ABSTRACT

Negin Dahya and W.E. King (both located at the University of Washington Seattle’s School of Information) provide an assessment of Reel Grrls’ shift to more mobile programming in their chapter, “Feminist Perspectives and Mobile Culture(s): Power and Participation in Girls’ Digital Video Making Communities.” Dahya and King provide insights that challenge community-based media educators on two key fronts. First, they identify a tendency for media trainers to emphasize high-end equipment and professional polish that might work across purposes when attempting to extend access to production skills that last beyond the time horizon of the workshop itself. Second, they observe that community-based programs pay far more attention to training youth to produce media than they do on methods of sharing and distributing such media, often with an underlying assumption that what is produced will be (almost automatically) shared or posted in social media settings. While this expectation could grow from a belief that young people already share media on social platforms regularly, Dahya and King point out that educating media producers – youth or otherwise – on the methods as well as the advantages and disadvantages of sharing and distributing their media with wider audiences is a missing element of many contemporary community-based media programs.