YouTube just announced on its blog a new citizen journalist initiative, which is described above by YouTube News & Politics manager Olivia M. I have to admit that the whole style and approach of the press release is interesting because normally it’s traditional media companies who try to hip-ify themselves through remediating (appropriating) the style of user-generated media (i.e. with amateurish production). It’s a complete melding of the prosumer aesthetic when one of the biggest internet companies in the world (Google) makes its company style completely “uncorporate.”
Archive for the 'Citizen Media' Category
OK, so please don’t kill me for this cheap date, but I saw the above clip at Huffington Post and instantly fell in love. I’m torn because part of me thinks this is really a future SNL skit inserted as covert marketing, the other part of me wants to believe that this is the last piece of authentic home brew media we’ll see ever again. I love this because with so many out-of-the-box media production kits out there, rarely do you get to see something with real fingerprints on it.
Now, bring on the imitators and the haters and see what happens.
I nice little profile from MTV about community low power radio.
OK, so this is really not a spontaneous deconstruction of Super Bowl ads, but really a clever Miller Lite ad made to look like something fo’ real. I spotted the ad technique right away from the gratuitous lingering shots on the Miller Lite logo, and I thought the cuts were a little too fast for an amateur. But, I’m sure it will do its viral trick as it was intended to.
PS Unfortunately this year I cannot do a Super Bowl ad round up because here in Italy it was running far to late for me to watch. I will monitor the net closely, though, for some good montages.
Technorati Tags: Super Bowl
I’m cribbing notes from Rising Voice’s David Sasaki who wrote an excellent roundup of how the Web is a tool for Kenyan activists to document the current crisis.
Ushahidi is an organization that is combining SMS alerts of Kenyan violence with google maps that gives a timeline of civil incidents but also a way to map the state of the conflict in real time. You can view the timeline here.
And here a post of the potential of twitter in Africa.
YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.:
It’s about time to demand some R-E-S-P-E-C-T from your cleaning products so tell that broom “She’s Gone.” We know that you love to belt out those break up songs, especially while you’re cleaning. Put those talents on camera! Choose a song, grab your Swiffer and start filming now! Sing along, dance and show us your moves Swiffer!
You know the user generated media revolution has gone too far when Swiffer gets involved. Yes, Swiffer wants you to make a commercial for them (you could win $15,000– cheaper than an ad agency) because you love them so much you feel motivated to make a film. One thing I emphasize in media literacy workshops is the ridiculousness of feigned passion, be it in the ecstatic and orgasmic states people in the ad-generated world find themselves in, or a Shakira jingle declaring love for Pepsi. I have never in my life seen in a teen talent show a song or poem written for a product– a jilted lover, a betrayed friendship, a love for animals, yes. Products? No. OK, sometimes drugs, but products are most definitely out. And just to prove my point, last I checked there were only 2 videos posted. But… there are 121 subscribers. They can’t all be media critics, can they? Anyhow, one thing that I don’t think anyone gets concerning the user generated phenomena: people do it because they care. In the case of Swiffer, I can guess that most will care more about the opportunity to win $15,000 than some plastic hyper-broom. But the way the dollar is going these days, a broom is about all you’ll be able to buy with the prize money.
PS A note to ad copywriters: please stop the extraneous use of exclamation points. It does not make the product more fun, and it’s really annoying!
(Via AdRants)
You can download the guide here.
Global Voices Online » An Introductory Guide to Global Citizen Media:
A change is taking place in how we communicate.
Just ten years ago we all learned about the world around us from newspapers, the television, and radio. Professional journalists would go to faraway places and bring back stories, photographs and videos of the situations they witnessed and the people they met.
Sometimes at dinner we talk about these stories with our friends and family. But ten years ago we rarely, if ever, communicated directly with the journalists themselves. Leading members of society wrote editorials expressing their opinions about various issues, but the rest of us could only share our opinions and thoughts with a small group of friends.
Over the last few years everything has changed. Thanks to new tools like weblogs, it is now possible to easily publish to the Internet. From Turkey to Kenya to Bolivia, everyday people like you and me are starting to share their stories and opinions with the rest of the world.
While this new form of communication is now freely available to anyone, most of the people participating still live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban cities.
The purpose of this guide is to show that anyone with an internet connection can participate in the emerging global conversation. Our understanding of the world is now shaped not just by the newspapers and television, but also by each other.
Indigenous Action Media, a Native American video production collective in the southwestern United States, believes the punk ethic of do-it-yourself (DIY) is more than rhetoric. Instigated by the sibling trio that forms the Diné rock band, Blackfire, Indigenous Action Media are designing and running their own video production workshops that are producing homegrown views on education, environment and social justice. Consequently, when school starts this Fall, these intrepid Indigenous youth will be taking their curriculum into their own hands.
