Down to the Wire

I'm meeting with Dawnja tomorrow afternoon, and I'm frantically finishing up both my writing and the social media campaign I just started. I've managed to get most of my content onto the Tumblr site, and am actively looking for ways to present the paper more interactively. As a wiki? Google docs? Hopefully I will have a link to both this site and the paper in an editable form up on the Tumblr site by tomorrow morning. For now, I'm heading to bed.

The Tumblr Page is Live! (and in progress...)

I'm working to migrate all the important content (list of videos, photo galleries, news articles, quotes, blogs, Twitter posts, Facebook invites, etc) over to my newly-established Tumblr account, but the platform is working nicely for me so far. If I can find a way to link to my paper via google docs, I'll have a complete social media campaign project. All my content will be publicly accessible and linkable, illustrating the importance to mastering different uses of social media for activism and education in general.

Solution!

I woke up still trying to figure out the best place to present all my content, and I think I've got a solution: Tumblr! It's a blogging platform that's much more flexible and customizable than Blogger, but still easy to use. I signed up for an account, and will begin migrating all the photos, videos, websites, audio interviews, and other rich media I've collected today.

Delicious Bibliography?

I started working with a researching Delicious a few months back, and I'm realizing as the paper/project come down to their final days, my account will serve better as a storehouse for all the links I want to embed in my paper than as a bibliography of actual scholarly references. The reason is two-fold: 1) not all the scholarly articles I'm working with are available in an easily linked online version (many of them require logins or other password protects to access) and 2) this use is better integrated with the purpose of delicious, which is not only to store but to share online content. It is much more likely that a link to a newspaper article, flickr gallery, or youtube video will foster interaction on delicious than a post to a journal article. I will also post my articles to delicious if possible, and create a web-based bibliography to link to from delicious, but I'm confident this new use will serve my project better than I had originally intended by giving me more flexibility and allowing me to share a greater range of content on my topic in one place.

Progress Update #2

I'm up to 7 pages, and I haven't even really started my analysis (mostly recounting the New School case study and tracing the history of social media/internet activism). The paper will probably shape up to be somewhere between 15 and 20 pages. I've got to set up a meeting with Dawnja to figure out a final meeting date/deadline, but I'm looking to have the writing and pulling together of all my links/files done this weekend, so I have a few days to assemble it in the correct format and present it to her by the end of next week.

Progress Update- Paper

I started writing the paper this morning, and got through about 4 pages of it before I called it quits. A few weeks back, I recruited a certain future librarian to help me find journal articles dealing with the topic of the internet/social media and activism. She provided a whole bunch of relevant content, and right now I'm focusing on two in particular, "Organizing MySpage: Youth Walkouts, Pleasure, Politics, and New Media" by K. Wayne Yang and "The Electronic Republic? Evidence on the Impact of the Internet on Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the U.S." by Phillip Vanfossen.

Alternative Means of Presentation

Less than a month until the end, and I'm exploring different ways to present my final project that will do the rich multimedia content justice. The interactive PDF thing is ok, but I think I can make it even better. I'm exploring different ways to present the paper outside of a traditional full paper/PDF format. One idea I had was creating a modified blog with different sections of the paper being distributed as postings. I did some research, and couldn't find any interesting alternatives for presenting long documents on the web other than in PDF/publication form. I'm going to do a little more digging and hope I find some inspiration, but at this point I'm going to play around with the few ideas I have. Of course, I'd also turn in a regular word doc/pdf version of the paper, but I'd really like to find a more visually engaging way to integrate the rich media content I'm working with than just live hyperlinks.

Citizen Journalism

The actions of the last few weeks have led me to question the very nature of citizenship, activism, and journalism. I used to see journalism as a noble profession, willfully divorced from moralizing and dedicated to seeking the truth. With the ubiquity of technology turning many of us into citizen journalists, the importance of this nobility becomes less and less clear. Much has been written about the trust we place in the "truth" of the image, and its ability to manipulate. This idea of acting as a witness and a documenter, and intention behind that action, is an important piece of the technology and activism puzzle. While I initially set out to explore only the use of technology by activists, citizen journalists who witness and record political action are activists in their own right, and I will have to consider them as such in this paper.

