The result is that few societies are now without some experience of video, television and radio. The result are social contexts in which communities have developed sophisticated media strategies at an aesthetic and political level, often far removed from the concerns of the NGO groups who bring the media with them. Yet there is more to the notion of voice than what Vinebohm suggests. One of the main assumptions of community based media activities in both the North and the South is that of empowerment. Voice stands in for all of the processes which supposedly lead to enhanced notions of community control of information and knowledge.
Dialogue is at the very heart of community access television.
This quote summarizes many of the concerns of the alternative video movement in both the South and the North. Like the medical treatments of the barefoot doctors, community television was a shared tool belonging to a community of equals. However, in the community TV model, the distinction between 'doctor' and 'patient' breaks down. The medium becomes a tool of community self-healing. The intervention of the videomakers, accompanied by the use of the medium on the part of 'ordinary' people, supposedly leads to shifts in identity and further claims of self-determination.