ABSTRACT
Citizen Media and Public Spaces and the series in which it appears are part of a broad vision that extends beyond traditional scholarship to engage with the lived experience of unaffiliated individuals and collectives as they reclaim public and digital spaces in the pursuit of non-institutionalized agendas. This chapter attempts at reconceptualizing citizen media with critical look at the meaning of citizen and citizenship, which seems to be taken as self-evident in much of the existing literature on citizen media and related terms. Other practices and media are not represented in this volume but are equally important to preliminary conceptualization of citizen media as a field of enquiry. This critique recalls Clemencia Rodrguez's argument that citizen media should not be thought of as an asset or help to Western institutions, or as a tool for disseminating public service announcements. Rather, citizen media must be understood as community building practices that engage their participants directly in multiple and grounded ways.
