The ‘Popular’ Culture of Internet Activism »
How does the internet contribute to changes in civic engagement in the USA? To answer this question we must examine the institutional context of US marketizing civil society and the cultures of good citizenship constructed online. Drawing upon the findings from a case study of ONE, a campaign targeting extreme poverty and the spread of AIDS, I demonstrate how the internet may function as a space of new divisions of labor between civil society organizational actors and lay activists. While organizational actors use Web 2.0 to make activism convenient and standardized, the public is asked to participate in what I term ‘visual labor’, creating and representing images of community online that legitimize the organization’s claims. At the same time, volunteer action is understood largely as performative. Ultimately, the article confronts the understanding of the internet as a post-bureaucratic democracy and emphasizes its cultural role in communicative capitalism.
The latest in anime music videos, political remixes, fan vids, videoblogs, and the YouTube scene.
CJR on online video »
A good read on online video from the Columbia Journalism Review
Transmedia storytelling 101 »
Henry Jenkins handout on transmedia storytelling from 2007.
Presentation on transmedia story-telling
The video of Michael Wesch’s keynote talk from the second day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009.
Clive Thompson on How YouTube Changes the Way We Think »
“We’re developing a new language of video—forms that let us say different things and maybe even think in different ways.”
KiberaTV »
KiberaTV is a community TV channel for the people of Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi. Students from the Kibera Film School use Flip cameras to report on the community
