A2 MEDIA 2009 - 10

‘WE-MEDIA’ AND DEMOCRACY

Student Handbook

We – Media

‘We-media’ – can be defined as interactive technology, allowing ‘users’ to create and generate content, to be linked in ‘real time’ communication, and to ‘participate’ in social, political and cultural actions. Generally speaking, ‘we-media’ is a synonym for Web 2.0 – the ‘interactive web’. ‘We-media’ centres on the internet and includes hardware such as mobile phones and other mobile devices. ‘We-media’ includes software that enables users to engage in the activities outlined above.

Democracy

/dimokr si/

  • noun (pl. democracies) 1 a form of government in which the people have a voice in the exercise of power, typically through elected representatives. 2 a state governed in such a way. 3 control of a group by the majority of its members.

  — ORIGIN Greek demokratia, from demos ‘the people’ + -kratia ‘power, rule’.

Oxford English Dictionary

Introduction

The rise of ‘we-media’ over the last decade has led to debate in academic, political, cultural and business spheres over the use of the new media technologies in the contemporary world. There are essentaily two positions in the debate; the optimists, who see ‘we-media’ as an empowering, democratic force for good and the pessimists who are wary of the potential for ‘we-media’ to be used for surveillance, oppression and control. As an A2 media student, you have the task of negotiating these positions against the wider concept of ‘democracy’. What examples can you use to illustrate these two opposing ways of looking at ‘we - media’? What conclusions can you draw from the use of ‘we-media’ in the contemporary media landscape?

This booklet will help to focus your thoughts on the subject. It is divided into three sections; Section 1 has some useful quotes from each of the positions outlined above, along with a bibliography (all the texts are available in the LRC), Section 2 has some relevant examples taken from the internet sites of newspapers and other relevant sources, and Section 3 has suggestions for further reading.

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Guide to symbolsWhere you see this symbol , the quote will be emphasising the POSITIVE, DEMOCRATIC (UTOPIAN) elements of ‘We Media’

Where you see this symbol the quote will be emphasising the NEGATIVE, UN-DEMOCRATIC (DYSTOPIAN) elements of ‘We Media’

Note

Words, phrases and names in bold are of particular relevance and importance to the exam subject of We Media and Democracy. Students are encouraged to do their own research on the subject and use these indicators as search terms for websites or indexes in books.

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Quotes with Bibliography

Taken from Chapter 16, Scientists, capitalists and cyberchartists, pp238 – 258, Curran, J., Seaton, J. (Eds) Power Without Responsibility; The Press, Broadcasting and New Media in Britain, (Sixth Edition), Abingdon, Routledge, 2003

The Utopians/optimists …

‘There are two leading schools of thought. One sees the internet as a technology of freedom that is empowering humankind, making accessible the world’s knowledge, building ‘emancipated subjectivities’, promoting a new progressive global politics, and laying the foundation of the ‘new economy’. The other sees the internet as an over-hyped technology whose potential value has been undermined by ‘digital capitalism’ and social inequality. Which view is right?’

p238 (Curran, J. 2003)

The Dystopians /pessimists…

‘…the internet came to exhibit incongruent features. It is still a decentralized system in which information is transmitted via independent variable pathways through dispersed computer power. But on top of this is imposed a new technology of commercial surveillance which enables commercial operators – and potentially governments – to monitor what people do online.’

Ibid p256

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TASK 1

Take an A3 sheet of paper and create a ‘mind map’ of all the ‘We-media’ that you use in your day to day life. Put ‘We-media’ in the centre and list all of the different websites/hardware you may use (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, i-Phone etc) – now research each of your examples and find a case of where each ‘We-media’ format has been used by groups to affect democratic change. (e.g. Iran and the use of ‘Twitter’ in June 2009 to protest against the outcome of the election)

Try to find examples not featured in this booklet – bring your mindmap to college to feedback to the class.

Taken from Chapter 19, Global futures, pp297 – 322, Curran, J., Seaton, J. (Eds) Power Without Responsibility; The Press, Broadcasting and New Media in Britain, (Sixth Edition), Abingdon, Routledge, 2003

‘The emergent social organization brought about by the information revolution will have inherently stable, socially desirable outcomes. ‘We are all created equal in the virtual world’, (Bill) Gates says. ‘The information network will not eliminate barriers of prejudice or inequality but it will be a powerful

force in that direction’*. The information revolution (‘We-media’), according to this view, gently rationalizes and develops – it improves things’

In contrast there are the pessimists, like Herbert Schiller, who argue that the communication revolution will merely reinforce existing inequalities in a world which is becoming perilously more divided…There have been even more flamboyant theorists like Michel Foucault, who identified surveillance and control, the arbitrary, but ever present, but ever present, possibility of regulation, correction and domination as the intrinsic and essential feature of modern societies. The information revolution was the crowning extension of this’.

* Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (London, Viking, 1995), pp226, 259

p302, (Seaton, J.) 2003

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Taken from Chapter 10, Government and the Nation State, pp257 – 281, Cairncross, F., The Death of Distance; How The Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives, Orion, London, 1998

Half a century ago, in 1948, George Orwell described a world dictatorship built on electronic communications that could monitor its citizens’ every action…Certainly governments will acquire the technological capability to isolate and track every movement of those citizens it regards with suspicion…But a far likelier development will be a reduction in the authority of the nation state. The death of distance will shift power downward, to the individual. It will both reinforce democracy and transform it.

p257, (Cairncross, F.) 1998

Now some observers imagine that the internet will encourage further transformation of political debate. In the United States, in particular, enthusiasts such as Alvin and Heidi Toffler keenly extol what they call ‘semi-direct democracy’. The Tofflers argue in their book, Creating a New Civilization that voters should be allowed to make many more policy decisions. After all, if people can shop from home, no obvious technical reason prevents them from eventually voting at home. Ibid, p262

Just as electronic communications may alter, but will not destroy, the role of intermediaries in commerce, so they will not kill off representative democracy. The political intermediary – the politician – will remain, performing a specialist role on behalf of voters reluctant to carry the burden of deciding everything from the size of the state budget to the appropriate weight limits for trucks.

