Purpose and intent of social action and community media

Purpose and intent of social action and community media.

Social action is classified as an act which takes into account the actions and reactions of individuals.  There are different types of ‘social action’; one is Rational action. Rational actions are actions that are taken that lead to a desired goal, but taken with no thought of consequence and without consideration of the actions.  Social action is intended to influence others to follow whoever started the protests actions.

Community media is a form of social communication that is classified as a type of media that is spread around a local community rather then being country/world wide spread. It’s a smaller spread method compared to world wide news broadcasts but is larger then social action.

The purpose of social action is to make people aware of an issue and inspire them to take action upon that issue. The impact this leaves is often leaving people who have seen/heard the protest on the issue to become emotionally invested in the issue presented to them and to join with other who feel this way in order to take action and help in changing whatever issue was presented.

The purpose of community media is to get a local community active and aware of certain local issues that may or may not affect them. The idea is to get the community talking and spreading word of the issues raised in hopes that more and more people will join their cause and help to do something about the issue. The impact of this is creating a large, local group of people who are all working to a common goal, thus making the achievement of that goal more and more likely. In turn this can also bring the local community closer together as people and can leave a positive impact on the area.

Examples of social action could be anything from getting the passengers of a broken down bus to work together to push it and get it started again to someone starting a protest and leading a large procession of people to fight for their cause.

An example of this would be the ‘Black Lives Matter’ activist movement that begun in July 2013. The campaign is essentially a protest against police brutality and treatment of African-Americans and was founded by three activists and has over 500 people as a part of the movement. The movement is still currently on going.

Examples of community media can be local newspapers and radio or television shows. It’s a mainly local way of getting a community to work together, but on a somewhat larger scale then social action. The effect of community media is that it spreads the news of the issue in question through much wider vicinity and much faster then social action would. Therefore community media could be considered a more effective way of raising awareness of an issue.  Community media can also take the form of a community/student made film or documentary that explains the issue they want to raise, this film would then be broadcasted to the local area or uploaded to a social media site such as facebook or youtube.