Reconstituting the urban through community-articulated digital environments

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Reconstituting the urban through community-articulated digital environmentsRamesh Srinivasan a

a candidate in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University,

Online Publication Date: 01 August 2004

To cite this Article Srinivasan, Ramesh(2004)'Reconstituting the urban through community-articulated digital environments',Journal ofUrban Technology,11:2,93 — 111

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Reconstituting the Urbanthrough Community-ArticulatedDigital Environments

Ramesh Srinivasan

Acombination of social, economic, and political

dynamics have created an environment where the

idea of community now embraces more than just a

neighborhood, more than just a geographic locale. An individual

can now be a member of multiple social groups, many of which

need not be defined by local boundaries. Digital networks enable

these unprecedented phenomena, which include instantaneous

exchanges and accesses of greater amounts of information than

were ever considered before. In the 1940s, Jorge Borges invoked

the “infinite library” as a metaphor to describe an environment

in which information would be omnipresent and constantly avail-

able. Today, the notion of order, structure, and path are all called

into question, as digital networks allow users to move freely across

Web pages, search tools, and programs which all use digital infra-

structure to communicate (Instant Messenger, Bulletin Boards,

e-mail, etc.). Specifically, no longer are there few sources of

receiving information (library, bulletin board) or interacting with

another (telephone, telegraph, face-to-face, letter writing), but

instead, there has been a recombination of communication into a

variety of digital tools (Web pages, digital bulletin boards, online

chat, webcam chats, etc.) that have created greater choices for

obtaining information and interaction. As a result, several layers

of communications technology have thus inserted themselves

Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 93

Journal of Urban Technology, Volume 11, Number 2, pages 93–111.

Copyright # 2004 by The Society of Urban Technology.

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onto the urban fabric and have helped change cities. Communities

have begun to reorient themselves as the virtual has enabled inter-

action to occur independent of spatial proximity. Today, social

network analysts have begun to describe community membership

as “far-flung, loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit, and fragmentary.”

What is to be made of place or the great American city or

public space in light of this? Some writers have noted that

instead of meeting others in a public space or park, we have

shifted to digital agoras and that much interaction is now occurring

in “virtual communities.” A virtual community is a community

that meets across a computer network, often because the distance

between members allows for only that kind of meeting.

A community can be “virtual” if it is defined as a set of indi-

viduals with a shared set of interests, values, or ideals. One’s com-

munity can be characterized as the set of interpersonal networks

that provide sociability, social support, and social capital to its

members. They key aspect to community is one of solidarity,

and traditional notions of community have identified solidarity

around the notion of neighborhood, which imposes the bounds

of spatial proximity. Communities provide the individual with

social capital, a term that describes an individual’s ability to

access needed resources, whether they be material, physical, or

emotional/psychological. Social capital flows to an individual

from numerous sources as he or she joins different communities.

New research explains how social networks increase social

capital.

However, the discussion of how new media affect commu-

nities has been fraught with disagreement. Some have argued

that networked media are ill-suited for the expressive, emotional

actions that are fundamental to the sustenance of community,

while others have seen them as integrative and rich mechanisms

for connecting people. My belief is that new media can strengthen

already strong connections, open up previously “latent” connec-

tions, and make possible rich communities that only meet

across the online space. Critics have lamented the loss of public

space and the fragmentation of urban environments that have

accompanied recent urban dynamics (economic, sociological,

and political) and pointed to a recombination of social networks

that are greater in number yet fluid in the sense that they no

longer depend on spatial proximity. There are a number of persua-

sive arguments that have been voiced among different theorists

who call into question whether an adequate digital place can be

designed for the continuum of communities that now exist

94 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004

Wellman

Rheingold

Wellman

Wellman

Kraut et al.

Wellman

Haythomwaite

Smith and Kollock

Sorkin


(ranging from geographically local to spatially distributed). The

role of the physical public space is now being questioned as a

result. I do not take this dichotomous approach toward my

research but instead focus on the need for community spaces

and the potential to use digital technologies to meet this need.

In fact, I believe that the physical–digital separation is an anti-

quated model and that new convergences between the two have

created and will continue to generate exciting new social

dynamics.

