It’s time for a manifesto. Everyone should write one every once in a while, it’s a good way to blow off steam. Here we go:

OPEN MEDIA LITERACY MANIFESTO



Humans are learning creatures. We evolve through sharing. Everyone has something to contribute to the cultural commons. And the cultural commons must remain open.

Meanwhile we are being globally mindfraked by less than a handful of multinational corporations. Our education system is crumbling and being ripped to shreds. The public good is being put into debt slavery for the global banking and finance system. It is clear the enclosure of the commons cannot happen without corporate media’s complicity with the neoliberal agenda and its daily propagation of free market propaganda.

Most importantly, our planet cannot be sustained by further growth. That means consumerism as we know it must end. But corporate media won’t tell you that.

Yet there is hope. Participatory and open media are alive and evolving. People are sharing and doing stuff for free. They are giving time and creativity away because it feels good and it is fun. But enclosure always lurks behind our backs. We have to be vigilant.

So now our education practices should reflect the open culture. We can’t afford not to.

But when it comes to media literacy, we have some cultural barriers. Media education is as old as mass media, and therefore has modeled its approach on mass media.

The mass media of the industrial era has shifted radically. But media literacy has not. Often times media literacy is just anti-media, and still thinks the way industrial media thinks. Often it focuses on content and information, but not practice or lifelong learning.

We have content literacy, tool literacy, image literacy, information literacy. But what about open culture literacy?

Media literacy books, videos and tools are often copyrighted and locked behind walled gardens. A media literacy documentary should not cost $100. Media literacy curriculum should not cost $100. Media literacy education should not cost anything. It should be free.

Nor should we brand or market our materials for corporations.

We have no business with standards, we have no business with testing. We are in the business of freeing education and opening culture.

Therefore, it should be resolved that our resources be put on the Web for free; that we take down copyright barriers and prohibitive institutional pricing of our tools and give them away.

OK, that’s all folks. I know we need to earn a living, no doubt. But we can develop alternative models for generating income, such as consulting, customization, teaching, lecturing, designing, and writing. But our activities should ultimately be in service the planet and human evolution. Any suggestions? Is this position too extreme?

I’ve been a media literacy educator for over a dozen years. And since participating in the punk movement during the early ‘80s, I’ve been a lifelong proponent of do-it-yourself media. Since entering the field of education I’ve worked in numerous arts programs with youths, spending considerable time in under-served communities. Consequently, working with Native Americans, Latinos and Afro-Caribbean youth has helped me to formulate a multicultural, multi-perspective approach to media literacy that has pushed me to reconceptualize cultural assumptions embedded in traditional media education.* Learners in those communities are under greater stress than mainstream Americans, and their particular needs call for attention to social justice, environmental issues and cultural citizenship, things that many privileged Americans take for granted.

While working on the rez, at one point a Native American elder said of the information highway: “any road can get you somewhere.” Unfortunately, many programs that embrace digital media tools are too enamored with the technology to think more critically about the “somewhere” we are moving towards. It was during the period when I worked on the rez that I realized the importance of appropriate applications of technology and the ethnocentrism embedded in the idea of “progress.” More importantly, I was forced to think more carefully about who or what I was ultimately serving in my work.

As a fellow media geek it might surprise you, then, to suggest that my approach since then has been to serve  the planet: humans and nonhuman alike. In particular I feel a strong calling to speak to the best of my abilities on behalf of our silent partner: nature. These days in my current role as a professor of media studies at an American university in Rome, I find myself in the unlikely position of having to argue for a greener approach to media. I have taken to heart the task of incorporating lessons I learned beyond the walled garden of academia to green the field of media studies. What follows, then, is a field report from my most recent effort, which was to green a digital media culture course.

The Root of the Problem

Last Spring, about halfway through the semester of my undergrad Digital Media Culture class I asked students to raise their hand if they expected the course to be about ecology. None did, which didn’t surprise me. But I did in fact incorporate ecology as a major element of the course material. Was I forcing an unrelated issue on an unsuspecting class? Is there a legitimate connection between environmental issues and digital media culture?

Absolutely! The impact of electronics on the biosphere is staggering. The entire production chain of our media gadgets damages the environment in several ways. Issues include:

• the toxins used to make gadgets and their impact on the health of workers and their communities;

• the CO2 emissions of fossil fuels needed to run our electronic networks (which is now equal to the global aviation industry);

• the ecological “mindprint” on our perception of time, space and our sense of “place”;

• the enabling of a destructive globalized growth economy; and

• the e-waste generated from over-consumption.

