Abstract

My paper addresses the use of social software and online content delivery by ethnic media centers in the United States. I work at the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) in San Francisco, a non-profit media center that seek to diversify a traditional media landscape by funding, producing and distributing Asian/Asian American themed work. We have recently started to focus heavily on new strategies of communication and networking by using social networks and enabling user generated content on our website. We are also broadening our scope of media by commissioning new media works as well as delivering audio and video content online. A similar organization to CAAM is the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) who is critically engaging new modes of content production by orchestrating the New Media Institute for filmmakers to learn new strategies for storytelling. In a time when the boundaries of races have been interrogated and complicated, using new digital technologies can allow ethnic media centers to organize around racial identity while being anti-essentialist in practice. By multiplying the voices that are telling stories, by creating spaces where participants can contribute their stories, what defines a community becomes more porous and elastic. My paper will explore how can ethnic media centers engage new modes of social interaction and content delivery to stretch out fixed notions of race and thus broaden their audiences.

Michella Rivera-Gravage Biography

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