Ibid, p262

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Taken from Chapter 2, Critique: Central Issues, pp82 – 95, Computer Mediated Communication; Social Interaction and The Internet, Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., Tomic, A. (Eds), Sage, London, 2008

The idea of democratic discourse and the promotion of civil society through CMC (computer mediated communication) draw on the ideas of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Habermas conceptualized the notion of the public sphere, a space where informed citizens could reach consensus through open debate…In 1991 ZaMir Transnational Net, one of the first spaces of democratic CMC, was created. Named after the Serbo-Croatian word for ‘peace’, ZaMir was an electronic mail network which allowed people to discuss the complex civil and ethnic conflicts which led to the Balkan wars in the Yugoslav successor states. ZaMir was one of the most valuable communication channels for the anti-war and human rights organizations throughout South eastern Europe. Active primarily during the mid to late 90’s, a series of message boards allowed users in Serbia and elsewhere the opportunity to communicate, create alliances and encourage peace.

‘Voices from Sarajevo’, was a similar project to Za Mir, provided an online space for teens to develop friendships and communicate daily crises to those on the outside

The democratic possibilities of the online public sphere are useful only if citizens have access to the internet. Think of the teens in the Voice of Sarajevo online project. How many more teens did not have the privilege of participating in that project? Those who could benefit the most from engaging in the public sphere, those who are most disenfranchised by dominant political and social power structures, are those who more likely than not are unable to engage in CMC.

pp 88, 89 (Thurlow,C., Lengel, L. Tomic, A.) 2008

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TASK 2

Find out more about the following writers and their ideas;

George OrwellJürgen HabermasHerbert SchillerMichel FoucaultAlvin and Heidi Toffler

Divide a sheet into two and place the writers who see a more positive use for We Media in one half and those who see a the more negative potential in the other half. Use one internet reference and one non-internet reference for each writer and include your sources on the sheet

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Internet Sources

China denies involvement in cyber attacks on GoogleBeijing defends right to punish those who challenge party rule online following Google's decision to stop censoring in China. From The Guardian Online Edition, January 25th, 2010

Workers repair a broken marble tablet in front of Google China's headquarters in Beijing. Beijing has denied involvement in cyber attacks on Google. Photograph: Alexander F Yuan/AP

Beijing has denied involvement in cyber attacks and defended its right to punish people who challenge party rule online as it continues a fight-back against criticism of its internet policies."Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China. We are firmly opposed to that," an unidentified spokesman from the ministry of industry and information technology told the state news agency, Xinhua.The spokesman did not refer directly to Google's announcement, in which the firm said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese service. Google had cited an intrusion targeting human rights activists' email accounts and tougher online censorship as reasons behind its decision.The remarks are the most direct official response on the issue, although the government has previously said that it "resolutely opposes" hacking and criticised "baseless" claims. The spokesman added that China was the biggest victim of such attacks, with hackers targeting more than 42,000 websites last year. Using figures from the Internet Society of China, he said cyber attacks from overseas increased 148% from 2007 to 2008, affecting "sectors of finance, transportation and energy, which posed severe harm to economic development and people's lives".Separately, a Chinese internet security official told Xinhua that Google had yet to report its complaints to them.

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"We have been hoping that Google will contact us so that we could have details on this issue and provide them help if necessary," said Zhou Yonglin, deputy chief of operations at the China national computer network emergency response technical team.

Google reported a massive and sophisticated attack which originated in China, but has chosen not to say "one way or the other" whether it believes hackers were sponsored or approved by Beijing.

Zhou also said most hacking of Chinese computers originated from the US.

The Chinese government has toughened its stance since Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, challenged it on the issue last week. She criticised internet censorship, named China as one of several countries where there had been "a spike in threats to the free flow of information" recently,  and urged Beijing to investigate the Google attacks fully and openly.The foreign ministry warned that bilateral relations were being harmed and state media have run several articles attacking US internet policy. Yesterday a commentary in the People's Daily, the Communist party newspaper, accused the US of using social media, such as Twitter and You Tube, to stir up unrest in Iran.In separate comments, carried on a government website today, a spokesperson for the state council information office said China "bans using the internet to subvert state power and wreck national unity, to incite ethnic hatred and division, to promote cults and to distribute content that is pornographic, salacious, violent or terrorist".

The spokesperson added: "China has an ample legal basis for punishing such harmful content, and there is no room for doubting this. This is completely different from so-called restriction of internet freedom."

The state council information office is the cabinet arm of China's propaganda apparatus and one of several agencies that control the internet.

China has prosecuted dissidents and advocates of self-rule in Tibet who have challenged Communist party policies online.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/25/china-denies-cyber-attacks-google

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TASK 3 – read the article above about Google and China; in your own words, summarise the content of the article and make a conclusion about the Chinese government’s actions and use of new media technologies. Try to apply some of the ideas of the writers you looked at in TASK 2 to this example and which writers’ views are relevant to this case.