It’s not all negative. There are many positive aspects to digital media culture that may also help us prevent an impending global ecological catastrophe, in particular the emergent culture of sharing, connecting and self-organizing prevalent on the Web. I also hope that the kinds of social revolutions occurring in the Arab world and Occupied movements will translate to the environmental movement.

A holistic digital media course should make connections between cultural practice and the environment. Even if we are teaching technical skills and aptitude, reducing these skills to an isolated digital literacy encloses them within a mental bubble that is likely to repeat the mistakes of our techno-scientific revolution that have brought on our ecological crisis. Moreover, no matter how neutral our educational model is, technology always has embedded cultural attitudes that impact our pedagogical approach and are ingrained within the tools.

So, if the environment is intimately linked with digital media, why is it so rare to see the two issues connected?

One of the misconceptions concerning environmental education is that it is a topic that is outside all subjects except those pertaining to “nature” (such as the biological sciences). Even though the primary cause of our ecological crisis is cultural, few who teach culture-related courses incorporate sustainability into their material. This is not to place blame. The cause for this goes back to the origins of modern academia, and even the creation of the term “ecology.” Based on the Greek oikos, which means household, “eco” also is the root of economics. Consequently, the combined meaning of ecology and economics is “household management,” which is an appropriate and holistic approach to thinking about humans and the natural world. We need to remind ourselves that the world is our home, and that we need to treat it with as much care as the places that we inhabit on a daily basis.

Yet, due to the prejudice of the techno-industrial-scientific revolution, material and immaterial issues were divided up between the different disciplines and we are left with the famous split in Western culture between mind and body. Earth, in this case, falls under the category of “body,” albeit abstracted by mechanistic science. Culture, being a subject of the mind, is usually not taught in conjunction with environmental issues. Curiously, though, the term “culture” originates from agriculture, and has to do with the act of cultivation: we cultivate food and beliefs (food for thought!).

Finally, environmental educator David Orr has made the point that all education is environmental education. What he means is that whether acknowledged or not what we teach has a bearing on how we view the environment, especially when it is omitted altogether. When we don’t talk about it, the lesson becomes, “The environment is not relevant to what we do. This is someone else’s problem.” Or, in the example of economics, we are taught that the ecological impact of growth and consumption is irrelevant to an economy’s bottom line. Given the state of our biosphere, we cannot continue like this, nor should we assume some technological fix is awaiting on the horizon. What we need is a human fix.

Conceptual Strategy: Open and Closed Systems

So how does a digital media culture class look when ecology is incorporated into its curriculum?

For starters, as a framework we discuss open versus closed systems. In agricultural terms, a monocultural crop of genetically engineered corn is a closed system. It is governed by numerous control mechanisms and a form of science that doesn’t allow for the open ended integration of natural systems. Open systems are like permaculture gardens, which are structured in such a way as to work with the given conditions of the local environment. It is not controlled with pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizer or laboratory engineered seeds. It is open to the conditions of its local ecology and interacts with unpredictable elements, such as weather, insects and native plants. And since agriculture is humans acting upon the environment, the kind of approach one makes entails a worldview. Societies that engage in monoculture are far different in outlook than those that use permaculture.

How does this translate in the digital media world? Numerous scholars are concerned with the difference between open and closed systems, be they gadgets or the Internet. Jonathan Zittrain talks about the iPhone (“iBrick”) versus Google’s Android. Tim Wu looks into the rise and fall of media empires, examining how monopolies are essentially closed systems. James Boyle believes there is an information ecology that is threatened by enclosure. And Lawrence Lessig talks about the difference between Read-Only and Read-Write information economies.

A keystone essay I use is Benjamin Barber‘s “Pangloss, Pandora and Jefferson: Three scenarios for the future of technology and strong democracy” (published in Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age) In it he argues about potential scenarios facing the future of the Internet. Pangloss is the status quo, and has a do-nothing stance in which the Internet evolves according to the needs of governments, corporations and consumers. If this scenario continues according to its internal momentum towards closed monopolies, we end up with the Pandora scenario. Pandora is represented by two-tired Internet, DRM, Great Fire Wall of China, increased repression and surveillance, and the use of anti-piracy measures to shut off dissent and peer-to-peer sharing (as is the case with Wikileaks and ACTA). The Jeffersonian model represents hope, and would entail the active participation of users to continue developing and utilizing the Internet for opening up democratic participation.

