Appendix A 463
back by circumventing the market-driven environment that has reduced news media to shallow, superficial, and entertainmentheavy forms of reporting and journalism. Various media platforms that incorporate education with entertainment offer interesting and cost-effective options for citizens to escape the barrage of manipulative and nonsubstantive content in news programming. Use electronic newsletters, guides, or handbooks
These media platforms provide interactive tools that can deliver significant amounts of data and information on demand. They empower users with greater control in actively seeking out preferred topics of interest and relevant issues of concern. Multimedia CDs and DVDs can be designed to promote engagement and interest using software tools and interactive games to enhance entertainment value.
Feedback from Participants’ Response Cards Q: What approaches and techniques have you found most effective in overcoming obstacles to citizen engagement and mobilization? The example here can be broken down into two categories: enabling environment and capacity building. Enabling-environment approaches include changing the political, legal, regulatory context to ensure freedom of expression, access to information, freedom of association, and media pluralism. Capacity-building approaches include establishment of diverse, sustainable, and independent media including community media; building ICT [information and communication technology] infrastructure; education (especially literacy); and building a culture of citizen engagement through political action. More difficult to specify but very often of crucial importance are the social and political circumstances that raise citizens’ desire and readiness to mobilize and that contribute to conscientization and act as catalysts of political upheaval and change. Start with people’s work, with knowing the conditions (political, cultural, media, etc.); base your work on existing formal and informal community systems and networks. Creat[ing] awareness by providing information generated through various technical tools may sometime[s] be enough, but in most cases one would need to support additional mobilization actions to get from awareness creation to public action.