Urbanism, Neighborhood, and Community Media Systems

Whether rich or not in interaction or resources offered, this discus-

sion so far has merely adhered to the traditional binary model of

physical proximity and place versus immaterial and virtual com-

munities. What is left out, however, is the fascinating potential

of how digital technologies can begin to enable the formation of

communities that are primarily local. In particular, research

focused on communities that have a low level of technological

fluency or infrastructural support adds a nice complementary

layer to the topics discussed above. My interest is in how digital

media can be designed as a tool of empowerment for these

communities.

In this paper, I examine my thesis that placing the commu-

nity in control of the content and architecture of its shared

digital agora enables a greater attachment and sense of commu-

nity to develop. Village Voice, the project which I present in

the next section, is my examination of this conceptual approach.

As this paper will demonstrate, possibilities remain for the virtual

place to embody the goals of the public space as being a sphere of

interaction and communication. This project was implemented

and active within a community of Somali refugees distributed

across the Boston metropolitan area between December 2001

and December 2002. The project was unable to continue

because of the basic lack of technological know-how across the

community (for maintaining the server system, resolving bugs,

etc.). The goal of the one-year project was to test the potential

of designing a community-focused digital place that would

ideally maintain a long-term sustainability. An important lesson,

however, was that sustainability requires enabling community

members to also maintain technical control and knowledge of

their media system.


Mitchell

Deutsche


Community Media Projects: An Overview

Only a few studies have examined the impact of information and

communication technologies (ICTs) on local neighborhoods, but

there are a few relevant benchmarks in this research.

E-neighbors and NetvilleThe study by Hampton et al. of four Boston-area neighborhoods

(E-neighbors) has shown that Internet use can have both positive

and negative effects on local communities depending on how

interactive the type of usage is (e.g., chatting or e-mailing vs.

watching videos). Regardless, the finding that community does

not have to be physically bounded does not mean that local com-

munities are necessarily disenfranchised. In fact, several studies in

underprivileged neighborhoods have demonstrated that digital

media systems can empower local neighborhoods to share

assets, communicate about issues, and feel more of a sense of com-

munity. Finally, the now famous Netville study has shown that

residents of a wired suburb can expand their social networks to

include both those who are in the neighborhood and those who

are far away. In these studies, the focus was on the mere provision

of Internet in a localized setting, rather than the design of the

content or its underlying architecture. Two points are notable

about these projects: (1) The focus was largely on the impact of

Internet access and a localized Intranet rather than the form,

design, or nature of content that was contained. (2) In both

cases, the groups studied were of largely middle or upper-

middle class standing, implying a community not necessarily at

risk in terms of access to basic resources.

Silver StringersWhat happens when a senior citizen community, filled with stories

and experiences, is given the tools to publish a community

journal? This experiment, known as Silver Stringers, demonstrated

the role of technology in testing the social cohesion of a publishing

process.

What we see in the Silver Stringers is a group of older adults

embracing technology for a purpose—creating stories of their

lives and communities for others to learn from. These stories

are ways for them to make sense of their life histories, to

reconcile a multitude of experiences into coherent narratives

(731).


Hampton and Wellman

Shaw

Hampton and Wellman

Smith et al.


In this experiment, publishing technology inspired face-to-

face interaction in a geographically bounded community. The

process of creating a journal to represent the stories of this commu-

nity led to increased interaction and community building. Patterns

of role sharing and organization evolved out of this process, which

provided members with a sense of shared responsibility and con-

tinuity as they created an electronic journal. This undertaking

(1) used a story as a powerful granule within the community

system, (2) used the system solely to publish community-related

stories, and (3) had authors adhere to the system’s architecture

of editor’s boxes, etc. In other words, the structure of the stories

of the Stringers was pre-defined by the technology developer

rather than community member.

MUSIC: Rebuilding Physically Proximal CommunitiesMUSIC (Multi-User Sessions In Community), Alan Shaw’s doc-

toral project, is a significant benchmark in this research. This

system was deployed in Boston’s “Four Corners” neighborhood

as a bulletin board system (BBS) to help residents share infor-

mation, setup events and projects, share their creations (such as

articles or pictures), and discuss community issues. Certain

aspects of the system were private for the individual user (such

as e-mail inboxes) while others were public. Community

members were supplied with computers at home from which

they could log onto the system. Shaw found that many projects

were both created as well as organized online and that most of

those who logged into the system regularly were involved with

these projects, meaning they used the system to facilitate and

further their involvement in community projects.