The status quo (Pangloss) has elements of both a cautionary and hopeful future, but we are at a crossroads and it remains to be seen how open or closed the future Internet will be. In terms of the environment there are similar parallels. Closed, monopolized media systems further the interests of those powers that refuse to solve the ecological crisis. Climate change has to be resolved through democratic processes, and sustainable culture has to be cultivated through sharing and connecting. The Jeffersonian scenario goes hand-in-hand with transitioning from the centralized and closed energy system of petroleum, natural gas and nuclear power, to the decentralized and democratic potential of clean energy. One is corporate powered, the other is people powered. There also is middle ground where some corporations are choosing open systems as their primary operational model (such as many of the Web 2.0 start-ups), but it’s still not a guarantee that the climate crisis will tackled by technology users.

It’s important to not be overly Utopian or dystopian. Ultimately the key is to think systemically. Ultimately my goal is to encourage a shift from the standpoint of mere consumerism to a kind of practice based on cultural citizenship. Or, more importantly, green cultural citizenship. What follows is my experiment to move in this direction.

Design Strategy: The Four Perspectives

My design strategy is based on a four-pronged approach inspired by cultural studies’ circuit of culture model and sustainability design. The circuit of culture looks at media phenomena from as a set of iterative, interacting forces that include identity, regulation, representation, culture and consumption. It sees the development of consumer gadgets, like the Sony Walkman, as not an isolated economic practice, but coming from an interactive feedback loop between culture and economics. But it also reflects the bias described earlier: where is the environment in this matrix? Surely it needs to be part of the mix.

Enter sustainability design which is holistic and approaches problems from multiple angles. Gaia Education has developed an Ecovillage Design initiative that approaches human experience according to four dimensions: lifeworld, ecology, economics and society. I hybridized both the circuit of culture and ecovillage design approaches to divide up the course according to the following disciplinary lenses:

Worldview: the phenomenology of time and space. This section covers topics like technological determinism, the history of media technologies, and the impact of digital media gadgets on the user’s perception of time, space and place. Assignments include keeping diaries of gadget usage and to get lost in Rome (which is where I teach) without any media devices, including pens, paper or maps. Students then write and share their experiences in a class blog.

Environment: the material reality of digital media, including extraction, production, e-waste, energy and emissions. To get a picture of the environmental impact of gadget production, we watch the documentary Manufactured Landscapes. We also view the Story of Stuff and the Story of Electronics. There are a ton of videos on YouTube about e-waste. We also look at material relating to “cradle-to-cradle” design and Green IT. Additionally, we read and discuss the various reports on ecological impact created by critics such as GreenPeace, and internal communications from parent company Web sites of gadget makers.

Economy: Drawing on themes from political economy, we look at the ideological structure of the global economics system, paying attention to the reasons why designers design what they do. We compare consumer designed products (Sony’s Walkman, Motorola’s Xoom tablet, Apple gadgets) with computers designed for low-income education, such as the One Laptop Per Child project and the Open Source Ecology project. The goal here is to understand how intention influences the production process of our gadgets. During this section we watch Objectified, a documentary about industrial design.

Culture: Multiple strategies are used in this section, but predominantly it is hermeneutics. Throughout the course we look at promotional videos and advertisements to deconstruct the thinking behind the marketing of gadgetry. This reiterates the point that that though these categories are distinct sections of the course, they spiral around each other. None are completely separate, they are embedded within each other. In the culture section, however, we go more deeply into how digital media usage is impacting by cultural practice. This includes looking at Henry Jenkins‘ model of convergence culture, Lessig’s Read-Only vs. Read-Write model of cultural production, participatory/social media, and the cultural commons (intellectual property, mash-ups, etc.). None of these are isolated from economics, environment and worldview.

These zones are then explored through the perspective of a “boundary object.” For the purpose of this course a boundary object is a media gadget (iPhone, Ipad, Blackberry, laptop, etc.) that has different purposes according to how it is used and how its potential is perceived. So even though a gadget has objective properties in the sense that we all know what an iPhone is, it can also be many different things to different people. It can be a way to call your friends, an instrument of revolution, or a tool for triggering a roadside bomb. To get my students to think in terms of boundary objects, I show clips from the 1980s film The Gods Must be Crazy to demonstrate how a coke bottle, though on the surface is something fairly neutral and innocuous, can do completely different things according to people’s culture.

For their final project students analyze their personal media gadget of choice according to the four zones of experience. I also incorporate a multiliteracy approach. In addition to the content elements of the course, I also want to embed certain skill literacies. So for each section I assign a specific skill-related task. For the first section it is autoethnography and blogging. The ecology section is about tool literacy: what is the “nature” of our gadgets? The third and fourth section are a mix of information and visual literacy, i.e. how to read and deconstruct marketing and information about the gadgets, including how to research the design and production aspects of the gadgets online. Students do mixed activities ranging between collaborative, solo, writing and multimedia. The final project is a paper and a Prezi presentation.

