Community Media

This concise text will help readers understand the ongoing fascination with do-it-yourself media around the world. Ellie Rennie explains how community media has, since its beginning, challenged the mainstream. A clear and useful guide for students, Community Media lays out the terrain in which community media theory and advocacy have located themselves, including the ideals of participation, community, and social change.

This highly readable book on community media provides a welcome fusion of theory and practice. Illustrations of grassroots initiatives from around the world are blended together in a manner highlighting the diversity and commonality of community media. Rennie's study will be of value for a wide range of readers—students, scholars, station volunteers, and social activists—concerned with the meaning and possibilities of this form of mediated communication., A highly scholarly book drawing upon worldwide examples of digital broadcasting, community broadcasting (both legitamate and priated), the interplay between comunity and network society, and much more. Community Media is a lynchpin to better understanding improved societal communications in the twenty-first century, and is a welcome addition to college library sociology shelves and media studies refereance texts., Community Media offers an excellent back-story for contemporary debates around media access, participation and empowerment., Ellie Rennie has collected more data about community media in different parts of the world than all other community media scholars combined; and without doubt Community Media: A Global Introduction reflects this. The organization of the book around the two axes of geography and theory make this an excellent volume to introduce readers to community media scholarship and practice from a truly global perspective., The book is a very valuable contribution to community media studies that gives a truly global perspective on the issues emerging from policy and academic debates, providing an important groundwork for future research, and surely an essential reading for students and researchers in the area of critical media studies, as well as for community media practitioners worldwide.

Ellie Rennie is a Research Fellow in the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Swinburne University of Technology.