It counts for more than we can see firsthand; in a world where there is ~4.7 degrees of separation between you and everyone else, what you have to say carries. Mark your words, and use your voice. Is that blurry picture of what you ate for breakfast what you really want to say? The Toxoplasma Of Rage | Slate Star Codex. “Nobody makes an IRC channel for no reason.
Who are we doing this versus?” — topic of #slatestarcodex Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. (this story makes more sense if you know Detroit is in a crisis where the bankrupt city government is trying to increase revenues by cracking down on poor people who can’t pay for the water they use.) Predictably, the move has caused a backlash. Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography. People call these things “blunders”, but consider the alternative.
PETA creates publicity, but at a cost. But at least they’re paying attention! [source] The web video problem | why it’s time to rethink visual storytelling on the web from the bottom up | Adam Westbrook // Journal. We've already seen this approach fail in online video news, where papers rushed to produce their own news bulletins with a newsreader (huh?) And television style packages, completely forgetting they were formats made for TV. The results were embarrassing . (Incidentally, this also works (or doesn't work) the other way. Ever seen Great Movie Mistakes? It's one of the worst TV shows ever made, because it's trying to take clips from Youtube and make them work on television. Don't work, baby.)
Web video is obviously hugely popular and it's actually what I do for a living. It's passive Sitting and watching a video is like being put into a trance. It's clunky Video files are enormous. It's linear and self-contained You watch it the way the author intended, in the order they intended. It just looks like television and cinema Stylistically (and that's the important word), web video is not new nor innovative. It doesn't make use of the web It's in the wrong context Do you see what I mean? Upworthy: I Thought This Website Was Crazy, but What Happened Next Changed Everything - Derek Thompson. The Internet's latest viral wizard matches smart technology and lily-white earnestness to market "stuff that matters" online, and the Gates Foundation is buying. The first blockbuster hit came from an unlikely source: Irish talk radio. In 2010, Michael D. Higgins, then a foreign-policy spokesperson for Ireland (and now its president), went on the radio in Galway and excoriated a conservative American talk show host for opposing President Obama's plan to enact universal health care.
For a long time, the audio file of the berating lingered in Internet purgatory. Then, in August 2012, Mansur Gidfar uploaded the audio to the new, rapidly growing site Upworthy.com in August 2012. Today, Upworthy is a million-hit machine for heartfelt, progressive content, and it is trying to use this alchemy—spinning hearty fiber into viral gold—on behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Upworthy has mastered the dark viral arts with a unique blend of A/B technology and lily-white earnestness. ... For Archivists, ‘Occupy’ Movement Presents New Challenges - Wired Campus. Baltimore – Howard Besser, a New York University archivist, recently got into a shouting match at an Occupy protest, making a case for why the activists should preserve records of their activities.
“Within the Occupy movement there’s a huge suspicion of traditional organizations, including libraries and universities,” Mr. Besser explained Monday at the spring meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information. The shouting match was an extreme moment, but Mr. Besser and other archivists on a panel here explained that they have had to take unusual steps to try to gather a snapshot for future scholars of the nationwide Occupy protests, which call attention to income inequality in the United States. Those steps—including distributing postcards promoting archiving at protests, developing automated systems to download photos posted online, and asking participants to vote on which images are most important for the historic record—could serve as a model for preserving future events.
Mr. Former CIA Spy Tells the Truth. Crystal cox, $25 million libel. A few days ago, I posted a piece about the Pepper Spray incident at UC Davis. When people saw the original video clip, they overwhelmingly supported students and felt the police had acted harshly and without justification. When I posted a longer video clip, those who commented on my blog, on Twitter and Facebook were about evenly divided on whether police actions were justified or not. The point of my post seems to have gotten a little lost. I was calling for a need for balance in citizen-generated news content. I was emphasizing that when we see content from sources we don’t know, we need to keep an open mind on what we see.