New Occupation

A lot has happened in the last few days, with the students occupying another building—this time breaking in before the building opened. Because the action started with a break-in, the university did not treat it like a demonstration but as a criminal act, and called in the NYPD. There is a lot of conflicting coverage from different witnesses and journalists, but a really interesting article in yesterday's Times, which I'm going to draw on for the paper, explores it rather eloquently.

New School as Case Study

As I begin to write the paper, I'm deciding to use the current turmoil at The New School as the lens through which I explore technology and student action. The December occupation and subsequent student actions (press conferences and teach-ins) demonstrated the ways in which technology can be used by activists to quickly spread their message. I have a lot of material at my disposal. Now I just have to figure out the best way to illustrate it (screenshots of Twitter and web posts? live links?)

Interactive Documents

I'm trying to figure out the best way to build an interactive document. I'd like the words/sentences in the document to live link to web pages, images, videos, and other rich media content. I already know how to create PDFs with live links, but I was hoping to use a more intricate, newer software to create the final document. I've found a couple links to help me with the process:

Apple

Computer Arts

Delicious Bibliography

In keeping with the "social media is revolutionizing the way we interact and view events" thesis of this project, I've decided to utilize the social bookmarking service delicious as my bibliography. All web-based sources will be catalogued on my delicious page. This will allow me to easily categorize and share my sources with others, and view how popular those sources are with the delicious community.

The Importance of Social Media

Part of my job at The New School involves creating strategic presences for the university on a variety of social media sites. This work involves a great deal of consideration for the nature and importance of social media, and the ways it has influenced how we think, feel, and interact.

The unique importance of social media in broadcasting information will play a large role in this project. The fact that social media sites are free, immediate, and far-reaching makes them an important platform for the quick and easy dissemination of important information. The regular daily news cycle has been replaced by up-to-the-minute man on scene coverage of important events, including protests. These observations color the public perception of events (for those technologically invested follow them) in more concrete ways than we might like to admit. The ease with which a story can be spread through a note posted on Facebook, a status update, a series of images or video, or a tweet, means that people have access to far more information (most of it unfiltered by the press) than in the past. How this changes the way we view certain events, and whether it makes the "truth" any clearer, is something I'd like to explore in this project.

A Note on the Blog

With the refocusing of my project, the significance of this blog has now changed. The project is now both a consideration and illustration of technology and social media as tools of communication. As such, this blog is no longer just a storehouse for information but an exercise in transparency—a web 2.0 picture of academic process. I'll be posting regular updates on what I've been working on, ideas for sites and technologies to use, etc. The blog is now part of the project instead of a tool for creating it. It is a constant work in progress. I look forward to being both the scientist and subject in this web experiment.

Thesis... Round 1

I've been doing some thinking on my thesis statement, and I think the best way to figure it out is the jump right in. So here's my first attempt at focusing my paper:

The democratization and ubiquity of internet technology has changed the way we protest—allowing protesters to act as their own publications and blurring the lines between journalist and participant, reporting and propaganda.

Reset

So I met with Dawnja and I'm going to go in a different direction with the project, one that seems better suited to both my timeframe and my experience. Instead of doing a single video documentary, I'm going to do a sort of digital design packet: an interactive pdf paper detailing the way activism has been changed by digital media—with live links to photography, videos, newspaper articles, web pages, etc—embedded within. The project will simultaneously discuss how these new technologies have changed the nature of activism and illustrate those changes by utilizing those technologies. Now all I need is a thesis...

Interview Subjects

Two ideas I have to getting in other voices in the film: 

Man-on-the-street style interviews (audio only) asking: 1) what is an activist? 2) what does it mean to be an activist? and 3) what do activists do?

And interviews with digital media experts who can put the effect of media on grassroots organizing and demonstration into context. Right now, the person I'm thinking would be best is the New School's own Ken Wark. I'm going to write him an email this week introducing the project and seeing if he'd be willing to sit down and talk to me once the project takes a bit more shape, and I have a concrete set of questions to ask him.

Hardware/Software

This new computer I bought is really saving me. It has the most recent version of Final Cut Pro, CS3, Mac the Ripper, Soundtrack (although I'm looking into a cheap or trial version of a better audio editing software, or just scheduling time in the lab on Pro Tools). I'm also going to spend the weekend looking for some upgraded audio equipment to invest in (at least a basic lav mic and a good shotgun). One of the main reasons for wanting to do a final project rather than just finishing with a class is that it gives me a chance to boost my equipment collection and ensure I have a good handle on how to use all the software and equipment I do own.

