Digital Arts Service Corps - Portland Community Media

AAAAAt Laaaaaast

Denise Cheng — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:58:20 +0000

Nine months since I took the digital storytelling class at PCM, I have finally finished my digital story!
One of the on-call media ed instructors, Peta Mni came up with the last component of my piece: the title. Yes, it was that hard to come up with one.

Portland Speaks: The genesis of the idea

Denise Cheng — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:33:39 +0000

From July onward, I've spent much of my time at Portland Community Media working on a proposal for a project that would allow immigrants and Millennials to create media at low-cost anywhere and at anytime. To do this, we focused on the cell phone as a media creation device and the Internet as the primary distribution platform with the hope of television as a second one. Here's how the idea began:

After coming back from Africa, I have a deeper appreciation for the immigrant experience. As a minority, I could only superficially understand the immigrant struggle till my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho. In addition to this, there’s very little ethnic diversity in Portland, and I was curious why, out of the major West Coast cities, it had been excluded from the richness of cultural infusion.
My first day on the job as a CTC Vista, I had a talk with Jason, who managesthe government production side of PCM. I was asking about immigrant representation on PCM channels and programming done by immigrants, of which Jason said there was very little. We talked about the lack of outreach by PCM to immigrant communities in the area even though it’s in line with the mission, and we discussed the need for their presence in community media in Portland.
Having come from print journalism, I have a penchant for paper. Bea, my supervisor, shares this as a bookbinder. We discussed what would be the most comfortable and familiar medium for immigrants. Despite my position as the New Media Vista, I really wanted to bring print into PCM. We decided that, of all forms of media, paper is the most familiar in the world and probably the most comfortable form of communication that anyone can opt for.
Since I was hired on to be the New Media Vista without really understanding what the buzzword of “New Media” and “Web 2.0” were, I was also researching heavily during my first couple of weeks on the job. I read a lot about social media and also came across this website focusing on the phone as an activist tool. It was incredibly interesting for me to learn how phones were being used for flash mobbing and information distribution in third world countries.
At the time, my boyfriend was also about to replace his shitty phone and was intently scouring the Internet for new cell phone technology and customer ratings. I asked him about transferring contacts, SMS’, and other forms of data from his old phone to a new one. I remembered how all my phones used to have a voice memo feature and the short amount of time it allowed for recording. I figured this was anywhere between 1-10 minutes because I used to accidentally hit the voice memo feature on my old cell phone while on calls. I realized how that might be a possibility for new media use for immigrants and thought it might be appropriate technology because of what I saw in Lesotho: Everyone has a cell phone regardless of how remote they are, and a lot of it is driven by the phone as a status symbol. "Everyone" is a bit of an exaggeration, but I later learned that the most familiar and bestselling communicative technology device in the world is the cell phone, which suggests that the phone is at least more familiar than other new communication media.
I started to test the technical side of this idea with phones that belonged to coworkers and friends. The goal was trying to figure out the average amount of time that the memo feature records, and that’s where I discovered that, in fact, not all phones have voice memo features, and phones range in recording time from a minute to whatever amount of memory is left on the phone.
It was around that time that Bea put Jacob and me together on a project to figure out how PCM could address the needs of both immigrant communities and Millennials. PCM has a very hard time retaining Millennials at the facility, and yet they are some of the most media active and social justice oriented people in Portland.
Eventually, I stumbled upon a social networking site called “Utterz,” (now known as Utterli), and although the hope of the voice memo feature was zero-cost media creation, it seemed that a system like Utterli (people dial in to record memos and interviews) was the best compromise between cell phone plans and incongruencies in cell phone features. Utterli, however, is a free form social media site, and Portland Speaks has more of a focus in the form of target groups.
However, following a group brainstorm and dissection, Jacob and I felt somewhat confused and disillusioned since our parameters were loose and our ideas were being scrambled, so I set out to define the original idea and it burgeoned into the attached proposal and illustrations. It was then decided that the idea would be submitted for the Knight Foundation's News Challenge grant (our application can be found here).
All in all, this has been an incredible learning process with lots of creativity but also some incredibly devastating downs. Welcome to the real world, I guess.

A bit of crossposting on digital storytelling

Denise Cheng — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:48:50 +0000

Thought I'd share a more appropriate post that I wrote for the PCM blog a couple of days ago. This is probably what I should be submitting for my field reports...

