Community Media and Technology Certificate
It is by now axiomatic that most of our information about everything from people and places to pressing social issues and the diversity of world cultures comes to us through mass mediated words, sounds, and images.As these media and information technologies converge, corporate power is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer transnational media and technology companies. Because these giant firms play an ever more crucial role in shaping everyday life for millions of people, an analysis and critique of such a concentration is essential to understanding how the world works and how social reality is constructed. At the same time, these very technologies hold out the promise of incredible decentralization and democratization of communication. Sophisticated media and information technologies are no longer simply the province of giant corporations.
As these media and technologies have become more affordable and more accesible they have become useful, if not indispensible, tools for even the smallest non-profits and community-based organizations, to be utilized in the service of organizational development, community building, grassroots organizing, constituient mobilization, influencing public opinion, and social change.
Given the increasing relevance of media and information technology to public and community service, the Certificate in Community Media and Technology is designed to provide students with the key competencies they need to incorporate a range of multimedia tools into their primary responsibilities, be they labor activists, community organizers, or agency professionals.