Democratic, but dangerous too: how the web changed our world - Taken from the Guardian Online Edition 24/01/10In two decades the world wide web has become the most powerful information tool since Gutenberg's printing press, but also the most intrusive and threatening. Aleks Krotoski, presenter of a major new series on the history of the net, reports;

On Thursday, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, gave a speech on internet freedom at a journalism museum in Washington, arguing that the architecture of the web must be free from censorship and manipulation. It is a position that stands in stark contrast with the approach of countries, including China, Egypt and Iran, that seek to curb access – and while there was a whiff of economic self-protectionism in Clinton's words, she opened up the floor to a global discussion about the potential revolutionary power of this invention.Less than two decades after it came into being, the web is now a pawn in an international public policy debate that could create rifts between nations so deep that they lay the foundation for future wars.

For the past year, I have been working on  Virtual Revolution , a four-part documentary series for BBC2, co-produced by the Open University. It aims to identify the true political, economic, social and psychological implications of this new technology. I spoke to an extraordinary cast of characters including the web pioneers, the e-entrepreneurs, and the sceptics who have seen it all before.We identified the new power brokers in our society, whose non-traditional ascents through the web have challenged hundreds of years of hierarchy. We found the kids who took down the economic, communication and political

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pillars of an entire country with the press of a button. We looked at the tactics extremists use to radicalise new recruits, and compared them to the methods that have proved so successful in getting a generation that had been dismissed as dispassionate involved in politics.

We also looked at how the trails of information that we leave across the web are not only redefining privacy, but are creating feedback loops that may be narrowing our horizons, rather than opening our eyes to the new. And we discovered how the web is changing how we think and who we are.

I started the journey travelling through Ghana with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the unassuming Englishman who put the first website in history online on 6 August 1991. He was on a tour with the World Wide Web Foundation, carrying out field research to understand how the web was affecting rural communities who were only now getting connected. He was modest about his role in the development of this technology, making sure to name-check the others who were toying with the same ideas at the same time. His aim had not been to catalyse a worldwide revolution, but to create a framework that would connect lots of information that would not require one person to look after it. But his idealism and belief in the power of web has driven him to take the web to the world."Tim Berners-Lee created a new mode of human communication, "Stephen Fry told me. "He created a new way of allowing communication to work in extraordinarily connected ways."Fry, well-known for his enthusiasm for technology, reflected on what the web had meant to him when he discovered it in the early 1990s. "It seemed like a great new world," he enthused. "It seemed like a new democracy. It seemed like a new way of people coming together and spreading news, of educating, of giving yourself information and access to people and cultures and history. It seemed the most fantastic, radical and extraordinary development since Gutenberg produced his Bible."

Tim Berners-Lee

His thoughts were echoed by Al Gore, the former US vice-president. "It represents the emergence of a new information ecosystem that will have a more profound impact on human civilisation than did the printing press," he said.The web has brought about an enormous transformation in what information we have at our fingertips. It is extremely empowering: everyone has the freedom to participate in the library of knowledge collected online, by accessing it or creating it. Anyone who has historically held control over the

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distribution of information – governments, media, agents – is having to reposition in the face of this information tsunami.

"Individuals without great wealth or bases of power and the industrial world economy can exert influence on others who find their ideas resonating with them," Gore said. "It is inherently democratising and egalitarian and promotes a greater role for the rule of reason."

It is always dangerous, however, to be blinded by idealism. The web is undoubtedly a transformative technology on a par with the printing press, but it's difficult to believe that it will bring the end of inequality or will eradicate international conflict. In fact, some have learned to manipulate the web's power for their own ends.

When this sits well with our personal politics, we celebrate. A 25-year-old from San Francisco can create a piece of software that opens up a channel of communication on the violent streets of post-election Iran, giving protesters the ability to transmit what is happening to the rest of the world. Teenagers in London can organise mass protests on climate change, rallying people from around the country to march on a coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire. But when the same techniques and tools are used to radicalise new recruits to fundamentalist causes, to attack a country's banks and newspapers, or to promote propaganda within authoritarian states, the web becomes something to condemn.

The debate becomes even more personal when you consider how our use of this overwhelmingly commercial space is transforming what privacy means in the 21st century. As we traipse across the web, our trails of personal information are captured and manipulated. We get services for free, but our actions are analysed to produce precisely targeted advertising that funds the companies behind the websites.

The greatest shock to most people is that we willingly create this commercial pact when we think we're alone. A Google search, for example, transcends the barrier between what we view as public and what we view as private. When we do a search on our computers at home, in the office or on the road, we have a misplaced sense we are transacting only with our machine. In fact, when we type a query in Google's search box, we are divulging our intentions to a technology located across the planet, with hundreds of potential eyeballs sifting through our search terms for the perfect advertising match. Yet we still treat it like an oracle, asking it deeply personal questions and looking for answers in its computer brain.

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The surveillance implications for this are clear, but there are wider cultural implications when the money people behind the scenes get their rewards for feeding us exactly what we want. Amazon's recommendation engine, Last.fm's social music service, even news sites such as the Huffington Post, reduce the possibility for serendipity by serving up what they think we want, channelling us into a loop of confirmation. As author Douglas Rushkoff says: "The more like one of my kind of person I become, the less me I am, and the more I am a demographic type."

Socially, this is as potentially damaging as what the extremists peddle; we are coagulating into tight-knit groups who reinforce our own beliefs. It's a far cry from the global group hug that web proponents such as Fry or Gore had hoped it would be.

