Vision Statement

We can tweet post, Facebook, Myspace, blog and flickr our selves across the world, without having meet face to face the people who see it. We can make media at the push of a button within the blink of an eye, often with as much context and memory. Our identities are now intertwined for far too many in what site we are on, how many hits we have, what other people we are connected to. Instead of providing a sense of belonging and interaction we live on a quest for fame. Are we talking to the right people? Are we part of the zeitgeist? Are we reading the right media? Dangerously hyper aware, our lives veer perilously close to being simulacrum, reflected images of the things we wish we were saying, doing feeling, staged increasingly to convince an audience that we are in fact worth it and alive.

Which is a nice way of saying I asked all my friends on Facebook what media should be. And the responses all said the same things. More, more danger, more mess, more. More thinking. Media that looked like notebooks, that brings us together that made us think.
As we seek to define what we mean by being Women’s Media Equity Collaborative, I ask that we use this time to embrace the mess. When we speak about Women, we should mean ALL women and be adamant that instead of policing who is and isn’t proper womanhood, but concentrating on how to support and love all of our sisters.
Are we a Women’s group because that is our leadership or because that is our constituency? And if the latter do we include protection and care and support even for those women we disagree with.

Media, is not just the things that we believe that power responds to? More and more as black women everything from my hair, my body, my sex life and my breathing is worth of dissection and analysis. Youth on trains say more with their clothes than many a pundit has said in four books. Are we not only trying to combat the media we dislike but also uplifting and preserving the media that love’s and sustains us, and those who make it.
Coming from an internet/social networking work background and theatrical training, the rising concern with media to entertain, is frightening. Driving towards our basest impulses, and broadest caricatures, we follow templates, stereotypes, and fireworks. The easy tools of irony, and cliché, aiming for low targets (Rush Limbaugh is a jackass?!?! the sky will be above my head the day will end in y) are exciting and in the Internet it ups your popularity and gets you to conferences, but does it change anything.

The respect for the objective, the idea that the proper vantage is a room of one’s own, or some vantage point above the fray doesn’t improve quality, and most important does not inspire the change we wish to seek .We are and must be in it. Rather than furthering my career in hopes of moving back, how do we construct our media that it sustains AND moves what we believe in and forward as well, and not just puts us one more time in a room we hope this time may be the right one. Especially if the price of entry is the need to disconnect, disassociate, or bargain away the things that first made us able to be brought in. If my power is disruption then it doesn’t matter what room I am in if the thing I agree to is to not disrupt. I seek to the possibility beyond simply destroying others but in building for myself. The self that includes the identities that are undesirable, intangible, and especially the ones that are most disruptive.

I can only do that by being honest, I must feel what I feel and see what I see and say where I am . For this I believe that would be one of the greatest gifts that could be put into the media landscape, an HONEST upfront assessment of our media activities. How are we funded, how do we interact, who does what, what gets “ play” how do we actually support each other and who is benefiting and not. If that is all we get then an enormous service will have been done. Where the heck are we actually?

Because when what is a “ thing to miss for one woman” is a suicide watch for another, and it means something if we are still unwilling to admit that we still question if we even truly pay attention or care if that woman is not cisgendered/white/correctly classed/abled or appropriately apologetic about not being those things. Are there books worth our safety and mental health? IS it enough to have women in anchor chairs if what they say still colludes with the basest instinct to marginalize those outside that studio/classroom/blog/?

Those of us who are outside and I am inside outside many rooms have always found ways to survive, but what has been most damaging as been the denial of the things that have asked us to develop these mechanisms. Media is the desire to tell the truth about the world as we see it and want it to be seen. That part cuts across class race money. We are making our media to shape our world, release ourselves, and guide and instruct others. Be it to liberation, capitalism, voting or market share.

Rather than reach out and move, we reach out and brand, and sadly the left/progressive/liberal movement is not outside of this. Our music is Auto Tuned and tweaked within an inch of its life till the tool has become genre rather than an aide. Movements talk about tone, conversation and pitch and no one has asked whom are we playing for.

It is an opportune moment to do so, and a tenuous one. As more and more of our media tools move to erase our imperfections and “flaws”, honesty, commitment, and development are considered expendable. Imperfection is a weakness of character, not a part of life. Except no one is exactly sure whose idea of perfect we’re aiming for. And when that imperfection is used as reason to not feed, clothe, or educate, as a justification for eradication or dismissal, or strangulation by silence it is imperative we begin in whatever small steps in whatever failed, unfailing attempts to TRULY examine where are we going and why.
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