The philosophical approach Shaw took in this project is

described as social constructionism. This idea builds on the con-

structionist model of the individual as a constructor, not a

passive receiver, of knowledge. Social constructionism combines

this idea with the sociocultural view that shared experiences

allow these constructions to take on meaning. The resulting

theory is that a social setting is enhanced by the developmental

activity of the individual.

Social constructionism is an epistemological paradigm that

suggests that becoming acquainted with one’s neighbors is

an act of extending one’s self. Computer networking is a

technical tool that can support this endeavor. However, the

network is not the active force; the people are. The critical


Shaw

Vygotsky


agency is based entirely upon the prerogatives of the people

involved (15).

Appropriately, MUSIC was applied in an urban setting where

fractured, less cohesive social relations existed. Observing how

this technology worked over time, Shaw concluded that MUSIC

enhanced the development and organization of the neighborhood’s

shared social constructions. Notable about MUSIC were (1) the

adoption of this project by a community traditionally neglected

by technological innovations, (2) the engagement of the system

across a variety of community needs, rather than merely being

focused on a specific topic such as publishing, and (3) the

design of the system by nonmembers of the community.

Village Voice: Ontologies and Storytelling

To varying degrees, each of the above mentioned projects intro-

duced an envelope of community empowerment without truly

pushing it. I propose in this paper that a digital community

space could achieve deeper effects in terms of community empow-

erment if it gave the community the power over its design and

content. Village Voice was a narrative-based community multime-

dia system I designed, developed, and evaluated for a Somali

refugee community based in the Boston metropolitan area. Here

I present the methodology by which Village Voice built upon

the movement in community publishing and storytelling. A

number of studies have demonstrated that empowering commu-

nities to create their own stories stimulates a process of reflection,

which in turn facilitates the sharing of values, knowledge, struc-

tures, and dreams.

Community IntroductionThe Somali refugee community in the Boston area was concen-

trated in a few pockets in Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, Revere, and

Charlestown. (See Figure 1.) The population of the group

expanded from about 3,000 in the mid-1990s to 5,000 by the

end of the decade. The refugees, many from families separated

by events in Somalia or by their relocation to the United States,

were all different ages. Many were victims of the civil war that

tore families apart and decimated a once thriving culture. Resettle-

ment was a traumatic event for many who came from a culture

with markedly different educational, monetary, and social

systems than those in the United States.


Shaw

Campbell

Yussuf


There were only a few major hubs around which Somalis

traditionally gathered. These included the Somali Development

Center (SDC) in Jamaica Plain; the Sagal cafe, restaurant, and

computer literacy center; the Butterfly Somali crafts store in

Roxbury Crossing; and the Somali Sunni Muslim mosque in

Jamaica Plain. In general, however, Somalis I met would remark

that there existed very few opportunities for community dialogue

to begin to address the issues that affected them. There were

obvious needs that this project could fill. For example, there was

a critical need to integrate incoming refugees with the existing

Somali community, and ultimately with the larger community of

Boston. A technology that could introduce new members to

issues and associated stories of the community would help the

process of acclimation. In addition, building a tool that could

document the unique culture of Somali-Americans could help

future generations be connected to their traditions and reflect on

how they changed over time. A variety of community members

indicated to me that the community faced some significant pro-

blems. For example, the clan heritage with which many Somalis

FIGURE 1Boston Neighborhood Map



identified was a significant stumbling block in the center’s efforts

to try to build a unified community that could benefit from the

programs it offered. The community perceived a need to create

an archive or safe place to discuss these issues. Learning this,

my question was: Is it possible to use technology to remind

Somalis of their heritage yet still show that they were, as refugees,

one clan living together in Boston? More generally, I was curious

about the ability of a community to use technology as a tool of

dialogue and community empowerment.

I first became involved in the community in (September

2001) as a tutor and mentor for teenagers. This involved bi-weekly

visits to the community center and other Somali institutions, where

I would work on different subjects with the children. I sometimes

found it difficult to teach certain concepts because the textbooks

were all written in English, which they knew to varying extents.

Over time, my tutoring helped me meet more people within the

community (such as the parents of those I was tutoring), and I

learned more about how the community operated. I became a

familiar face and eventually Somalis whom I had met would go

out of their way to greet me warmly. After I devised the technol-

ogy project, it became clear that it would be most effective if the

community itself could take charge of the content and architecture

of the system that would serve its need for dialogue.