You can only do so much in a 14 week course, and a lot is left out. Ideally this would be a year-long (let alone lifelong) process.

Conclusion

The model I offer here is experimental and not definitive. My main goal is to argue for sustainability as multidimensional, and to integrate ecological issues into a standard digital media course that typically eschews the environment. My vision for the future of education is that “green” subjects are not ghettoized and treated as distinct or off topic from those subjects that are familiar to us. I imagine that all media courses one day will incorporate sustainability, and it will be “natural” to do so.

Barriers to such a project include a lack of familiarity with ecoliteracy (pedagogy and a basic literacy of environmental issues), resistance from academic gatekeepers who don’t acknowledge the connection between the environment and social studies/humanities, and a lack of concern or desire to change cultural practice. I think all these can be overcome, but it will take concerted effort and will be up to the practitioners (i.e. teachers, scholars and learners) to push for more integrative approaches to teaching media.

Please feel free to contact me for more information. I plan to do an online training for educators to learn this model. If you are interested in participating in the training, contact me at info@worldbridgermedia.com

* My book, Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the 21st Century deals with this topic in more detail.

CRASS: There Is No Authority But Yourself (click here if you can’t view it)

During my media ethics course this week I launched into an epic rant that frightened some students.

The diatribe was inspired by a recent controversy covered by Boing Boing about the (mis)appropriation of a logo belonging to the infamous punk band, Crass (click here for the initial post and here for the follow-up). The backstory is that some fashion designer in London, Hardware, blatantly ripped off the Crass logo to convert it into some apolitical fashion icon (if you compare the current Hardware Website with the logo posted at Boing Boing, you will see that Hardware hastily fixed their plagiarism problem). Concurrently, for our class we watched The Greatest Movie Ever Sold by Morgan Spurlock (maker of Super Size Me), which has the subtitle, “He’s not selling out, he’s buying in.” In a nutshell, Spurlock made a movie about branding and product placement by branding and selling his “doc-buster” to advertisers. The question for my class about the film–and what spurned the epic rant–was, Can a critical film about marketing use branding to make its point?

I’ll get to Spurlock’s film momentarily. Returning to Crass, the logo controversy led me to YouTube where I found a documentary about the band. Watching it reminded my of how in the early 1980s Crass had been such an ethical influence on me as a young punk rocker. Crass fans were considered “peace punks” that were into the scene not for style, but to participate in oppositional politics and an alternative social movement. As an anarchist collective Crass practiced what they preached. Whenever they performed they donated whatever was left after expenses to local charity. They were truly a not-for-profit endeavor that wanted to live by their principle, “There is no authority but yourself.” In retrospect this phrase is not in-sync with ecology, which eschews such pronounced individualism, but the basic anti-authority stance is still valid.

Our culture should not be dictated by an economic ideology that has taken over virtually all realms of life (see the book Monoculture for a good overview of this point). Relatedly, I asked the class if it were anachronistic to have a strong anti-commercial stance that contradicts the prevailing paradigm that views privatization and the commercialization of public space as gospel. I have found that many students these days seem to accept the blanket marketing of their lives as the price for doing business as usual. Many have internalized the age-old justification for screwing over anyone: it’s just business. Indeed!

At Boing Boing commentators criticized Xeni Jardin (who posted about the Crass controversy) by arguing that it was hypocritical to promote open culture and remixing but then not apply the same standards when a fashion designer does it. My response is that we’re not talking about an absolute ideology that can’t differentiate between an open and closed commons. Crass were about sharing and generosity. Corporate theft from punk rockers is the opposite. It’s evil. There is a difference between fair use and plagiarism, which comes down to intent. What is the purpose of the appropriation technique? You can tell the difference by observing which act is participatory and which one is not. This is the thin red line of dissent versus exploitation, and fair play versus cheating.

Trailer for The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Click here if you can’t see it.

Which brings me to Spurlock’s documentary, a film that I essentially experienced as a major mind fuck. On the one hand, it does exactly what it sets out to do: it makes transparent the entire process of selling out. So in the process of making a film that is potentially a critique of marketing, the filmmaker must sell out. How does one reconcile this contradiction? Is it even possible? Has media criticism devolved into self-mockery?