Yesterday, an Oregon Judge ruled that Crystal L. Social media and traditional media is all media. So while I think Cox deserves to be called a journalist, protected by Shield Laws, I don’t think she is a very good one. In reading the Cox blog post, I am unsure whether or not what she wrote is true, and truth is the ultimate defense of libel. 7 Citizen Journalism Websites For Crowdsourced News. Citizen journalism in the simple sense is news collected and published online by people like you and me. We aren’t reporters by any stretch, but citizen journalism websites gives us an opportunity to speak as interested observers. It is freedom of speech without any censorship in its unadulterated sense.
Citizen journalism as first witness accounts or even as second hand reporting has gained credibility thanks to many media channels. The common man as a commentator or a reporter also goes where walking-the-beat journos sometimes can’t. So check out these seven social news websites for a week long reading of news put together by citizen journalists. Now Public A multimedia news site with 5 million readers puts it in the top bracket of citizen journalism news coverage. CNN iReport CNN iReport is an example of a mainstream news media company that’s also tapping into the power of citizen journalism. Digital Journal All Voices Newsvine Wikinews Demotix Image Credit: Shutterstock. Independentmedia.ca: a directory of non-corporate journalism. Occupy. A Catalogue of Social Media (and Related) Tools | Digital Politics.
Global directory of #occupy live video streams. Globalrevolution. RSA Animate - The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens? Social Movements in the Age of the Internet. Twitter, Facebook, and social activism.
At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away.
The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. Liking Social Justice - Politics. The whole Kony 2012 debate has gotten me thinking about how activism has changed over the past few years, especially with the explosion of social media use. Back in 2010, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a much-read piece in The New Yorker about the so-called “Twitter Revolutions” in Moldova and Iran the previous year. Many observers had jumped to the conclusion that social media had reinvented grassroots activism, that, of all things, Facebook and Twitter were now powerful tools for populist change.
But as Gladwell argued, activists’ use of Twitter in both countries had been way overblown, and in fact, it was hard to see how social media could ever live up to claims like that. Historically, most social movements, like civil rights in the U.S., had been based on what sociologists call “strong ties”—activists were more likely to commit time, energy, and personal safety, if they belonged to a strong, cohesive group of like minded friends.
UNICEF says Facebook 'likes' won't save children's lives. UNICEF has launched a bold advertising campaign that takes direct aim at perhaps the most ubiquitous form of online activism — the Facebook "like. " Late last month, UNICEF Sweden released three commercials that urge viewers to support humanitarian aid not through posts or shares on social media, but monetary donations. The Swedish-language spots each present different variations on this theme, but by far the most harrowing stars a 10-year-old orphan speaking directly to the camera from inside a dark and decrepit room. "Sometimes I worry that I will get sick, like my mom got sick," the child says in the captioned ad, his brother playing in the background. "But I think everything will be alright.
The other two ads, also in Swedish, take a relatively more lighthearted approach to the question of online activism, though they underscore the same point: Facebook likes aren't treated as currency in other commercial venues, so they shouldn't be equated with charitable donations. Social Media and the UK Riots: “Twitter Mobs”, “Facebook Mobs”, “Blackberry Mobs” and the Structural Violence of Neoliberalism. Social Media and the UK Riots: “Twitter Mobs”, “Blackberry Mobs” and the Structural Violence of Neoliberalism “One formula [...] can be that of the mob: gullible, fickle, herdlike, low in taste and habit. [...] If [...] our purpsoe is manipulation – the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, known in certain ways – the convenient formula will be that of the masses”. — Raymond Williams “What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns.
Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together”.
Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism | Micah White. A battle is raging for the soul of activism. It is a struggle between digital activists, who have adopted the logic of the marketplace, and those organisers who vehemently oppose the marketisation of social change. At stake is the possibility of an emancipatory revolution in our lifetimes. The conflict can be traced back to 1997 when a quirky Berkeley, California-based software company known for its iconic flying toaster screensaver was purchased for $13.8m (£8.8m). The sale financially liberated the founders, a left-leaning husband-and-wife team. He was a computer programmer, she a vice-president of marketing. And a year later they founded an online political organisation known as MoveOn. Novel for its combination of the ideology of marketing with the skills of computer programming, MoveOn is a major centre-leftist pro-Democrat force in the US.
The trouble is that this model of activism uncritically embraces the ideology of marketing. Maybe you’re better off not holding hands and singing We Shall Overcome. By Francesca Polletta Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport wade into the debate over the role of the Internet in contemporary social movements with a provocative claim: the Internet is ushering in a new repertoire of protest. In this repertoire, mobilizations are sporadic rather than deep-rooted and enduring. Protests flare up, gather huge numbers to the cause, and then fade away—sometimes to reemerge, other times not. More people participate than in earlier repertoires, and they do so for diverse reasons: because they care passionately about the cause or because they’re mildly concerned; because they believe that protest will be effective or because they just want to express themselves. Targets are diverse and issues are too. There are few clear dividing lines between politics and, variously, leisure, consumption, and popular culture: people may use the same tactics to protest the war in Iraq and the cancellation of their favorite TV show.
[i] Bakardjieva, M. 2009. [ii] Lea, M. 2007. MoveOn.Org. Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action. Taken as a whole, Anonymous resists straightforward definition as it is a name currently called into being to coordinate a range of disconnected actions, from trolling to political protests. Originally a name used to coordinate Internet pranks, in the winter of 2008 some wings of Anonymous also became political, focusing on protesting the abuses of the Church of Scientology.
By September 2010 another distinct political arm emerged as Operation Payback and did so to protest the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and a few months later this arm shifted its energies to Wikileaks, as did much of the world's attention. It was this manifestation of Anonymous that garnered substantial media coverage due the spectacular waves of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks they launched (against PayPal and Mastercard in support of Wikileaks). This difficulty follows from the fact that Anonymous is, like its name suggests, shrouded in some degree of deliberate mystery. Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz | Threat Level. (Editor’s Note: Any decent coverage of Anonymous is going to verge on some NSFW material at points.
There will be questionable language and strange imagery.) Last week the net and the media were ablaze with the news that Anonymous might be taking on the Zeta drug cartel in Mexico, a story that has morphed into a wider drug corruption story, and led to one American law enforcement official in North Carolina being named as a gang conspirator. Also this year, Anons released documents on, or d0xed, several police organizations and one prominent police vendor in retaliation for heavy-handed law enforcement reaction to occupations associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
They’ve fought with child pornographers, hacked Sony repeatedly, and even tried to release compromising pictures to blackmail Bay Area Rapid Transit spokesman Linton Johnson into resigning. But what is Anonymous? NYU Professor and Anonymous researcher Biella Coleman compares Anonymous to the trickster god archetype. Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop. About Pepper Spray Cop (also known as “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop”) is a photoshop meme based on a photograph of a police officer offhandedly pepper spraying a group of Occupy protesters at the University of California Davis in November 2011.
Origin UC Davis Occupy Protest On November 18th, 2011, a group of students at the University of California Davis gathered on campus for an Occupy protest, during which they formed a human chain by linking their arms together. When they refused to comply with the police request to leave, UC Davis Police officer Lieutenant John Pike and another officer walked across the the group, administering orange pepper spray straight down the line of unmoving students. A photo of Lieutenant John Pike pepper spraying seated students at the UC Davis protest was taken by Louise Macabitas and posted to Reddit on November 19th, 2011. Photoshop Meme Two photoshopped versions of Macabitas’ photo surfaced on Reddit on November 20th.
Spread Notable Examples. Mr. Washington Goes to Anonymous - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. CNN: Anonymous Wants To See An All Out Revolution Here In The United States! Social Networks. New media and Web Science.