Youth Internet Radio Network: Can we Innovate Democracy?

Abstract

The Youth Internet Radio Network (YIRN) explores the connection between
media technologies and citizenship, building on work by Hartley and Tacchi
on 'radiocracy' (radio, democracy & development)4. YIRN combines:
1. Content creation: Establishing a network of young content providers
across urban, regional, remote and Indigenous locations;
2. Ethnographic Action Research: Researching how young people
interact as both producers and consumers of new media content and
technology;
3. Technology Innovation: Identifying how different ‘communicative
ecologies’ within the network influence and learn from each other; and,
4. Enterprise development: Understanding how culture and creativity
combined with new technologies can be a seedbed for innovation and
enterprise.
Groups of young people across Queensland will be trained in how to produce
content for a dedicated website - audio (music and speech), text (stories,
reports, journals) and visuals (photographs, artworks). In addition, the network will allow groups of young people to interact with each other and with others
(including Government) on topics and issues chosen by them - through
forums, messaging services, message boards, blogs and emails.
This research project investigates important questions about new media and
participation. If the new economy is a network economy, if the new raw
materials are information and knowledge, and if the new workforce needs
content creation skills, how will these young people set about using and
developing the YIRN network? How do creativity, access, networks and
connectivity work together - what are the results of ensuring access and
training at this level to a diverse and dispersed set of groups of young
people? How does this network work as a communication space: how will the
young people interact with each other? And how will they communicate with
Government and other agencies? When they are participating in an
interactive network are they simultaneously being citizens? Would enterprises
built around creative content be civic institutions?
This paper presents some of the challenges that face this research project as
it seeks to discover how youth civic participation might be addressed through
innovative Internet use by embracing practices that are often considered
resistant and the domain of a 'subversive youth' (Hartley 1992, 21-42).