One of the best things about the broadband portion of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act is that it recognizes the importance of community media for expanding the Internet. The concern now is that if you focus too much on the medium itself, you miss that what really brings people online is the sense of community.

It’s helpful to think of the Internet as an outgrowth of the telephone – not just in the technical sense, because of its infrastructure, but also in the social sense. The value of the phone is that you can both speak and listen. The difference with the Internet is that you can speak and listen in multimedia, as an individual or as part of a group, in real-time or on delay.

This is the basis for how People’s Production House, the organization I work for, and many of our peers like Media Mobilizing Project and Media Alliance approach digital literacy. Many computer literacy programs only teach people how to use computers to consume media, and some, like One Economy’s Beehive, provide locally specific content. But teaching people how to surf the Web without showing them how to use the Web to promote their own voice is like giving someone a phone and just teaching them to pick it up and listen. If that were how people used the phone, it would make the whole network a lot less useful for all of us — just a lot of folks sitting quietly with a phone in their hands.

This is also why it is so important that people’s Internet connections are symmetric — meaning the speed for upload and for download are the same. DSL and cable connections that have decent download speeds but slow upload speeds are like a phone where you are permitted one word to the other party’s five words. Who would sign up for that?

The point is: To expand the Internet, you have to engage communities, not individuals. I hope this is what we can accomplish with the newly available federal funds..

Community media activists have always brought this principle of exchange to every medium – think of low power community radio, public access TV, or zines in print. Each of these provides an innovative way to make media more participatory. We owe undying gratitude to the people who have successfully shoehorned more voices into otherwise one-way media.

With the Internet, we shouldn’t be fighting for set-asides. Community media isn’t just a nifty tool for stimulating demand for broadband service. It’s the fundamental principle of the entire medium. As we put federal broadband stimulus dollars to work, we need to make sure it stays that way.

This is a guest blog post from Josh Breitbart, policy director at the People’s Production House.