In addition, the web may be fundamentally changing how we think. There is evidence that there is a generational difference between how children and adults consume information online. A team of researchers led by Professor David Nicholas, of the independent research group Ciber, at University College London, has begun a series of experiments to test whether the architecture of the web put into place by Berners-Lee is transforming the connections in our brains. A lifetime of use seems to be having a cognitive effect.Under-18s who have grown up with the web are better at multi-tasking. They also spend less time searching for information before deciding on what they view as the best answer to a question. Most intriguingly, the youngest users, born after 1993, "crowdsource" their knowledge: they look for the wisdom of their friends, networking what they know, rather than holding on to the information for themselves.

My PhD research   looked at the social psychological implications of our interactions online. What I have come to conclude is that who we are on the web is simply a reflection of who we already are offline. We project hierarchical systems into the virtual world. We extend our interests and make them happen using the tools the web provides. We seek out things that make us feel good about ourselves. The web is a mirror, and we have to face it in confidence, warts and all.Our relationship with the web is a synergy: as it matures, so will we. And as it draws us into its networks and its hyperlinks, we will shape them in our global image. It is the most revolutionary evolution that we as a planet have ever participated in. "The sorts of things which the internet brings by connecting

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people," Berners-Lee said to me while we were travelling to a community centre in Abiriw, outside Accra, "is openness and understanding of other people's ideas."On a good day," he added. "I hope we have a lot of good days."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/24/internet-revolution-changing-world

TASK 4

How does the phrase ‘Virtual Revolution’ imply a positive use of ‘We-Media’?

Find out more about the following people who have been involved in the promotion of a positive view of We-Media. What are their views? Again, find one internet source and one non-internet source for each.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Al Gore

Stephen Fry

Aleks Krotoski

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Beltway BloggersPersonal Politics Turn Communal on a Web of Local Internet Sites

Taken from The Online Edition of the Washington Post, 7/02/10

By Ellen McCarthyWashington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, February 7, 2004

When the D.C. Council held a public hearing on the proposed smoking ban for District bars and restaurants, more than a hundred people showed up to voice their opinions. Ban the Ban, a group organized by local bloggers, brought 25 people to testify on that December workday.

Zoe Mitchell, who led the online campaign, says the Ban the Ban turnout that day is proof that blogs are more than a wasteland of rhetoric. A veteran protester at 23, Mitchell has stormed congressional offices, marched against the war in Iraq and travelled the country attending anti-globalization rallies. She is trying to change the world; she believes that keeping a blog, a kind of online diary, will help.

Washington's blogsphere is a galaxy of local Web writers who are tied to their computers and to their connections with each other. There are plenty of gossipy teen blogs and "what-I-had-for-lunch" journals, but like the city itself, Washington's blog scene has a strong base of politicos.

Surfing through directories of Washington bloggers (several exist, including DCbloggers.com and the DC Metro Blog Map, a site that lists bloggers according to the nearest Metro stop) it is hard to miss the preponderance of politically charged blogs. Dedicated, like-minded bloggers have even founded

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circles of sites that link to one another and discuss similar topics. The Beltway Bloggers fall to the right. The Cato Blog Mafia consists of current and former employees of the Cato Institute. There are wonkish policy blogs, environmental blogs and libertarian blogs. Blogs that promoted the DC primary and track happenings in District education.

Web logs allow people with little technical know-how to create elaborate, quickly updated Internet sites at almost no expense. The growing ease of the technology has enticed hundreds (possibly thousands) of local residents to take their passions to the Web.

Blogging is a lifestyle, the most devoted say, and like the telephone or e-mail, can quickly become a second-nature method of communication.

One afternoon last week James Joyner trolled through the headlines on Google News, and learned that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favour of gay marriage. The Ashburn resident, who describes himself as a libertarian-leaning conservative, clicked through to the USA Today story on the ruling and decided to add it to his blog, Outside the Beltway.

A quick right-click of his mouse brings up a box giving Joyner, who uses a software system called Moveable Type, the option to link the story to his blog. He writes a couple of paragraphs of commentary and hits the "publish" button, sending an update to his blog. The whole process is done in about 10 minutes. There are options to change the way the text appears and some blogs are fancier than others, but very little technical prowess is actually required, he said.

Within hours Joyner received more than a dozen e-mails notifying him that readers had commented on that post. The replies go up on the site automatically, but Joyner can read the text in his e-mail and if there is a tawdry remark, he has the power to remove it. His site gets between 1,000 and 1,500 hits a day, mostly from people Joyner has never met.

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"You get interaction going, discussions. People can get sort of heated and start calling each other names," said Joyner, 38, a former political science professor.

Joyner will sometimes post to his blog 25 times a day and regularly reads between 30 and 40 other blogs. The activity takes up to an hour or two of his time on weekdays, and while he says most of it is done at home, Joyner admits that he probably blogs more than he should from the office.

Joyner says he'd be reading the news anyway, and reasons that blogging is actually complementary to his job as a non-fiction editor for Brassey's Inc., a Dulles book publisher. "I'm trying to sign authors for books. Part of my job is finding out what the hot topics are," he explained.

Why spend so much time on what Joyner contends is "just a hobby?" It is simply a way to connect, many bloggers say, and can create a sense of community.

"It's definitely a community. You would tend to think that a technology like this would make it easier for people to avoid personal interaction, but it's just actually the opposite," said P.J. Doland, a member of the Cato Blog Mafia and author of a blog called the Frosty Mug Revolution.

