Social action and community media is created for a multitude of purposes to bring attention to a cause or issue that is local, national or global, to change attitudes towards issues, to raise awareness for issues, to challenge dominant representations and agendas, to create and strengthen community ties, to provide information, to campaign, to change voting behaviour, to infiltrate mainstream media and to encourage the viewer to take action.
An example of social action media could be the video that went viral in 2012 "Kony 2012" that was created by the charity "Invisible children". The actual intentions of the charity are up for debate but the video was clearly a attempt to get the the audience to take some form of action to create change.
An example of community media is "The Loudest Whisper" movement that is taking place in stockton.
The Loudest Whisper was a community lash back against their representation current representation in the media. Stockton was recently featured in the show "Benefits Street" which painted the town as somewhere that was inhabited by people that just leeched off of the government. The people of Stockton-on-Tees didn't agree with this and decided to create their own media showing "The real stockton".
The difference between these two different peices of media is one drew much more attention than the other. Kony 2012 became famous (or infamous) worldwide while the loudest whisper ironically didn't make much more noise than a whisper.
In my opinion what makes the difference between these two videos is that one of them had a huge amount of money behind it and the other did not, and that is why a vast majority of community media productions fail in reaching their goal, because small communites cannot compete with huge productions.
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