Narrative and Somali Oral CultureThe technology project called Village Voice was built upon the

premise that story is fundamental to the sharing of experience.

In cultures throughout the world, story exists to serve a range of

purposes from teaching a moral, contemplating divinity, or preser-

ving history. Stories are clearly one of the many ways in which we,

as humans, present who we are to others.

Human beings are storytellers by nature. In many guises as

folk tale, legend, myth, epic, history, motion picture, and tel-

evision program, the story appears in every known human

culture. The story is a natural package for organizing many

different kinds of information. Storytelling appears to be a

fundamental way of expressing ourselves and our world to

others (11).

Alfred Lord, whose work on oral storytelling focused on the

singing bards who narrated stories to their respective cultures,

explains that the oral tradition has persevered because “the


Campbell

McAdams


picture that emerges is not really one of conflict between preserver

of tradition and the creative artist; it is rather one of the preser-

vation of tradition by the constant re-creation of it.” The oral

tradition has persevered through its adaptation to the change that

is inevitable to all cultures.

The role of story is significant in Somali cultural history.

Story has mostly been presented within the form of poetry, the

most developed art form from traditional Somalia. Poetry serves

as the ultimate expression of Somali cultural realities, often

mixing objects and relationships in ways that may seem odd to

the Westerner. Indeed, to the Somali, poetry traditionally has

been a living art affecting almost every aspect of life. It has

been a principal medium of mass communication, playing a role

similar to that of the press and television in Western societies.

The written alphabet only made its appearance in Somalia in

1972, and even with the entrance of basic technologies into

Somalia, the dominance of the oral tradition was not challenged.

Thus, my approach with Village Voice was to focus the technol-

ogy I would design around the powerful storytelling tradition of

the Somali people.

Community-Driven Content and ArchitecturesAs I have mentioned, my focus in this research was twofold:

community-generated content, and community-driven information

architectures. Village Voice allowed the user to interact with

material based on how the community itself articulated the

relationships within its different pieces. The interface was based

on a dynamic collage, which was able to reveal the complexity

of the artifacts of a community because of how it could adapt to

a user’s browsing history and the intricate relationships within

the different materials submitted by community members.

Village Voice was designed to be a technology to accomplish

all of the purposes listed in the above paragraph. The server and

database were placed on a server at the MIT Media Laboratory.

The project was made accessible to community members on any

machine by accessing a Web page and logging in with password

information. Village Voice was partly a study of how a knowledge

model, or ontology, created by community members, can better

facilitate the sharing of knowledge across a community as

compared to keyword indexing. I define ontology as an explicit

representation or structure of knowledge. Ontologies can be used

to describe physical processes, educational fields, or in the case

of Village Voice, the discourse of a community.


Lord

Putnam and Noor


My contribution is a demonstration that a community-built

ontology is more than a static structure with which to represent

community knowledge. When continuously populated with their

stories, ontology becomes a dynamic structure that is used by

members to model the evolution of their community. Additionally,

this paper also incorporates my ongoing research related to

software agents that can potentially add a deeper level of social

facilitation to already rich digital community systems. In the

next section, I discuss the process by which this project was

accomplished.

Methodology and Community Design

As mentioned, after spending several months as a volunteer, I

introduced the potential of a project that could use digital media

to integrate the collective issues and stories of the Somali commu-

nity within Boston. In consultation with members of the Somali

community, I decided to design a project that allowed users to

share community-created video stories. I soon met many prospec-

tive story creators and gave my first workshop to seven (three men,

four women – with an age range of 19 to 55). After an introductory

workshop on the basics of creating video, I gave very few instruc-

tions to the seven initial Somali story creators except to focus their

stories on issues that were relevant to them as Somali immigrants

in Boston. Over a month, 50 stories were collected from these

initial creators. They were instructed in the basics of I-Movie

editing and used computer workstations located at the MIT

Media Laboratory.

One research goal of these stories was to help design an

ontology that would illustrate the issues of interest to the commu-

nity. My goal was to engage the community in the reflective

process of creating an ontology that could articulate the relation-

ships between relevant community issues. As issues in the

community would change, the community could redesign this

representation through future ontology design meetings. And, in

turn, this representation could anchor the digital media system to

actually be a powerful tool of reflection and assembly for the

community.