One way for me to respond to this film is to go back to the problem of “postirony.” The term, coined in Alex Shakar, appears in the book The Savage Girl. It is described as follows:

“…Our culture has become so saturated with ironic doubt that it’s beginning to doubt its own mode of doubting. If everything is false, then by the same token anything can be taken as true, or at least as true enough. Truths are no longer absolute; they’re shifting, temporary, whatever serves the purpose of the moment. Postironists create their own sets of serviceable realities and live in them independent of any facets of the outside world that they choose to ignore….Practitioners of postironic consciousness blur the boundaries between irony and earnestness in ways we traditional ironists can barely understand, creating a state of consciousness wherein critical and uncritical responses are indistinguishable. Postirony seeks not to demystify but to befuddle, not to synthesize opposites but to suspend them, keeping open all possibilities at once. And we marketers, in forging a viable mode of postironic consumerism, must seek to foster in the consumer a mystical relationship with consumption. Through consumption consumers will be gods; outside of consumption they will be nothing: a perpetual oscillation between absolute control and absolute vulnerability, between grandeur and persecution.”

One way this insidious phenomena manifests itself is in the way marketers have appropriated culture jamming into their repertoire of manipulation. The classic example is Sprite’s Obey Your Thirst ad campaign that features celebrities making fun of themselves selling products. In media literacy parlance, these are the “wink, wink” and “flattery” persuasion techniques that essentially argue, “we marketers know we are full of crap, and we know that you know that we are a bunch of bull, so buy our product anyway!” Thankfully many see through this, but these techniques also do a lot of idealogical work. Essentially, this approach turns grassroots media activism and education into market research, undoing and refracting our legitimate critique into a hall of mirrors (for example, watch how this Fed Ex ad uses media literacy deconstruction techniques in its Super Bowl ad). In this way, capitalism has the incredibly capacity to absorb critique and then turn it on its critics (Occupy movement, watch out!).

So where does that leave us with Spurlock? The truth is, I think the film is a great tool for discussion, or what I like to call an “object-to-think-with.” For that, I believe it has educational value. I believe he is sincere and treats the subject with a lot of respect. (Check out Spurlock’s TED talk for more insight into his thinking about the film.)

But I still remain incredibly uncomfortable with its “truth in advertising” approach. My discomfort is grounded in an old school punk mentality–as outdated as it may seem–that there are lines that should not be crossed. One cannot “market” the revolution, as one major label A & R guy once promised Crass (they politely refused). What is at stake is the cultural commons, which is “all that we share.” As long as there is a commercial barrier between us and the access point to that shared space, then buying in really means fencing off. I still believe that there should be noncommercial spaces that are free from the nefarious influence of corporate power. The more we succumb to the temptation to allow corporations to mediate our methods of critique and engagement, the more we erode our capacity for culture to grow, learn and evolve. No one but a corrupt legal system bequeathed these corporations the right to take over our cultural life. Why do we continue enabling them?

OK, rant over. Thanks for listening!

The Occupy Rose Parade octopus (click here if you can’t see the embed video)

Local news coverage by CBS (click here if you can’t see the video embed)

As a native Angeleno, one of my annual rituals is to watch the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. Though I have never witnessed it in person, I have checked out the scene in Pasadena the night before and know many artisans who design and build floats for the annual parade. This year was no different, with the exception that I wanted to share the nostalgia with my kids. However, now that I’m a bit of an ex-pat, I see things that were part of my past with a slightly defamiliarized perspective.

As the parents of former students have told me, media literacy ruins TV watching for the family. Though I wanted to convey my enthusiasm for the artisanship of Rose Parade floats to my daughter, I couldn’t remove my critical hat. I became highly sensitized to the more troubling aspects of the event’s televised broadcast. Before watching it I was keenly aware that an Occupy group planned to tail the parade with their own anti-corporate message, so I was hoping to see if the network coverage (in this case, NBC) would mention or cover the Occupiers. What transpired should be of little surprise to any seasoned media watcher.

The parade coverage opened with a flyover of a Northrop Grumman’s B-2 stealth bomber, ironically dubbed the Spirit. In a sense, Spirit is an apt name for it represents the “spirit” of a particular mode of thinking (as in zeitgeist, which means “spirit of the age”). At a cost of $1.5 billion each, the B-2 represents the absurdity of our social structure in which our government pays outrageous sums to an elite group of military contractors at the expense of a withering infrastructure. Anthropologists and historians of the future will note how incredibly insane such a social system is. Meanwhile, parade commentators Shaun Robinson and Al Roker fawned over the bomber arguing that for most of the audience it was the main attraction. Such death technology warship should not be surprising given that one of NBC’s primary shareholders is the military contractor General Electric.

