傳播賦權視角下的公民新聞實踐: 以臺灣PeoPo公民新聞平臺及公民記者為例

This paper developed a three-dimensional analysis framework of communication empowerment to examine local practices of citizen journalism in Taiwan. Taking PeoPo and its citizen reporters as an example, this research collected data via qualitative methods of in-depth interviews, participant observation and online ethnography. It revealed that citizen media had not changed the ecology of media in society, however, as change agent, citizen media had contributed to emancipating, cultivating, aggregating and sustaining the perception and communication capacity of citizen reporters. At the individual level, it is the consciousness awakening of media access and participatory media production that empowered the citizen reporters. At the community level, citizen reporters who actively engaged in the citizen communication validated the individual and collective agency as cultural producers and political subjects both in everyday life and public crisis situations. Turning to societal level, through the combination of the citizen journalism and social movement organizations both online and offline, the issues of social movements could enter public sphere as soon as possible. In a networked society, citizen media was not the only discursive platform but one of nodes in the networked space that connected various parties of social movements and therefore created an alternative public sphere. Yet, striving for the construction of an alternative public sphere was “a long march”, both culturally and politically. These three levels of communication empowerment varied from and were dynamically intertwined with each other. Worthy of attention is that the power of emotional resonance of the citizen reporter community embedded throughout the whole processes of communication empowerment at these three levels.