When continuously populated with their stories, ontology

becomes a dynamic structure that is used by members to model

the evolution of their community. Thus, the ontology would

enable the stories and artifacts of a community to be represented



and exhibited in the landscape of a multimedia system. It allows

for the access and understanding of community-centered exhibits

to occur through the community’s own semantics. Values, dis-

course, and dreams are all framed in an architecture that allows

for the digital system to faithfully represent the evolution and

experiences of communities worldwide.

OntologyOntology can also be seen as a conceptual map where the links

between individual pieces of knowledge are delineated. An

assumption researchers in this field make is that knowledge is

without meaning unless it is contextualized. Village Voice fol-

lowed the same assumption—a cultural concept can be expressed

in relationship to others. An example of a concept map ontology is

seen in Figure 2.

FIGURE 2An Example Concept Map


Novak


Community Ontology DesignCommunity members were asked to come to a meeting to help

with the design of an initial ontology for Village Voice. This

was done by going to restaurants, shops, the community center,

and by advertising over the community cable access television

program. Over several initial sessions in November and Decem-

ber, 80 community members met at the Somali Development

Center in Jamaica Plain to view the created videos. The sessions

were chaired by the director and staff of the Somali Development

Center and were largely conducted in Somali. Each session began

with a reminder to the participants about the purpose of the project.

The video stories (created by the initial creators and others who

had later joined the eventual team of 15) were then shown on

the VHS tape, and participants were encouraged to pause, stop,

or repeat the video at any time. They were instructed to do this

whenever they felt an issue that was relevant for their community

was revealed in a story. During the pauses, the community would

discuss the videos they were watching and craft a part of the ontol-

ogy diagram on the white board in the front of the classroom.

The question of following tradition versus adapting to

America dominated the discussions. Elders would express conster-

nation over the direction the children took. One elder woman

implored, “These kids don’t have the respect for authority we

did at their age. Look at the language they use. What has happened

to what the Koran has taught them?” Some teenagers, on the other

hand, while remaining quiet when elders were in the room, would

tell me that while they had great pride in their heritage and reli-

gion, they felt a need to fit in with their peers at school and to

follow the opportunities living in America allowed them.

During these discussions, the community would come to a

consensus on whether an issue that had come up should be

included in the ontology. For example, one story was set at a

Somali youth party. It showed teenage men and women dancing

together to hip hop music. The idea of a youth dance party

without Somali music was disagreeable to some of the participants

because of its disrespect to the Islamic taboo of premarital

relationships. Many of the youths at the meeting argued that one

could have a premarital relationship without being disrespectful to

Muslim culture. During this discussion, the participants decided

that issues of religious tradition, sexuality, and generational

differences were relevant to the ontology. These topics were

then added to the ontology and linked to each other on the white

board. Another video story involved the onscreen interview of



an elderly woman and youth about their opinions on the Somali

tradition of female circumcision. This video elicited a significant

amount of discussion among workshop participants and created

new issues for the ontology. The ontology, which was con-

tinuously drawn on a white board at the development center,

changed many times in the process, as the community members

reflected further on the issues that united them. The overall

initial community ontology (translated into English) can be seen

in Figure 3.

System and InterfaceThe interface of Village Voice was suited for the representation of

a community or a culture because it was designed to illuminate

complex interrelationships between different topics visually.

(See Figure 4.)

Village Voice portal was entered via a “search” page. This

page was organized hierarchically, according to the tree-based

design of the ontology. The user could select multiple nodes

from the ontology tree that he or she was interested in watching

stories about. For example, to access the teenage dance party

FIGURE 3Somali Community Ontology



story, the visitor to Village Voice could select any or all of the

topics of religious tradition, sexuality, or generational differences,

and the dance story thumbnail would illuminate accordingly, as

will be explained shortly.

The browsing page was designed to give the user a wide

range of information about the different video stories by display-

ing each story’s thumbnails, while conveying its relationships

to other stories. The thumbnails were illuminated to varying

levels. This reflected how closely each thumbnail corresponded

to the terms employed by the user on the search page. A brighter

illumination indicated a closer match with the search query.

The story that best matched the query was known as the focus

story, whose thumbnail had a pink-colored border. Once the

browser was loaded, a user could change the focus story by click-

ing on any other thumbnail in the collage. This altered the illumi-

nation of all the other thumbnails in the interface, based on how

closely their annotations matched those of the new focus story

(as a function of distance within the ontology tree from the

chosen thumbnail).

