In trying to set up a conceptual base for the examination of community media one of the most important places to start is with the notion of community. The way we approach this analysis will depend on the perspective which we take to the idea and reality of community. Irrespective of the many and often conflicting ideas which govern the construction of community as a concept the truth of whether or not there is actually community in the pure sense of the word, means less than the ideals which make the concept resonate with importance. This sense that there is something important about community must be examined historically and with clear reference to concrete lived examples. It is a matter of nuancing the rather transparent use of the term and examining the implications of its appropriation for political and social change.

The above paragraph is a good example the potential of cyberspatial forms of textual communication. The three underlined connections all lead to further locations and so on. This ever-expanding network can be created and sustained by the cybertraveller. Information on the Media for example, can be found in Australia at Griffith University. But this connection leads to so many others, that the experience of visiting is like going to a vast library, looking into the bibliography of one book, finding a reference and then racing to retrieve it. At the same time, many other references suddenly pop up and the choices you make link up to other choices as you move around the library zig-zagging from concept to debate, discussion to polemic, etc.. Retrieval turns into databasing which leads to strategies of organization, how to access and keep control of an endless flow of information. An example of this hypermedia movement of ideas and information is the following:

Responses to the Holocaust: A Hypermedia Sourcebook for the Humanities is intended to introduce the viewer/reader to the various discourses, disciplines, media and institutions that have produced significant critical and theoretical positions and discussions concerning the Nazi Genocide of the Jews of Europe,1933-45. In this hypermedia sourcebook, a hypertextual research, teaching, and learning archive, the responses of disciplines, various media and institutions includes, but is not limited to, literature, philosophy, literary criticism and theory, sociology, psychoanalysis, history and historiography, religious studies, film, art and architecture, political theory, informatics and the history of technology, and popular culture or cultural studies. Through critical text, image, video and laserdisc clips and sound, my hope is to offer the navigator of this hypermedia archive a way to access important information regarding the study and critical discourse concerning the Holocaust, and to provide a research, teaching, and learning resource for the student, teacher, and scholar of the Holocaust.

Interestingly, the power of this example points towards the ways in which information can be used to bring people into potential contact with each other. But, does this represent an idea or ideal of community.

In speaking of community do we mean village (as in global or local)? Is there some sort of pastoral dream of innocence and togetherness behind all of this? I ask this in order to more properly understand the motivations and choices behind the desire to create togetherness and community. The notion of people coming together is based on a further conception of ?connectedness.? In talking about the broader terms of connectedness what do we mean?

A study by John Higgins, a doctoral student at Ohio State University entitled Tracing the Vision: A Study of Community Volunteer Producers, Public Access Cable Television and Empowerment made the following points:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, two emerging technologies were viewed as having the potential to solve a variety of societal inequities in North American societies. Portable video equipment and large channel capacity cable television were promoted by a variety of disparate social groups in the United States as providing a "voice for the voiceless" - an electronic First Amendment, of sorts. These ideas arose, in part, from experiments with film, video, and social change in Canada.

The U.S. visionaries believed that the inequities caused by monopoly-dominated broadcasting might be partially corrected by the establishment of video centers accessible by the public, with related channels on cable television. "Public access," or "community television," was to provide the structure necessary for video training, as well as a distribution system for community-produced programs.

Public access was to help address some of the social problems of the period, many of which stemmed in part from a fundamental distrust of centralized social institutions and a widespread belief that people were unable to make a difference in the society. Community television was perceived as an alternative that addressed the monopoly-dominated, profit-driven mainstream media's stranglehold on the electronic exchange of ideas. Public access was to encourage a grassroots "diversity of ideas," where citizens would express their First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, and the republic would benefit from the open exchange of views.

Many of the assumptions which Higgin's examines are related to enlightenment ideas of rationality and in particular to the idea of modernity gone wrong, of loss of status and relevance for individuals and community members who have come to expect that political activity geared toward elections and representative government will actually produce results. The initial idea of modernity as the model for more and more institutional structures which support the development of communication, representation and rational institutional practices (most fully incarnated by the legal apparatus) was quickly replaced with governmental structures and practices remote and insensitive to the needs of the citizenry.

The notion of communal ties broken - the idea that with those breaks individuals and communities lose their ability to define their realities - this leads to notions of empowerment which are proposed as a response to the crisis of subjectivity and institution.

A claim can be made, however, that Internet and World Wide Web technologies begin to overcome many of these problems. PRAXIS provides access to a vast array of archival resources on international and comparative social development. The intellectual commitment of PRAXIS is to the promotion of positive social change through informed action. Thus, PRAXIS has been designed to meet the informational needs of two audiences:

social work educators and students with international interests;

other educators and students who require assistance in locating useful national and international resources on social and economic development.

Does this notion of interconnection begin to solve some of the problems associated with the breakdown of community and the dystopic vision of modernity? The difficulty with many of the claims which have been made about communications technologies is that they confuse the relationship between information, communication, knowledge and learning. On the other hand, these very issues are themselves being debated within the networks and An Online Resource Guide: Networks & Community narrowcast communities themselves. So, the possibility is that the technologies actually open up debate in so many different and unpredictable ways that these difficulties will be overcome! At the same time, the technology remains remote from the communities which it is meant to serve and this suggests that the task of defining community as process, practice, ideal and lived experience will have to keep pace with the evolving relationship between new technological development and the creation of institutional structures.