A list of links to D.C. bloggers is a near-mainstay on most local blog sites, allowing bloggers to quickly reference each other. There are regular Friday night happy hours at Atomic Billiards, a Cleveland Park bar, where bloggers can put a face to a screen name. And member-only Yahoo user groups and e-mail lists allow Washington bloggers to privately discuss the craft and local blog gossip.

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"When you have a theory or a concern, telling people over the phone, it's not that effective, but put it on your blog and you can tell the whole world," said Alexis Rice, a fellow with the Center for American Government at Johns Hopkins University who is studying the use of technology in presidential campaigns.

Mitchell, a member of the D.C. Statehood Green Party, discovered that in early October when she posted a lengthy anti-smoking-ban essay on her personal blog, A Ten, A Five, and Five Ones. The site got more than 3,000 hits that day, triple its normal volume.

"I posted that thing and all these other bloggers in town and other political activists that were opposed to the ban started e-mailing me saying 'Are you going to found a group? When are you going to meet?' " she recalled.

Days later Mitchell, with the help of other local bloggers, launched Ban the Ban, a blog she hoped would become a platform for action. She and a team of fellow bloggers updated the blog daily with news and research about the impact bans in other cities were having on bar and restaurant sales.

They added a link so that readers could e-mail D.C. Council members; sold coffee mugs and T-shirts bearing the organization's logo; created an e-mail update list; and added a credit card transaction function for donations. Unlike a static Web site, the blog changed constantly, giving readers a reason to visit more frequently. Eventually the group met in person, organized bar crawls to raise money and canvassed local service workers who supported their cause. But the blog remained the centre point of the campaign.

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"I said if we're going to win this, we have to fight it first, we have to fight it using technology and logic and economic argument," Mitchell said.

The day before the public hearing, council member Carol Schwartz (R-At Large) proposed counter-legislation that would provide fiscal incentives to businesses that voluntarily went smoke-free. Seven out of the council's 13 members sponsored the less restrictive bill, making it far more likely to be passed, although no action yet has been taken.

Schwartz said her opinion was not influenced by any one group, and Ban the Ban doesn't claim to be solely responsible for defeating the bill banning smoking. But Mitchell says attendance at the hearing is proof that blogs can affect life outside the virtual world.

"What blogging is really useful for is making connections between disparate kinds of people," Mitchell said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20310-2004Feb6.html

TASK 5

Read the article above (‘Beltway Bloggers’) and in your own words, write a brief summary of the piece and answer these questions;

How is ‘blogging’ democratic?

How does We-Media empower communities?

What kinds of issues are being taken up by the blogging community mentioned above?

How does this article relate to the ideas of Jürgen Habermas and his idea of the public sphere?

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Text to Give: An opportunity for political candidates?The American Red Cross has reportedly raised more than $20 million for relief efforts in Haiti via its text to give program since the 12th of January earthquake. Mobile phone service providers have made it easy to donate by allowing customers to give $10 by texting “Haiti” to 90999, which will then be added to their phone bill. The amount that has been contributed in a very short time is impressive. However, the question that remains is whether candidates can take advantage of this technology to collect donations. The Rothenberg Political Report provides some insight into the complications that remain for political candidates:

First of all, candidates and campaign committees need to collect basic information about all donors including their name, address, and occupation. This is not necessarily prohibitive but candidates would need to establish a “best effort” to obtain the information after the contribution, according to a Federal Election Commission spokesman. This is more of a practical roadblock than a legal one.

But more importantly, collecting political contributions via text messaging may run afoul of the law because corporations are prohibited from being conduits for contributions. In order for the transaction to work, cell carriers such as Verizon, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, or AT&T would have to collect the contribution on the bill and then write a check to the particular campaign.

Keep in mind, the FEC has not issued a formal advisory opinion on the matter of accepting contributions via text (mainly because no candidate has requested one). Until that time comes, we won’t have a definitive answer on the legality of the issue.

In many ways this is still uncharted territory, but it is certainly a new technology that holds promise for collecting contributions. You can read more on The Rothenberg Political Report.

http://joetrippi.com/blog/

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TASK 6

What are the pros and cons of We-Media outlined in the above excerpt from Joe Trippi’s website?

Go to http://joetrippi.com/blog/ and find other examples of how We-Media is being used in a collective, democratic and positive way

Obama’s Secret Weapons: Internet, Databases and Psychology

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Taken from the ‘Wired’ Website

During a sweltering Friday evening rush hour in early October, Jeanette Scanlon spent two-and-a-half hours with 20 other people waving a homemade Barack Obama sign at the cars flowing through a busy intersection in Plant City, Florida.

"I got shot the bird one time," laughs the easy-natured Scanlon, a 43-year-old single mother of three and a Tampa psychiatrist’s billing manager. "That wasn’t the thumbs up I was looking for."

Scanlon is one of an estimated 230,000 volunteers who are powering Obama’s get-out-the-vote campaign in the swing state of Florida. And while sign-waving is a decidedly low-tech appeal to voters’ hearts and minds, make no mistake: The Obama campaign’s technology is represented here. Scanlon organized the gathering — and 24 others since September — through Obama’s social networking site,  my.BarackObama.com. Similarly, she used the site’s Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool in September to find registered voters in her own neighbourhood, so she could canvass them for Obama.  And this weekend, Scanlon and another 75 or so Plant City volunteers will be phoning thousands of Floridians to urge them to vote, using a sophisticated database provided by the Obama campaign to ensure they don’t call McCain supporters by mistake.