By mixing DIY and skate culture, their set piece project, The Outta Your Backpack Media Collective, combines free workshops with a portable digital video editing system that compactly fits into a pack kids typically use for schoolbooks. Their project is meant “to create community ownership of media, recognizing the inherent creative energy of youth, and challenges corporate dominated media. We create fully equipped decentralized media centers in each backpack.” By utilizing cheap digital media tool, the program enables Native youth to explore difficult and forbidden issues ignored by mainstream media and the education system:
Every organization & community needs an Outta Your Backpack Media collective! Imagine if every community had the power to create its own media. What would it look like? We see youth displaying their films on projection and bed sheets in public spaces (or home) in every community. What would it sound like? We hear high school students making guerilla radio/Podcasts so all can hear. What would it read like? We read Outta Your Backpack newspapers incorporating art, comedy, current news, and events concerning community empowerment and resistance. And most importantly, how does it feel? It feels damn goooooood! To tell our own stories and create our own his/herstories.
As one of over a half a dozen clips featured on their Website, the above video, “Knowledge is Dangerous,” poignantly expresses the need to take local control of education. “Knowledge is Dangerous” envisions a dystopic future where children are forced to read certain books (hmm, sounds a bit like the present), i.e. the sanctioned knowledge of the dominant culture. But an underground of book lovers with their own rewritten curriculum of texts featuring the likes of Malcolm X and Dr. Seuss (!), uses a car trunk for its forbidden library. You’ll have to watch the video to see how the knowledge bandits prevail, but suffice to say, in the case of this particular group of young Native American mediamakers, their storytelling agenda bypasses stereotypes of how indigenous youth are engaging their education.
Also featured on Indigenous Action Media’s Website is this documentary, “Making a Stand at Desert Rock.” In their words:
On December 12th, 2006 community members in Burnham, New Mexico established a blockade to prevent preliminary work for the proposed Desert Rock coal-fired power plant. More info: www.desert-rock-blog.com.
If you click on the video’s YouTube logo, it will send you to the YouTube site where several other citizen produced videos about the conflict will appear in the “related” sidebar section. With an on-going struggle over the land between the local indigenous population and energy companies in the four-corners region of the US Southwest, it appears that new user-generated media on the subject are being uploaded on a consistent basis.
If you are a young indigenous filmmaker and feel like jumping into the mix, Indigenous Action Media’s latest project is the sponsorship of The 4th Annual Southwest Native American Film Festival Fall Showcase & Workshops to be held on their home turf in Flagstaff, Arizona (USA) in April ‘08. On October 5-6, 2007 there will be a preview Fall showcase, so though the Website states the festival is in October, it appears they are still accepting submissions for the April event.
H/T to Will for passing on this great post from the Center for Citizen Media. It’s an excellent review of recent trends and has a nice little section on media literacy that focuses on principles rather than techniques. Here is a snip:
Center for Citizen Media: Blog » Blog Archive » Citizen Media: A Progress Report:
* Be skeptical. We need to be skeptical of just about all media. This means not taking or granted the trustworthiness of what we read, see or hear from media of all kinds, whether from traditional news organizations, blogs, online videos or you name it.
* Use an internal “trust meter.” But being skeptical of everything doesn’t mean being equally skeptical of everything. That’s why we need to bring to the modern media the same kinds of parsing we learned in a less complex time when there were only a few primary sources of information. Imagine a credibility scale ranging from plus 10 to minus 10. I give a New York Times or Wall Street Journal article an automatic plus 8 or 9; I don’t assume perfection but I do trust that, in articles by most reporters for those publications, a strong effort went into getting it right. An anonymous comment on a random blog, by contrast, starts at minus 8 or 9; it would have to go a long way to merely have zero credibility.
* Learn media techniques. Younger people are getting pretty good at this already. What I suspect they — and almost everyone else — lacks in this regard is understanding how communications are designed to persuade, and how we can be manipulated. We need to teach ourselves, and our children, about how media work in ways that go far beyond knowing how to take a snapshot with a mobile phone or posting something in a blog.
* Keep reporting. No one with any common sense buys a car solely based on a TV commercial. We do some homework. It’s the kind of research and follow-up that journalists do. So let’s call it reporting. We need to recognize the folly of making any major decision about our lives based on something we read, hear or see — and the need to keep reporting, sometimes in major ways, to ensure that we make good choices.
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Some cool Native media and an important cause. Please support the Native Rights Fund. The performance is by Culture Shock, check out more info on them below.
