Vision For A True Community

We hadn't heard from Grass-Roots Network founder John Smith in a long, long time.  Last month he sent a note wondering how it was going, after hearing from an old friend that GrassRoots TV was still an invaluable community asset.  GrassRoots is still here, 40 years after John and a handful of hippies plugged a camera into the cable system, because we still channel their original vision.  John wrote in 1975:

"Communication binds people together.  When a relationship works it is because communication works.  In the same way, good communication makes a community work. In fact, the words communication and community have the same root: communis, in common. A town is not a true community unless its residents are continually discovering and discussing their common concerns and developing common goals.

"In a personal relationship, face-to-face communication is most effective. But when we need to address a larger audience about an issue that concerns the entire community, face-to-face communication isn’t enough.  We need Mass Communication: newspapers, radio, television...

"Unfortunately, television has been expensive, complicated and exclusive, with a relatively small group of professionals speaking to the rest of us. Network television, for example, shows us sports, drama, comedy, news, but it almost never shows us ourselves.  Because it is national, and therefore general, it can entertain us, inform us, and sell to us, but it cannot respond to us.  Thus we cannot respond to it in any real way.  In short, because we cannot participate in network television, it offers little opportunity for making connections between people-particularly within our own community.

"But there is another kind of television.  It is inexpensive, flexible, inclusive and responsive.  It creates a link between the individual and the community. It is of, by and for the people of the community.  It is called community television.

"Since 1971, Aspen has had community television, Grass-Roots Network.  Grass-Roots offers everyone in the community not only a forum but also the opportunity to learn to create his or her own programs.  No view is excluded.  No issue is avoided.  No experiment is condemned.

"Literally hundreds of people have participated in this endeavor.  All of the programming on Grass-Roots has been created by local residents who are mastering a new technology and a new art form.  They are developing their own creative skills, discovering the rewards of participating with others in community television and finding a new and effective way to speak directly to their fellow residents."

John has been working his little farm outside Eugene, Oregon ever since moving on from Aspen in 1978.   "I don't do media anymore, I do life," John said in an Aspen Time article a few years back.  He seems quite fascinated, however, that 40 years later, his crazy experiment in communis is still connecting us to one another, still building true community.