Media and technology can be useful tools for documenting and disseminating the actions and insights that emerge from imaginative community processes. They can potentially expand the conversation to include more images and voices and enrich the levels of understanding and kinds of actions undertaken by communities. They can facilitate the opening and sharing of many stories and forms of human expression. They provide a mechanism for people to share publicly what is personally important to them. Yet media and technology can also distort, discredit and discourage. What should those of us engaged in creative and constructive intergenerational citizen work consider when enlisting media and technology?

One point of reference is who controls the media and technology. This relates primarily to power over content. An Imagine effort might consider how and whether it is able to influence and shape the content of the media or technology used, or whether decisions related to that content are necessarily out of ordinary citizens’ hands. For example, Imagine Chicago has worked in partnership with a few of Chicago’s local newspapers, sharing good stories and enlisting their interest in covering positive stories that showcase what is possible. In St. Louis, the editorial board of the largest paper decided to create an "Imagine St. Louis" section in the newspaper to highlight issues and related resources for action on matters of local concern.

A second point of reference is who uses the media and technology. Are the media and technology available to and usable by a diverse range of citizens in the community or are they the exclusive privilege of a few? Electronic based communication can be expensive, or require specific skills and training to use, and relies on a particular kind of infrastructure or climate. These (and many other) factors will inform an Imagine project as to which audiences will be engaged and included by virtue of access to specific media and technology, and which will be excluded by the same.

A third point of reference is who creates the media and technology. Images are powerful. Those who create images also communicate their biases and perspectives. People make choices when they produce media and technologies and those choices reveal what they believe to be true — about individuals and communities, about realities and possibilities. There is no such thing as ‘objective truth’ in newspapers, televisions, textbooks. We must therefore raise to consciousness underlying assumptions and biases and ask: Are the images and ‘truths’ (with a small ‘t’) represented nurturing, or hindering, hope, imagination and action?

Another reference point for evaluating media and technologies is their impacts on us, individually and socially. Communications media — where not only the answers, but also the questions are given — can diminish creativity and often bury peoples’ self- and social knowledge, as it facilitates the consumption of ready-made images instead of the creation of original ones. Current research suggests that certain media and technologies have a debilitating effect on children, as well as adults, not only in terms of encouraging violence and materialism, but also by fundamentally re-shaping brains, weakening cognitive learning and damaging social relationships.

Today, the variety of existing media and technologies lie on a spectrum of energy, infrastructure, power, money and literacy requirements: Satellite television and the world wide web... radio and newspapers... music, dance, puppetry, storytelling, painting, etc. Embedded within this spectrum are also other axes: from global to local, from elite to ordinary. Given the desire for inclusive and open conversation in Imagine work, a range of communication approaches is necessary. The key, of course, will be discerning the use and value of a particular medium or technology, in appreciation of the context, the people and place involved, the questions being considered and the task at hand. The more we can employ a diversity of media and technology, the greater our chances of expanding public imagination and the movement as a whole.