Make People Visible to Each Other
Earlier this week I joined a Zoom call to explore the role of journalism in creating community. I witnessed beautiful stories about how the media can play an active role in getting needed accurate information to people on the ground in our communities. Powerful ideas like:
Meet people where they are and get them the information they are looking for
Listen and share back (Check out jesikah maria ross’s Participatory Journalism Playbook)
Acknowledge and work to correct the power imbalances in journalism
Choose to put community at the center
Listen to the kind of world people want and help organize to make it happen
It was a book launch for Andrea Wenzel’s new book, Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust. She beautifully set up the event so that she was not doing all the talking. Three women joined her to share their diverse experiences of community-centred journalism. Beautiful stories, but the community gathering around them, keen to explore this empowering way of practicing journalism, was hidden. Our ability to become a community of support to each other was limited to the chat space on Zoom.
“To create and strengthen community it is necessary to connect the community to itself.”
To create and strengthen community it is necessary to connect the community to itself. This is what community-centered journalism offers yet we fell into a common community-deflating facilitation trap: the panel presentation. We did not pull on the threads of community that had gathered to both learn about the material on offer and find the natural connections between ourselves to support us each in our work. As a participant I came away with new ways of thinking about the role of journalism as a vital feedback loop in our communities, but I only saw four people (and they could not see me) at a distance. We all remained separate from each other.
The participants in this gathering were invisible to the panel and to each other.
A sense of community with others does not happen without contact. When we choose how we gather, we choose whether to create opportunities for connections and relationships. It doesn’t matter if we meet online or in person, if we design gatherings to remove or impede contact between people, whether consciously or unconsciously, we remove or impede opportunities to create a sense of community for the people who have gathered.
Our default mode of meeting, whether face-to-face or in online gatherings, is to put the sage on the stage. We often call it dialogue or conversation, but when it only involves a handful of people, even a couple from the crowd, it is not conversation because it does not allow relationships to form or be nurtured. We keep ourselves separate from ourselves. (For more on this, explore The Heat of the Cauldron and The Violent Saviour.)
The purpose of a panel is information sharing.
There is nothing wrong with a panel; it often is the perfect tool when information dissemination is the purpose of the gathering. It is not the right tool when we wish to foster community. When we experience a panel presentation in a face-to-face gathering we can at least see who has gathered, even if we don’t talk to them. When we default to panel mode online, we make the community invisible to both the panel and the community. And if a community can not see itself, it is not a community.
When we use technology like Zoom, even with a panel presentation, when we choose to allow participants to see each other we are allowing the community that has gathered to see each other and make further contact with itself. We choose to enable, rather than disable, community agency.
“When we choose to allow participants to see each other we are allowing the community that has gathered to see each other and make further contact with itself. We enable community agency. ”
To foster community, we need to foster social proximity. We need to do more than share ideas. We need to be in conversation with each other.
A vital starting point for community: make ourselves, and each other, visible to each other.
(One of my local journalists, Elise Stolte, is brilliant: prior to this book launch event she invited local folks to attend the event and set up a place for us to meet afterwards. She enabled local journalists and citizens to find each other; the exploration of participatory journalism in Edmonton just got stronger because she connected parts of the Edmonton community system, both journalists and citizens, to each other.)
REFLECTION:
What are the qualities of gatherings where you do not feel seen and visible?
What are the qualities of gatherings where you feel seen and visible?