Living & Arts

Beyond War News

In print | January 29, 2009

Recently, Swarthmore has witnessed and encouraged an explosion of projects that utilize new media technology to channel information. Stemming from such successes as War News Radio and the Darfur Radio Project, individual initiatives to personalize larger issues through the presentation of individual stories now abound on the college’s campus, taking advantage of resources such as Lang Center funding and Lodge Six’s media room.

The Chinatown Youth Radio project, founded by Lang Scholar Hansi Lo Wang ’09, exemplifies such initiatives. Wang began working with War News Radio his freshman year and with his Lang grant, decided to take his training in radio production to “cover material that’s usually dominated by the mainstream media.” Chinatown Youth Radio, Wang said, “was a summer pilot program” that involved “working with four high school students and teaching them how to make radio stories focused on Chinatown with the purpose of bringing about unheard stories.”

Wang’s project attests to how new media can encourage community involvement. One of the radio’s high school participants decided to broadcast a story on Chinatown’s Friendship Gate, which was renovated this summer. The girl’s story focused on the gate as a source of pride and identity for Chinatown residents, while construction projects, like a new Eagles stadium, loom in the future, threatening to encroach on the community. For many, the story humanized Chinatown, so that “it’s not just a block of restaurants and trinket shops … its got two schools, churches, apartments [and] entrepreneurial businesses,” Wang said. After the success of Chinatown Youth this summer, Wang hopes it will continue as an outlet for Chinatown youth.

Additional new media projects include Calvin Ho ’11’s Swarthmore Migration Project. “Basically, we’re a multimedia blog that tries to document immigration stories and create an oral history with community focus,” Ho explained. Thus far, Ho has collected stories from immigrants in the borough of Swarthmore, South Philly and Chinatown. “We want to share with the world what it means to be an immigrant […] Immigrants are often silent, and this is an opportunity for people to see into and understand their communities,” Ho said. His project also attests to new media’s potential to provide the marginalized with a microphone and a podium. The stories on Ho’s blog are accompanied by photographs and videos of the surrounding area, an interesting approach that provides “both an insider and outsider perspective,” said Ho.

Working with Internet and radio also presents challenges. “Audio equipment is especially difficult, because using radio technology requires training,” Ho said. With this challenge, however, comes the freedom to create one’s own unique style and content, thus truly allowing the exposure of raw, unfiltered perspectives. Shilpa Boppana ’11 of the Darfur Radio Project said, “The Internet is a great resource for getting our show out, and also for finding contacts who we can talk to for our pieces. It’s pretty easy to find e-mail addresses and phone numbers online for people we’d like to interview, and if they can’t help us, they’ll sometimes refer us to a colleague or someone who can.”

“[It] really comes down to telling stories,” Wang said. “What we’re really trying to do is old, in a way. It comes down to getting people comfortable with talking to strangers. It’s the best way to tell stories that can move people or change their perspectives.”