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Digital storytelling: The wonders never cease

10 Oct. 2008

I've had the privilege of being part of two digital storytelling workshops at Portland Community Media: once as sort of a teacher's aide and the second time as a participant.

I first heard of digital storytelling in 2006 as I was rounding the corner to my last semester in college. I was home for winter break and decided to take advantage of my locale to learn about media centers in the San Francisco Bay Area. I met Theeba Soundararajan of Third World Majority (TWM) and Jessica McCoy, who was the CTC Vista for Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) at the time.

Both were storytelling organizations with slightly differing missions. They're media centers focused on expression, but TWM was more focused on giving minorities and immigrant communities the media tools that have traditionally been used to ignore, suppress or misrepresent them.

Theeba opened my eyes to digital storytelling as a tool for those who have been sidestepped and wrongly represented on the local and national scene. As a person who has trained in journalism, I've seen much of this and even experienced it, which can be very jolting for someone who plays on both sides.

I've had a couple of experiences now, but the most shocking was after returning from Lesotho as a Peace Corps volunteer and hearing an NPR Marketplace broadcast entitled Chinese businesses rile Lesotho locals. To establish the scene, there's a lot of resentment against the Chinese by Basotho because the Chinese have been economically successful there while the Basotho are cementing themselves in poverty. As a Chinese American, I experienced a hefty amount of misdirected discrimination. The Marketplace broadcast seemed to side with the idea that the Chinese were snatching up every economic opportunity, leaving nothing for the Basotho. Granted, there are sketchy business decisions that some Chinese have made, but the Basotho are in their particular position most of all because of lack of entrepreneurial spirit (my official title as a PCV was "Small Business Advisor"). It was disturbing to hear the NPR report not because I share a physical appearance with the Chinese, but because I had experienced both sides and could not believe the lopsided situation an NPR show represented. Talk about a group that's exploited Lesotho's economy, where was any mention of South Africa and their complete infiltration into Basotho commodities and cultural goods? In many ways, Marketplace legitimized the discrimination against Lesotho's Chinese community. I still haven't heard a peep after writing a letter to the editor, not even acknowledgement of receipt.

Of course, this goes on everyday. There are countless misrepresentations in the news, and while it's hard to combat if you have limited media resources at your hand (which I've also experienced), it's even harder when you have none. In that case, there's no reason to even cultivate an audience.

Jessica and I spent much more time talking about the role of storytellers and story holders. Storytellers in our society can be seen as journalists, filmmakers, politicians--those who don't tell their own stories but tell other people's. Story holders are the people whose stories are being told. The big question for me at the time was if storytellers and story subjects share the intent of confronting readers with a question, is it better for the storyteller to tell it or the story holder? An unresolved question, but ultimately, we came to the conclusion that as nonprofessional storytellers, story holders have much more power to eschew pretenses and rules, dramatic questions, rhetoric or otherwise. Doing personal storytelling also serves to empower people in addition to getting the word out.

Back to the present-day, where I've been a part of two digital storytelling workshops. The first digital storytelling workshop I attended was a partnership between PCM and CDS. One particular person's story was about her predicament as an illegal immigrant who grew up in the US and knows no other home than the States. She doesn't qualify for college scholarships (a heavy burden for any student, especially spotlighted now in our recent economic crisis) because she'd have to prove citizenship. She speaks of looking "American" and being Latina, of being a high-achieving high schooler in AP courses with other Americans who are blind to her ethnicity and asked why "they" don't just go "home" and immigrate legally. At worst (and it's quite a short step in the case of illegal immigrants everywhere) she risks deportation with slim chances of return. At best, she can hope for sanctuary and some financial alleviation if the Dream Act passes.

Our instructor for the second workshop played this person's story as an example of digital storytelling. Several participants mentioned how uncomfortable the story made them feel, how her voice was trembling so much they thought she'd shatter into tears at any moment over her situation. They didn't know what to make of the story. Aside: I love awkward movies (The Squid and the Whale is a fantastic one), the tension around the white elephant in the room; I'm certain that awkwardness is an art itself in the art of film and acting. But that day in the second digital storytelling workshop, as I listened to the person's story again and heard the comments after, I realized that story holders have a power that storytellers do not. Because they're not ideas represented by actors and polished words, story holders have the power of truth in the voiceover room through the emotions they can't mask. It would be a shame if they could remove themselves.

Check out:

The Oxford Project - A fantastic example of what storytellers and storyholders can do together.