A Community of Conversationalists

In the months of thinking about what the Vineyard Voice could be my thoughts began to center on how to stimulate not interest but legitimacy. Questions arose: How can this new media presence help the community if it is in any way outside the central needs and ideas of its people? This is a medium of self-publication. How can we reconcile self-publication with community interests as a whole? Do we need to?

In my own life, I have come to understand that in order to form a bond in a community, to develop value, some sort of real discussion must happen. Likewise, in order to form a bond and value The Vineyard Voice has a very real and clear responsibility to be a community resource. With this responsibility it seems to me the question becomes: How can this medium be true to the voices of the people who live here, and provide a space for real conversation? Answering this question is not easy. It is inherently a social answer, one gotten not from an individual, but from the whole community. This takes people, involvement and time.

The legitimacy of a gathering place doesn't depend upon tech buzz; in fact, as we found in the dot com bubble, it often fails there. It also doesn't arise out of sheer availability; "Build it and they will come" doesn't wash here on this island, or anywhere else for that matter. And legitimacy certainly is not a successful marketing campaign . . . No, legitimacy, often claimed by people who are less than true, comes through a shared belief. In this space on The Vineyard Voice I hope we can create a shared belief that people can say something of themselves or of our community and that it will be heard. In that way both the thing said and the medium conveying it begins to matter. This is not something casual, certainly not something self-involved, and it is definitely not something easily gained.

Self-publication in the blog world has greatly benefited how we are informed. The whole concept of citizen journalism has risen (or exploded) out of the world of self-publication — out of blogs. Through citizen journalism we are now (sometimes) able to discern and discuss important social and political nuances on not just a community scale but a national and global scale. Nevertheless, I am reminded of a New Yorker cartoon, titled "Blogger Without Borders", where a man stands on a street corner with a megaphone shouting "...you need to hear what I have to say about breakfast wraps." (As and aside, my stepson thrives on the irony of "breakfast wraps".) This cartoon helps me understand it's not the medium, and it isn't even the message. What I say is not inherently important. I cannot say anything about what The Vineyard Voice is or is not; that is up to the community. In other words, it is what we say that is inherently important.

In the 2007 Annual Report on American Journalism, the Project for Excellence in Journalism wrote a piece entitled Citizen Media. It begins with the following passage:

James Carey, the esteemed Columbia University journalism professor who died in 2006, once wrote that journalism was essentially conversation among citizens. Communication was culture, he often said. It was creating a community “of conversationalists, of people who talk to one another, who resolve disputes with one another through talk,” he wrote in an essay titled “A Republic, If You Can Keep It.”

As we step from personal blogs to dynamic, rich-media publications I hope that The Vineyard Voice will contribute to the Vineyard's already very rich history as a "community of conversationalists". In this, when talking about The Vineyard Voice (or, better, anything but The Vineyard Voice) we will no longer have to talk about its legitimacy. The concern for legitimacy will vanish with our "talk". It will be our conversations that matter, and such early thoughts around legitimacy will be, like yelling about breakfast wraps, short-sighted, self-referential, and utterly foolish.