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The Obama campaign has been building, tweaking and tinkering with its technology and organizational infrastructure since it kicked off in February 2007, and today has most sophisticated organizing apparatus of any presidential campaign in history. Previous political campaigns have tapped the internet in innovative ways — Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run, and Ron Paul’s bid for this year’s Republican nomination, to name two. But Obama is the first to successfully integrate technology with a revamped model of political organization that stresses volunteer participation and feedback on a massive scale, erecting a vast, intricate machine set to fuel an unprecedented get-out-the-vote drive in the final days before Tuesday’s election.

"I think what was recovered in this campaign is the sense of what leadership is, and what the role of the technology is, so that you get the best out of both," says Marshall Ganz, a public policy lecturer at Harvard who designed the field-organizer and volunteer training system used by the Obama campaign. "The Dean campaign understood how to use the internet for the fund-raising, but not for the organizing."

"We’ve really poured a lot of energy and thought into making this focused on real-world organizing activity," says Chris Hughes, the 24-year-old co-founder of Facebook, who left that company last year to help Obama with his online organizational efforts.

Florida’s 27 electoral votes make it a key state in the national election, and Obama has poured $27.5 million into television advertising in the Sunshine State, drowning out McCain’s relatively paltry $6.4 million in ads since late June. But equally important to the campaign is making sure its supporters actually vote —  something that the Republican grassroots have historically been better at in Florida.

So the campaign swelled field operations to 19,000 "neighbourhood teams" as of late October, focused on 1,400 neighbourhoods across the state,

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according to a recent report from the St. Petersburg Times. The teams are directed by about 500 paid campaign field organizers, and are replicated nationally. In all, the Obama campaign estimates that 1.5 million volunteers are helping it to get out the vote in the battleground states.

These neighbourhood teams have both phone-banked and physically knocked on doors to make sure that voters are registered and know where to vote — an effort that will continue all the way through Election Day.

"The last weekend before the election, they’re going to have constant phone-banking and canvassing, asking people whether they’ve voted yet, and if not, when they’re going to vote," says Scanlon, discussing plans laid out by four team leaders at a local Plant City campaign office.

But the calling won’t be a completely random affair. TheObama campaign will give volunteers access to databases that have been constantly updated throughout the summer through its field-office computers, and through myBo — Obama supporters’ nickname for myBarackObama.com — with information about potential voters’political leanings. The information in the database has accumulated over time from previous election campaigns, and is constantly updated with information gathered at people’s doorsteps by canvassers likeScanlon, and through phone calls.

Now, someone identified as a supporter is likely to be called again by the Obama campaign, and reminded where to go vote; people identified as "undecided" in the database may receive a call or a personal visit from a volunteer to find out how they can still be persuaded, or they may be mailed some information about Obama’s positions on the issues. McCain supporters, naturally, aren’t called by the Obama volunteers.

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That blend of gumshoe canvassing and information processing is a hallmark of the Obama campaign, says Sanford Dickert, a social-media consultant in New York City.

"The integration of technology into the process of field organizing … is the success of the Obama campaign," says Dickert, who worked as John Kerry’s chief technology officer for the 2004 campaign."But the use technology was not the end-all and be-all in this cycle.Technology has been a partner, an enabler for the Obama campaign, bringing the efficiencies of the internet into the real-world problems of organizing people in a distributed, trusted fashion."

An 80-plus page training manual provided to campaign field organizers illustrates the organizational side of the campaign. Members of leadership teams are assigned specific roles, such as team coordinator, data coordinator, volunteer coordinator, voter-registration and voter-contact coordinator, and house-meeting coordinator. Each of these positions has a clearly defined role outlined in bullet points. Those teams of people and their cadres of volunteers are ultimately assigned to get out the vote in specific geographic regions.

But the campaign also seems to recognize that some volunteers won’t cotton to a top-down system, and its web tools accommodate independent efforts.  Scanlon started her work for Obama with the South Tampa team, but felt the campaign wasn’t sending enough volunteers to canvas her hometown Plant City, a working-class suburb that voted for Bush in the last two presidential elections. Obama’s organizers insisted that that they needed to focus their efforts on more densely populated surrounding areas.

"I just didn’t feel good about that," she says.

So Scanlon took matters in her own hands by tapping into the campaign’s online Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool on myBo. In two days last September, she knocked on 50 doors to sniff out support for Obama, entering her neighbours’ responses into the campaign’s databases through myBo.

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Though she’s volunteered on presidential campaigns before, it was the first time that she had ever made the effort to canvass for a presidential candidate by visiting neighbours’ houses.

Scanlon says that many of the voters she talked to worried about Obama’s tax plans. But she had gone on her canvassing trip prepared with printouts from the Obama campaign’s web site which provided a side-by-side comparison between Obama’s and John McCain’s tax proposals for families. "The plan was better for 100 percent of the voters I spoke to in Plant City," she says.

Scanlon logs her activities on myBo, which awards points for various volunteer activities. The point system helps other would-be supporters figure out who they can hook up with locally if they want to get more involved in the campaign, says Hughes.

"If you go to your local group in your small town, you can immediately find out who’s the most active person, and who just joined the group for the sake of joining the group," Hughes says. "And that gives you, the individual Obama supporter, much more information. You can measure your own activity against others, and you can contact the most active people within the groups."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/10/obamas-secret-w/

TASK 7

Read the above extract from ‘Wired’ website. Pick out quotes that show how Barack Obama and the Democrats used We-Media in the

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2008 US Presidential Election campaigns, then answer these questions;

What particular elements of We Media were used in the campaign?