Production Plan

In an effort to move this process forward, I'm putting forth this production plan with tangible deadlines to meet. Here's the first draft:

March 15- Finish simple trailer cut (with audio) and post to site
March 18- Finish first mockup of cover art and post to site
March 22- Develop shooting plan for BRoll and supplementary footage/images
March 25- Digitize and create graphics from relevant web coverage, newspaper articles, statements and any other media
April 2- Collect and digitize any new media from anticipated April 1 New School demonstration
April 9- Develop basic web presence for project (establish URL and post trailer)
April 15- Rough Cut
April 29- Refined Cut and developed web page (with bios, synopsis, background into, etc)
May 6- Final cut and deliverable packet to Dawnja

Since I've been working on the project a bit each day, these seem to be completely manageable deadlines (and build in a little more time since the real end of the semester is not until May 18. On the deadlines, any material that I am able to post will be posted to the site for review.

Title and Graphic Treatment

I'm stuck on trying to title this project, and its making it difficult for me to develop a graphic/type treatment. I want to get in the idea that the piece is looking at the ways digital media has changed activism, and the ways it has made the reporting of "facts" both more clear and more confusing. I tried to write out a list of words that I wanted to stress, sort of like a vocabulary mood board, and the best I came up with out of that is Digital Revolution, which I'm ok with if it sticks but I'd like to do one better. I think I'm going to work with that title for now, so at least I can design a quick cover graphic and choose a title card font. Since I'm stressing the digital/tech aspect of activism over activist history/legacy, I'm going to go with a simple, slick, sans-serif font like Helvetica, Vedana, or Klavika (the Facebook font). Graphically, I'm thinking solid lines, bold colors, not much of a color range— black, white, and greens. I'll mock up something soon and post a jpeg.

progress update

My new computer has the ability to capture youtube videos as flv files, so I've been able to pull a handful of raw video footage from the New School's December occupation. I'm now looking into free programs to convert flash video into quicktime movie format, since my version of Final Cut isn't recognizing the files as videos. The first program I installed put a watermark over all the converted video unless I paid and registered, so I have now installed ReelBean 3.93 from the Apple downloads page. So far, I haven't been able to get it to work with these particular flv files either. I'll discuss it with my advisor when we meet soon.

In the meantime, I've been putting together a basic score in soundtrack and cutting together a very basic trailer which should be completed in the next week or so. I'll post it here when I've got it to a point where its shareable.

theory

To make the project a real culmination of my studies at The New School, I decided to revisit some of my old media theory readings, supplement them with recent articles on new media activism, and pull some quotes out to draw a sort of theoretical framework. Some excerpts:

"The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propoganda."

— Noam Chomsky, and Edward Herman, "A Propoganda Model"

"Since then, broad-based, populist political spectacles have become the corm, thanks to an evolving sense of the way in which the internet may be deployed in a democratic and emancipatory manner by a growing planetary citizenry that is using the new media to become informed, to inform others, and to construct new social and political relations."

—Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, "New Media and Internet Activism: From the 'Battle of Seattle' to Blogging"

What I've Got

After taking a few days to research just how much raw photography and video footage exists of the various New School and NYU occupations and demonstrations, I am nearly overwhelmed with resources. The idea is now to contrast the different forms of media "coverage" of the events: the student-shot footage and photos, the traditional media coverage, the official press statements and the blog commentary.

Link to some of the youtube video:

rethinking the project

Over the past few months, The New School has been embroiled in a campus upheaval. Following the December student occupation at The New School, students from New York University occupied the Kimmel Student Center for a couple days in February 2009. The student groups across the city have been collaborating and organizing, with students from CUNY, The New School, New York University, and (maybe) Columbia creating a coalition of citywide student activists. As more demonstrations are likely to take place over the next month, and the New School students have vowed to "shut down" the university if president Bob Kerrey does not resign before April 1, it would be remiss for my project to not focus on these latest developments in student activism. The renewed focus will now be on student activism in the digital age, and what it means to be an activist in a time when you can live-blog your occupation, shoot video footage and post it on youtube, and publish your own "coverage" via weblogs, something the student activists of the late 1960s could only dream about.