The rest of the broadcast represented a seamless integration between the values of the military industrial complex and totalitarian capitalist ideology. The parade’s Grand Marshall, J. R. Martinez, is a bit of a rising media personality whose notoriety comes from his experience of overcoming the psychological damage of getting 40% of his body burned while deployed in Iraq. While I admire his perseverance and resilience, none of the discussion of this man’s tragic circumstances get contextualized by how unnecessary it was in the first place. No doubt, with stealth bombers getting applauded by pop culture punditry and parade organizers, these dirty little details need not be aired publicly. Martinez is a perfect metaphor for the denial of our sick system: get burned and disfigured and then turn it into corporate motivation for how to transcend the adversity of Empire’s reckless global behavior.

Meanwhile, each parade float was a mini-ad for its corporate sponsor. It was obvious that Roker’s canned commentary was essentially ad copy penned by the corporate overlords. Meanwhile, interspersed throughout the coverage was a noticeably higher ratio of advertising that mostly hawked product discounts and financial services for the newly poor. Though subtle (or not if you are media savvy), this was truly a hegemonic spectacle selling the ideology of the 1%. Good thing the Occupiers were there to counterbalance the message. Yet.. if you watched NBC, such a perspective didn’t exist. It was eliminated from the parade’s coverage.

This is a blatant example of how alternatives get excluded by the traditional power structure’s media system. Luckily, we no longer exist in a reality bubble of top-down communications. The complex ecology of our current social media allows for alternative perspectives to be shared horizontally. This is not to say that Occupy Rose Parade was entirely ignored. The LA Times and local news stations mentioned it, and those who were in attendance at the parade certainly had a chance to be exposed for the first time to the Occupy message. Not surprisingly, some critics disparaged the protestors for degrading a family event with politics. But in light of the parade’s default message of corporate and military domination, to not see the entire event as political represents a triumph of ideology.

Let’s hope that those who fail to see the political nature of mainstream media spectacles increasingly become the minority. Transforming and educating for a new perspective means we have lots of work to do. To begin with, its time to occupy the spirit of our age. I keep harping on the Occupy theme, but I believe it represents a concrete alternative to the mode of communication propagated by the hyper-capitalist take-over of the cultural commons.

Dear friends and readers,

Those who have followed this blog over the years have probably noticed a substantial drop in production. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that Facebook and Twitter have channeled some of the creative energy that the blog was used for in the past, such as linking and sharing. For this reason, I hope you will follow my Twitter account as well (@mediacology) or check out the box in the right column with my Twitter updates. I’m not a massive Twitterer, but usually that is where I filter things that I think others would be interested in.

The other reason has to do with my writing time getting eaten up by my current book project. I’m prioritizing my creative flow by channeling it into the book, but occasionally some half-baked thoughts surface and I find that blogging is a good way to process. Fingerscrossed, the manuscript is due in two weeks, so I’ll have a chance to get back into the flow again.

Peace out!

PS I posted the following request elsewhere. If you have any suggestions, please post in the comments section:

We all know intuitively and rationally that the no-longer mainstream media represent the interests of the 1% (re. the occupy wall st. meme). I would like to compile some stats to make this point more clearly. Aside from the most obvious fact of media consolidation, can anyone suggest a way to connect the 1% economy and media with some grounded statistics or facts?

Lots of buzz this week about the new Amazon Fire, the Kindle update primed to take a big bite out of Apple (OK, I couldn’t resist such a silly cliche). Upon viewing its first TV ad (posted above) I’m struck by the use of the fire metaphor for describing communications, something I’ve also been doing in response to the meme model of media. The idea of memes is too mechanical for me–it implies that an idea is an object that gets replicated from person to person. I prefer to think of an idea as a kind of flame that inspires or ignites new understandings, but doesn’t just repeat itself. My initial inspiration for this understanding comes from Buddhism which sees thoughts as impermanent.

Amazon borrows the concept from Voltaire, whose pithy little quote makes an excellent argument for how ideas belong to the public sphere and cannot be owned:

“The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”

Unfortunately, as DefectiveByDesign.org points out, Amazon’s digital rights management strategy is more about restriction than sharing. For example, even though you purchase books through its service, you don’t actually own them. You can’t trade, give away or resell them in the same way you can with physical books. By storing your media on its cloud drives, Amazon exerts complete control over your content and can delete books if they choose (it has happened). This also represents more of the creeping privatization of our data. We have to trust Amazon to not abuse their power of surveillance, data tracking and censorship. Remember that they deleted Wikileaks from their servers when it became politically uncomfortable.

