Community Mediation: Writing in Communities and Enabling Connections through New Media

The question of how best to facilitate the creation of sustainable new media compositions within communities is vital if these compositions are to become a permanent part of community knowledge-making practices and to reach audiences in a meaningful way. We explore a model of community mediation that is cognizant of the practices and structures of communication within a given community. This model also acknowledges the boundary between the definition of community identity and the possibility of connection to both internal and external audiences. We illustrate this model of community mediation using three cases in which it was practiced: the creation of an informational video that profiles a local neighborhood center, the building of a digital installation on the history of the Cherokee Nation, and the preservation and practice of Indian classical dance amid its remediation via new media technologies. These examples reveal where and how stabilized meaning-making practices can emerge when researchers and other facilitators of new media composition are cognizant of existing mediums that community members use to represent themselves and the complex lifeways embodied by those mediums. Because all cultural practices resist mediation to some degree, we ultimately find that the only way to insure sustainable community mediation is to use existing practices and structures as infrastructures for building new compositions.