Media democracy

On a more positive note, I helped with the hosting of a documentary workshop/lecture thing today, about the crisis in Canadian journalism. Crisis being that ownership concentrated into the hands of a very few companies, and that the news media tend to all show the same conservative, white, uppermiddleclass perspectives.

The speaker had a background in photojournalism in Turkey and is now making a documentary on journalism in Canada. She was quite inspirational and I must confess feeling slightly motivated to do something like that too. Then again, I think I've always wanted to do that, to travel to impoverished and wartorn places to see the people there and document it in some way. Something about that has always been more appealing to me than tourist traps. It's convincing people to pay you to do it that's the problem.

Watched Born into Brothels today too. It's a documentary about the children that live in brothels and red light districts in India. The neat thing about it is that the filmmaker gave cameras to the children and let them tell their own stories. Some of the things they say are quite different from what you would have expected.

They did that here on the Downtown East Side a while ago. They gave disposable cameras to prostitutes, drug addicts and homeless people and told them to go and take pictures of things that they thought were important. The pictures expose a side of the neighbourhood that isn't readily apparent from the street, a community with some people who really care and look out for each other. In spite of any prejudice you have towards those sorts of people, they come out looking human.

Very democratic, I think. In spite of our claims to democracy, neither our governments nor our media are really structured in in a way that allows us to do that. To the government we are numbers and to the media we are target markets, aggregate audiences to be bought and sold to advertisers. Is that how what we call democracy really is to function? Is there no place in the system for the individual?

There are so many people in this world that have stories to tell if we just let them. I guess that's part of the optimism behind blogs, the idea that if people speak, someone, somewhere will listen and things will change. I've never been much of an optimist though. It's hard to see things changing any time soon. Inertia's a pretty powerful thing.

Doesn't change the fact that I like reading people who are different from me though. I just wish that the interesting ones were easier to find.

Daniel Regelbrugge's written another post for Matt Good's blog and I forgot to mention it earlier. His posts are always well worth the read. Then again, the whole blog is worth the read, though I don't know why I bother to mention that. Most of the people that read this already know that.