While the media will likely focus on the titanic battle between our gods of capitalism– Amazon’s Jeff Bezos versus Apple’s Steve Jobs–our rights under their control freak purview will increasingly diminish. As the African proverb states, when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. So be mindful for how these new gadgets get fetishized in the absence of a healthy debate about their impact on the public sphere.

For what it’s worth, I own an iPad and I happen to like it, but I’m also not that impressed. I have been mostly disappointed by how limiting it is in terms of my power to create and do stuff with it. It is certainly a perfected media consumption device that makes reading Twitter and PDFs a great pleasure. But when it comes to making media, even something as basic as a PowerPoint presentation, forget it. Even my favorite presentation tool, Prezi, is rendered useless by the iPad (I can view Prezis with an app, but i can’t edit them because iPads don’t have Flash).

In sum, though I’m a fan of tablets for reading and viewing media, they reinforce old media regimes and increase the monopolization of our mediasphere. It’s probably why big media companies really love them. If we eventually migrate from flexible laptops to restricted tablets, it will probably mean a general regression to the one-to-many media model of old rather than to increased participation that should be the promise of the new. I hope I’m wrong.

I just came across a sympathetic and thoughtful review of my book on the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Website (I swear I wasn’t looking for myself on the Web!). This review was far more appreciative than the last one I read in which the author expressed a desire to throw my book in the garbage (I hope that she at least put it in the compost). Reading reviews is incredibly painful, but thankfully the AEJMC reviewer got what I was trying to say while ignoring all the typos!

One thing the reviewer points out is that Mediacology was not an easy read. Agreed! Mediacology was my first book and was done in the midst of heavy readings of McLuhan and the Media Ecology tradition. I was playing with academic jargon, perhaps as an exaggerated response to the boring newspaper journalism I had been doing for so many years before. Every venue demands a different style and over the years I have become schizophrenic from writing in so many different formats: punk fanzines, magazines, newspapers, blogs, academic journals, academic books and popular culture books. I’m hoping that I’m finally hitting a sweet spot between all of these with my current book project. But that remains to be seen. The main thing I realize is that my first book didn’t exactly practice what I preached: though I was calling for participatory educational practice, its language was a bit too inaccessible. Let’s hope I do a better job on the next round.

My Italian friends asked me if I wanted to to do something special for 9/11. I was ashamed to say that the memory conjured something that I didn’t want to re-experience: bloodlust, revenge and war. All I can remember is how the moment of compassion and empathy that the incident called for eroded as fast as war plans were drawn-up to invade Afghanistan. Ten years ago all I could think about was the impending world war that would be launched in the name of 9/11 victims and their families. Indeed, the mainstream media failed to give voice to the peacemakers and antiwar critics who predicated the inevitable folly, crucial voices that I’m afraid have been proven right by the course of history.

But for this post I didn’t want to focus on politics. Rather, I wanted to share with you a clip from a film that I feel is one of the most powerful polemics against political violence I’ve ever seen. It comes from the Italian film Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), directed by Marco Bellocchio (who, BTW, won last night’s lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival). Unfortunately there are no subtitles, so I will have to set it up for you.

The film is about when Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped in 1978 by the Red Brigades, a left-wing terrorist group. The movie depicts the 55 days of his captivity in Rome, focusing on his captors, four young brigadistas, and their relationship with the imprisoned Moro. The story zooms in on the conflicted brigadista, Anna Laura Braghetti, who is increasingly troubled by the fact that the Italian political establishment won’t negotiate a prisoner exchange–the condition for his release–which means that Moro will be sentenced to death by his captors and eventually murdered.

The clip I have posted above involves Braghetti (performed by Maya Sansa) reading Moro’s final letter to his wife. It is then ingeniously overlaid with a letter by a WWII partisan who was sentenced to death by the Nazis. She then has a shattering epiphany (1:50 in the clip) when she realizes that the senseless horror that is about to be inflicted on her captive is no different than the heartless political murders of the past. Bellocchio emphasizes this point by intercutting source footage of prisoner executions from the war. Cut to Pink FLoyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” for me it is one of cinema’s most poignant montages, a heartful rebuttal against the cold logic of terrorists and vengeful war machines.

I hope you have the patience to watch the entire clip. Even if you don’t understand the language, it is poetry in motion. Incidentally, it is possible to see a subtitled version of the film. If at all possible, I encourage you to watch it and learn more about this tragic moment in Italian history.

Al-Jazeer’s Empire on social networks and revolution. Features some excellent talking heads.