How were these elements combined with more traditional forms of campaigning?

Do you think that We-media played a significant role in motivating people and gathering support for Obama? Explain your response.

How does this example of the use of We Media echo the ideas of Sir Tim Berners-Lee?

How Alternative Media Provide The Crucial Critique Of The MainstreamBy: Richard Keeble

Taken from ‘Media Lens Website

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Celebrating The Internet And Blogosphere

Today, the internet and the blogosphere provide enormous opportunities for the development of progressive journalism ideals in both the UK and globally. Stuart Allan, for instance, celebrates the bloggers and the "extraordinary contribution made by ordinary citizens offering their first hand reports, digital photographs, camcorder video footage, mobile telephone snapshots or audio clips". A great deal of this "citizen journalism" (while challenging the professional monopoly of the journalistic field) actually feeds into mainstream media routines and thus reinforces the dominant news value system. The internet and blogosphere only become interesting when they serve to challenge the mainstream as crucial elements in progressive social and political movements. 

Moreover, we need to follow John Hartley in making a radical transformation of journalism theory. We need as both academics and citizens to move away from the concept of the audience as a passive consumer of a professional product to seeing the audience as producers of their own (written or visual) media. Hartley even draws on Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which he suggests proclaims the radical utopian-liberal idea that everyone has the right not only to seek and receive but to "impart" (in other words communicate) information and ideas. If everyone, then, is a journalist then how can journalism be professed? "Journalism has transferred from a modern expert system to contemporary open innovation - from 'one-to-many' to 'many to many' communication." Let us see how this redefinition of journalism can incorporate many different forms of media activity into the alternative public sphere.

Firstly, there is the role of radical, non-mainstream journalists. George Orwell (1903-1950) is best known as the author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) but he was also a distinguished progressive journalist who concentrated most of his writing on obscure, alternative journals of the Left - such Controversy, New Leader, Left Forum, Left News, Polemic, Progressive, Politics and Letters. From 1943 to 1947 he was literary editor of the leftist journal, Tribune, and through writing his regular "As I Please" column, instinctively developed a close relationship with his audience. This relationship was crucial to the flowering of Orwell's journalistic imagination. 

While he realised mainstream journalism was basically propaganda for wealthy newspaper proprietors, at Tribune he was engaging in the crucial political debate with people who mattered to him. They were an authentic audience compared with what Stuart Allan has called the "implied reader or imagined community of readers" of the mainstream media. 

Today, in the United States, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St Clair produce Counterpunch, an alternative investigative website (www.counterpunch.org). Out of their writings come many publications. There's also the excellent Middle East Report (www.merip.org), the Nation (www.thenation.com), Mother Jones (www.motherjones.com), Z Magazine (www.zcommunications.org/zmag), In These Times (www.inthesetimes.com);

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in Chennai, India, Frontline (www.frontlineonnet.com); in London there's the investigativewww.corporatewatch.org. 

Coldtype.net in the UK brings together many of the writings by radical journalists, campaigners and academics (such as Felicity Arbuthnot and William Blum). Dahr Jamail is a freelance journalist reporting regularly from a critical peace perspective on the Middle East (seewww.dahrjamailiraq.com) while Democracy Now! is an alternative US radio station (with allied website and podcasts) run by Amy Goodman overtly committed to peace journalism.

Drawing Inspiration From ChomskyChris Atton argues that alternative media such as these often draw inspiration from Chomsky's critique of the corporate myths of "balance" and "objectivity" and stresses, instead, their explicitly partisan character. Moreover, they seek "to invert the hierarchy of access" to the news by explicitly foregrounding the viewpoints of "ordinary" people (activists, protestors, local residents), citizens whose visibility in the mainstream media tends to be obscured by the presence of elite groups and individuals.

Then there's the role of radical intellectuals such as the American historian Tom Engelhardt (www.tomdispatch.com). Other radical intellectuals prominent in the blogosphere have included the late Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Norman Solomon, James Winter, Mark Curtis and the recently deceased African intellectual campaigner and journalist Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem. In the UK, activists David Edwards and David Cromwell edit the radical media monitoring site www.medialens.org which monitors the mainstream media from a radical Chomskyite/Buddhist perspective and in support of the global peace movement. Professor David Miller and William Dinan are part of the collective running www.spinwatch.org which critiques the PR industry from a radical, peace perspective.

Some research centres play important roles in the formation of an alternative global public sphere. For instance, http://globalresearch.ca is the website of the Centre for Research and Globalisation, an independent research and media group based in Montreal. It carries excellent articles by Michel Chussodovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa. Special subjects on the site include US war agenda, crimes against humanity, militarisation and WMD, poverty and social inequality, media disinformation and intelligence. There is also the website produced by the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought (www.ii-pt.com). 

Political activists often double as media activists. Take for instance IndyMedia (www.indymedia.org). It emerged during the "battle of Seattle" in 1999 when thousands of people took to the streets to protest against the World Trade Organisation and the impact of global free trade relations - and were met by armoured riot police. Violent clashes erupted with many injuries on both sides. In response 400 volunteers, rallying under the motto "Don't hate the media: be the media", created a site and a daily news sheet, the Blind Spot, which spelled out news of the demonstration from the perspective of the protestors. The site incorporated news, photographs, audio and video

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footage - and received 1.5 million hits in its first week. Today there are more than 150 independent media centres in around 45 countries over six continents. Their mission statement says:

"The Independent Media Centre is a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity."

