
colleagues, and we had, for the first time, the opportunity to do field trips
to visit local projects and initiatives of social development. This was also
the first time that an Our Media / Nuestros Medios conference extended
over two days and included field visits.

Encouraged by the experience, we held Our Media 4 in another

country of Latin America, Brazil. We met in Porto Alegre, the city that is
famous for hosting the World Social Forum where social movements of the

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 Our Media 5 – A memory Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron

world meet every year. Our Media 4 conference linked again with an
IAMCR congress; however, we had the opportunity of counting on local
support from activist groups who organised field trips, ICT laboratories, a
live community radio in the campus of the university2, and other parallel
activities. For the first time our programme extended over three days,
including the conference and field trips. More practitioners and activists
joined Our Media / Nuestros Medios, which in the first two years was very
much a network of academics.

What is new and important in Bangalore?

There are several important new developments to signal about Our Media
5, now starting in Bangalore.

1. This is the first time an Our Media / Nuestros Medios conference is

being held in Asia, the first time it is organised outside of the
Western part of the world. In fact, when we suggested in Porto
Alegre that Asia should be next, some colleagues reacted saying: “is
too far”. I replied: “Too far from where?” However it became feasible
thanks to the initial contacts of Ellie Rennie, Jo Tacchi, Dorothy Kidd
among other, and made possible by the Indian committee that was
later formed, and with the contributions from Juan Salazar and very
few other members from the international committee.
2. This is the first time the Our Media conference is not tied to any
other event, and it stands on its own feet.
3. This is the first time the organisation of the conference has been
largely in the hands of the hosting country, lead by a group of local
institutions, mainly Voices and the United Theological College.

2
The Our Media conference and the IMCR congress were both hosted by the Pontificia Universidade Catolica de
Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS).

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 Our Media 5 – A memory Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron

4. This is the first time that we are holding a four-day conference,

including the field trip.

Why Our Media / Nuestros Medios is important?

This is a network of academics and activists, people involved in

communication and social change, who recognise that a big gap still exists
between the academic studies on communication and the needs for social
change.

Most university departments self-labelled as “social communication”

are narrowly oriented to conventional mass media: press, television, radio,
as well as advertising, public relations and marketing. My rough estimate
is that 50,000 new journalists are produced by these universities every
year. Out of 2,000 “social communication” departments or faculties around
the world, I found scarcely 15 that have programmes specifically related to
communication for social change and development, some at the graduate
level, some at the Master Degree level, and some at the PhD level. Only
one academic institution offers communication for development
programmes at the three levels: the University of The Philippines at Los
Baños. These precious 15 universities are training a new generation of
communicators for social change.

I would like to briefly point to the difference between a journalist

and a communicator for development and social change, as I see it.
Whereas a journalist uses the media he or she has been trained for (radio,
TV or print), and decides alone on the contents of an article, a
documentary or a poster, a communicator has the capacity and motivation
to be a facilitator of social change, and he or she is equipped with
something very few journalists have: a strategic perspective of

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 Our Media 5 – A memory Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron

communication for development and the conviction that communication is

not about messages but about processes of transformation and social
change. Whereas a journalist may be able to write good articles and
prepare radio programmes and messages on tuberculosis, for example; a
communicator will be able to facilitate a national strategy to combat TB,
using various forms of communication and media, but above all, involving
through participation and dialogue communities and institutions concerned
with the issue.

The cruel paradox is that while most of universities are training

journalists, the need of communicators for social change is enormous. The
demand from development projects and the offer from universities do not
meet. When I was in charge of the communication and information
programme in UNICEF Nigeria during the early 1990s, and later in UNICEF
Haiti, I couldn’t find communicators when I needed them. I received
dozens of CVs from good journalists, but they had no experience working
with communities. I didn’t need a good writer or a good designer, as much
as I needed someone that could facilitate a process of participatory
communication.

Most of us, communicators for development and social change, were

actually trained by working during many years at the community level with
participatory approaches. Many of my colleagues with a similar profile
come from fields apart from journalism; they come from rural extension
work, from health work, from social activism. I’m myself a filmmaker by
training, and a journalist by practice. However, we have been trained as
communicators by the communities we worked with.

The above shows why Our Media is so important. Our Media has the
opportunity to contribute building the bridge between the practice of

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 Our Media 5 – A memory Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron

communication for social change and the way communication is taught in

academic institutions. Our Media can help to bridge the gap between
demand and offer.

Looking at the moving horizon

The horizon is always a moving target, the more we approach to it, the
further it moves. But that is the beauty of it, because if we ever catch-up
with the horizon, there would be no more room for dreams and utopia.

This fifth conference of Our Media in Bangalore is a turning point. From

here on, Our Media can gather new strength to continue, or collapse and
die. It will depend on us; nobody out there will care about the future of
Our Media as much as we who made the effort to come to Bangalore and
those that couldn’t come but are committed to the network.
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen it in Porto Alegre, some colleagues have
disengaged, partly by fatigue, partly because they embraced other
projects, other dreams. Maybe this continuous renewal of the Our Media
network constitutes its main potential.

The next horizon of Our Media will be decided during this week, in
consultation with the larger group of those who for several unfortunate
reasons could not come. Although it has not been a common practice in
previous Our Media meetings, I dare to suggest the organisers that this
conference crafts a short declaration on our horizon in the future; a
declaration that should also mention our rejection of discrimination policies
that prevented some of our colleagues from Colombia to attend the
conference.

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 Our Media 5 – A memory Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron

I want to emphasize that the active and critical participation of every one
in this meeting is crucial. We are all plain participants here, with the same
rights, even if this is the first time we meet. We need to express our
views, critical as they may be. We need to think together as a network.

Our Media conferences are not the same as any other academic
conferences where each one comes to tell the others about the great work
she or he is doing in his country or in her community. The accounts of
concrete experiences are useful, but we need to go further into discussing
the principles that guide our work in communication for social change. This
conference should not be a series of monologues and reports, but a true
discussion on the ideas that drive us forward.

As much as we want to learn about what the others are doing, we need to
be more substantial. Sharing information is fine, but establishing a
dialogue of ideas and ideals is even better.

The Our Media website: http://www.ourmedianet.org