Community members were given three options with which

they could work on any given submission. The story could be

played by selecting the play button, which was the left most of

FIGURE 4Ontology-Based Browse Page



the three buttons below the thumbnail. This would stream the

video in a frame to the right of the collage.

Users could also record their reactions to any story that they

viewed. These reactions could be uploaded as audio files to Village

Voice by selecting the Talk button below the thumbnail. Finally,

the user could listen to the audio annotations associated with

any story. These could be loaded by clicking on the middle of

the three buttons under the thumbnail.

AssessmentAssessment was carried out by testing thirty Somali immigrants

living in Boston. Each subject was asked to browse Village

Voice and a control keyword version that would only organize

stories based on the words most often stated within them. Before

using either version, the subject would log on the system with

an anonymous name so that I could monitor which sequences of

stories the subject browsed, how long he or she stayed logged

on, and how many stories were played.

These data showed the mean and standard deviation values

(across the 30 subjects) of the number of stories browsed, the

number of stories played, and the time online for the keyword

(KW) and Village Voice (VV) versions. The values for time

online were expressed in terms of seconds. (See Table 1.)

These data show a higher engagement for subjects across-

the-board with Village Voice. In general, subjects spent a lot of

time studying the interface and not interacting with it heavily, as

TABLE 1Mean and Standard of Deviation Values of Village Voice

Versus Control(Expressed in Terms of Seconds or Number of Clips as

Appropriate)

Mean Value Standard of Deviation

KW time online 263 205.36VV time online 967 891.39KW # clips browsed 2 0.697VV # clips browsed 7 2.719KW # clips played 1 0.433VV # clips played 3 0.788



can be seen by the rather small number of clips played or browsed

on in either version. It appears that the community-designed ontol-

ogy version inspires a greater engagement with the digital media

system and provides a great potential of being an architecture

that can enable Village Voice to communicate important issues

across a community.

Many subjects mentioned to me that they would have

browsed in more detail if they had been more familiar with the

system and technology, in general. Indeed, the issues of control

over the technical infrastructure and familiarity with the technol-

ogy were critical in my experiment. Community members were

able to see that the pieces and architecture of the system were

theirs but the language of an interactive collage, the ability to

change the system or interface easily, and the general lack of

ease with computers proved to be mitigating factors. I believe

that enabling a longer term presence of Village Voice would

have allowed it to maintain a greater presence over time, but

without a resolution of some key “digital divide” factors of

access, familiarity, and control over technology, my work with

the Somali community only could point to strong potentials.

Access and LimitationsVillage Voice was a design project that pointed to the potential of a

new approach for delivering technology to an underprivileged,

localized community. The lack of access or fluency with digital

technology compromised what had been a generally positive set

of results. Indeed, Somali Development Center leaders explained

that fewer than 40 percent of Somali refugees in the Boston

area had at-home broadband Internet access, which was necessary

to access Village Voice. However, I found through a set of

interviews with Somali community members that there had been

an increase in accessing the system among those who had

visited the places that maintained Web-enabled kiosks, and that

some of the collected video content had been screened on more

accessible media such as the community’s weekly cable access

television programs. Indeed, Village Voice was a study of a new

approach toward bestowing a community with a deeper level of

control over its digital public space. I believe that infrastructural

access issues should not compromise the process of technology

design, and that my results demonstrated the potential for such a

system to integrate a community along lines that other projects

have not.


Srinivasan


Concluding Thoughts

This paper discussed the approach of community-driven content

and ontology to revolutionize the ability to make a technologically

mediated community space more deeply engaging. In my work

with Village Voice, I observed that ontology could become a

dynamic structure that can model a community and the cultural

material that it can produce. Thus, ontology-based designs can

enable community media systems to articulate the important

issues across a community. I have demonstrated this idea

through the introduction of a methodology that can allow a

designer to work with communities, solicit and archive important

community information, and frame these experiences in terms of

relevant community themes that have been articulated by

members themselves.

Significant amounts of research remain to be done to better

understand how to maintain dynamic models of communities

and how to further empower community media systems. Indeed,

a fascinating next step would be to begin to apply Village Voice

to connect Somali refugee communities throughout the United

States and world, potentially bringing fractured families and

friends together. However, this research points to the empowering

potential of digital places for disadvantaged communities.



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Reconstituting the urban through community-articulated digital environments

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