Meanwhile, NYU’s Jay Rosen has been a bit of a lightening rod in the debate between the so-called digital Utopians and the pessimists. He rounds up the debates on his blog here. I recommend following him on twitter.

What do I think? Any media that enters into a communication or language community will disturb it. By disturbance I mean an ecological disturbance as in when a new element enters into an ecosystem it becomes a new ecosystem. The fact is, the Internet is part of the system, so we can’t even speculate what the situation would be without it. Obviously it is a mix of both. But I like the point from Mark Poster (thanks Peter!) that the Internet is not a hammer, but a social space. Of course people make revolutions. But empathy is contagious and we can’t be empathetic with that which we do not know. Something is in the air, and certainly media are generating the wind.

I’m loath to make historical analogies, simply because every historical moment has its own unique characteristics that would not be possible if we impose nonexistent conditions. So as the clutch mechanism of time slips, it would be unfair to compare the unreal moment of democratic potential in Egypt with those events in Spain when the libertines of Catalunya tasted freedom but were feeling Franco’s fascist forces pushing against the edges of their dreams for autonomy. Unfortunately for the Republicans of Spain, history didn’t side with them, and the freedom fighters of the Spanish Civil War were crushed and wiped out as the world’s leaders stood by, or as was the case of Stalin and Hitler, made sure that they were destroyed.

So why are my thoughts on Spain during these days of North Africa’s fight for democracy? As I read via the twitterverse the incredible ways in which everyday Egyptians are self-organizing to fill the space of a collapsed state, I’m reminded of George Orwell’s profound passages about free Barcelona during the early days of the Spanish Civil War (if you haven’t yet, you must read Homage to Catalonia). In it he describes a spirit of cooperation and brother/sisterhood that permeated cafes and barber shops alike, one in which a temporary autonomous zone of human potential was freed from the restraints of state terror and mechanized control. To behold such a space is a beautiful thing. To live it is a miracle. To unlearn it is impossible.

Now, one thing (among many, which makes this just a thought exercise) that differentiates the current situation from Spain in 1936 is the global interconnectedness of the events unfolding on our screens. Though the Republicans defending against Franco were shored up by a vast solidarity movement from around the world that sent volunteers and fighters to aid their embattled democracy, few could monitor and mobilize support in real time to prevent the horror that was unleashed by Franco and his allies. Though I’m not on the ground in Egypt to provide any physical assistance, through the Internet* I’m able to track, share, connect and extend an invaluable resource that drives any revolution: empathy.

I know it is vogue to decry net Utopianism, and to invoke something as woo-woo as “empathy” seems rather weak in comparison to the kinds of assistance that foreign brigadistas gave the Spanish Republicans. But I would argue that solidarity is a powerful force that feeds the people engaged in real struggle. The worse feeling is to be in an isolated cell somewhere, subject to random torture, knowing that you are completely alone and without help, as was the case for Spanish libertines who were abandoned after the fall of their republic. People are wired for connection and thrive from positive feedback. (For more about this, I highly recommend watching the Jeremy Rifkin’s RSA animation of his “empathic civilization” thesis.)

On this note, then, I want to balance some of the skepticism coming from the likes of Morozov who argue that net activism is as much a tool of repression as liberation. We could all point to Iran’s Green Revolution as an example of both the failure of the Net and empathy to save the situation. However, it is also not over, and the fact is that through our interconnectedness, we are stronger and more able to keep the struggle alive than to let it disappear into some dungeon in the periphery of an Iraqi or Afghan war zone. Let’s not shut down the optimism that empathy drives. And let’s not so quickly dismiss the role that media can play in supporting the hard work of organizing and rebelling that is now stripping old emperor’s of their illusions, parading them naked across the world’s screens.

PS A note on the strange irony of my historical analogy. Franco launched his attack on the Republic with his North African brigades.

* FYI, my own particular formula for monitoring events is a combination of Al Jazeera English’s Internet stream, the Guardian UK’s live news blog, Twitter, and Mother Jones’ “explainer” page. From these primary portals I’m able to link into a variety of sources. In particular I’ve been able to diversify my Twitter stream to be more inclusive of non-Western perspectives. Compared to the universe of American MSM, this is really a whole different reality. Here you get pointed questions from intelligent and independent thinkers who don’t feel compelled to ask the kinds of ridiculous questions that the Wolf Blitzer’s of the world are asking, such what role al-Qaeda has in the Jan. 25 movement. Give me a break. And while I’m at it, why hasn’t anyone in the MSM pointed out that new Egyptian VP Omar Suleiman was a key figure in the CIA’s rendition to torture program? Is the American press that cowardly?