In the UK, Peace News (for non-violent revolution), edited by author and political activist Milan Rai and Emily Johns, comes as both a hard copy magazine and a lively website (www.peacenews.info) combining analysis, cultural reviews and news of the extraordinarily brave activities of peace movement activities internationally. As its website stresses, it is "written and produced by and for activists, campaigners and radical academics from all over the world". Not only does their content differ radically from the mainstream. In their collaborative, non-hierarchical structures and sourcing techniques alternative media operations challenge the conventions of mainstream organisational routines. Atton describes the alternative journalism of the British video magazine Undercurrents and Indymedia as "native reporting". "Both privilege a journalism politicised through subjective testimony, through the subjects being represented by themselves."

Fitwatch: Monitoring The MonitorsMembers of Fit Watch, a protest group opposed to police forward intelligence teams (Fits), the units that monitor demonstrations and meetings, similarly combine political and media activism in their "sousveillance" - the latest buzzword for taking videos and photographs of police activities and then uploading them on to the web. They are part of a growing international media activist, protest movement. In Palestine, for instance, B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, gave video cameras to 160 citizens in the West Bank and Gaza and their shocking footage of abuses by Israeli settlers and troops was broadcast on the country's television as well as internationally.

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Citizens and campaigners in the UK and US who upload images of police surveillance or brutality on to YouTube or citizens who report on opposition movements via blogs, Twitter and websites in authoritarian societies such as China, Burma, Iran and Egypt can similarly be considered participants in the alternative media sphere. Commenting on the role of citizen blogs during the 2003 Iraq invasion, Stuart Allan stressed:

"... these emergent forms of journalism have the capacity to bring to bear alternative perspectives, contexts and ideological diversity to war reporting, providing users with the means to connect with distant voices otherwise being marginalised, if not silenced altogether, from across the globe."

And for Atton, participatory, amateur media production contests the concentration of institutional and professional media power "and challenges the media monopoly on producing symbolic forms". 

Peace movement and international human rights organisations also produce excellent campaigning sites which can be viewed as forms of activist journalism. For instance, http://ipb.org is the site of the International Peace Bureau founded in 1891 and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1910. It currently has 282 member organisations in 70 countries. Or there is the Campaign for the Abolition of War (http://www.abolishwar.org.uk). Formed in 2001 following the Hague Appeal for Peace in 1999, its founder president was Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat FRS, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate; while its founder chair was Bruce Kent. They work closely with the International Peace Bureau in Geneva for an end to arms sales, economic justice, a more equitable United Nations, political rights for persecuted minorities, a world peace force (instead of gunboat democracy), conflict prevention and education for peace in schools, colleges and the media.

Exposing Human Rights AbusesThe organisation, Reprieve (www.reprieve.org.uk), campaigns on behalf of those often unlawfully detained by the US and UK in the "war on terror" and

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its director Clive Stafford Smith writes regular pieces for the "quality" press and the leftist New Statesman magazine, highlighting cases of abuse. For instance, on 10 August 2009, he wrote in the Guardian of three cases of government cover-ups. In the first, the government was refusing to hand over to the High Court details about the horrific torture of Binyam Mohamed (in Morocco and at the notorious US detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba) on the grounds that it would endanger future intelligence co-operation with the Americans. 

In the second case, after the government admitted that two men had been taken for torture ("rendered" in the jargon) via the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, they were still refusing Reprieve's requests for their names. And the final case involved cover-ups over Britain's complicity in the renditions of prisoners from Iraq to abuse in Afghanistan. In the US, the American Civil Liberties Union (seewww.aclu.org) has consistently campaigned to expose the human rights abuses which have accompanied the "war on terror" and produced a important series of reports on the issue. 

Finally, Tim Luckhurst is wrong to suggest that advocates of alternative media are fired by "postmodern, Marxist fantasies". Certainly my own writings on journalism and teaching for 25 years have not been based on any fantasies but rather grounded, in part, on a real desire to problematise the notion of professionalism. So, while clearly acknowledging the many achievements of progressive professional journalists I have always seen it as one of my crucial responsibilities as an educator to present students with an alternative to professionalism - drawing, indeed, for inspiration on a critical engagement with Marxism and postmodernism amongst a range of important concepts. 

Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, is the joint editor of Peace Journalism, War and Conflict Resolution, shortly to be published by Peter Lang. David Edwards, of Media Lens, has a chapter titled "Normalising the unthinking: The media's role in mass killing". Richard Keeble's chapter, "Peace journalism as political practice: A new, radical look

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at the theory", expands on some of the ideas in this piece. John Pilger provides a Foreword.

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/

TASK 8

Read the above excerpt from the Media Lens Website. Pick one example of how We Media has been used to address human rights abuses or has countered state surveillance and state violence and answer these questions;

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In what way do you think some of these examples of the use of We Media are democratic?

How does We Media provide a valid alternative voice to ordinary citizens? Give examples.

TASK 9

Find out more about the following writers and their ideas; how do they connect with the activities and organizations outlined in the Media Lens extract?

Noam Chomsky

Edward Said

Mark Curtis

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

Further Reading - Books

Books by Henry Jenkins

Youtube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009)

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008)

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (2006)

Charles Leadbetter

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We-Think: Mass innovation, not mass production (2008)

David Weinberger

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2008)

Clay Shirky

Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together (2009)

Websites

http://henryjenkins.org/

http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/orange-buttons/we-think.aspx

http://www.medialens.org/

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