Culture Shock Camp, comprised of Marcus “Quese IMC” Frejo and Brian “DJ Shock B” Frejo, is a Pawnee/Seminole hip-hop group originating out of Oklahoma City. Culture Shock’s sound and vibe is defined by its unique and powerful blend of hip-hop and Native music, language, and culture that promotes a message of wellness, unity and Native pride. Culture Shock was named “one of the most celebrated hip-hop groups in the Native American world” by The Source Magazine, one of the largest-selling hip-hop magazines in the country.
Culture Shock Camp has successfully toured nationally and performed before thousands of fans in more than 400 cities and reservations. Culture Shock also conducts youth leadership and wellness training for Native American youth using both hip hop and Pawnee/Seminole cultural teachings as the basis of their message of empowerment for Native youth.
Technorati Tags: Culture Shock, native america, native rights fund
Steve Spendlove realizes that after last month’s layoffs of most of the news-gathering staff at tiny KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa there will be less local coverage. The Clear Channel executive overseeing the station knows there won’t be reporters to investigate local scandals, let alone do those fluffy woman-turns-100 features that make TV anchors cock their heads and smile at the end of a newscast.
But Spendlove said that the station’s “business model” hadn’t been working for years, and that “covering one-eighth of the Bay Area” is neither a moneymaker nor even an operation large enough to be measured by Nielsen ratings.
So the next step in Channel 50’s evolution will be a nationally watched experiment in local television coverage. Over the next few months, the station’s management plans to ask people in the community — its independent filmmakers, its college students and professors, its civic leaders and others — to provide programming for the station.
Is this citizen journalism, or just asking consumers to produce their own content for free? It’s both really, and it should be viewed as an evolving situation that is more and more common. If the consumers are the producers, ultimately this is a good thing. In the early days of punk there was a breakdown between audience and performer, and it was liberating. Of course, in the end it’s quality that counts, and that remains to be scene
Technorati Tags: citizen journalism
The ghost of Tibor Kalman, whose tenure at the helm of Colors Magazine revitalized and re-appropiated the language of commercial graphics for social change, seems eerily present behind the creative campaign of Dropping Knowledge. Like a Zen koan, Dropping Knowledge is part playful pun, part serious business. We drop a dime like anonymous tipsters to the cosmic dharma police on nonsensical, idiotic social practices, and we download knowledge like hidden viruses inside protein shell ad phrases.
The project is part of a trend of participatory new media, utilizing the Web as an instantaneous democratic medium. In this case site users can upload questions, which then get translated into ads, films and commercials. The more successful combination of images and words have built in paradoxes that get us thinking the way that riddles scramble our rational minds. Ideally these should be ready for meme deployment. That is, I’d like to see ready-made code available so people can easily drop Dropping Knowledge onto their iPods, P2Ps, and into emails. Thankfully the movies are in Quicktime format so they are easy to download, but I’d still like to see viral marketing strategies in place. But… it’s a nice start. I look forward to more idea infections.
“Tibor Kalman, Perverse Optimist” (Peter Hall, Michael Bierut)
“Colors : Tibor Kalman, Issues 1-13″ (Tibor Kalman, Maira Kalman)
A great article From The Economist print edition on the possibilities of “citizen journalism” as traditional newspapers decline:
Journalism too is becoming interactive, and maybe better
Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, says that “journalism needs to become a community service rather than a profit centre,†and is working on making this happen. As The State of the News Media puts it, “the worry is not the wondrous addition of citizen media, but the decline of full-time, professional monitoring of powerful institutions.†That, after all, is what a free press in democracies is supposed to be for.
Update:
Democracy Now! devotes its show to the student walkout in SoCal.
Talk about extracurricular activity! Apparently many of the high school students who walked out of class on Monday in Southern Califaztlan to protest the proposed draconian immigration bill (HR 4437) had been inspired by the film, Walkout, which taught the kids a lesson they probably wouldn’t learn in school about Chicano power. Glad to some new homies carry the torch!
Blog | Max Blumenthal: Walkout! | The Huffington Post:“Many people I talked with around the city yesterday questioned whether Edward James Olmos’ newly released documentary about mass Chicano student protests against discriminatory educational policies in 1968 East L.A. high schools, ‘Walkout,’ influenced yesterday’s events. In an interview yesterday with Hoy, an L.A.-based Spanish language paper, Olmos refuted this idea by claiming the conditions that precipitated the protests against HR 4437 were drastically different than those that animated Chicano life in 1968. However, a student demonstrator from Manual Arts told Hoy, ‘Before I saw the movie, I didn’t think we could do something like that. I didn’t understand how you could affect change. But after I saw it, I felt in my heart that I could do something.’”
(Via Huffington Post.)
