Archive for the 'Activism' Category
File this one under WTF. Adidas finds a safe rebellion to latch onto to give it some street cred by creating a little action movie about rebel gardeners with GPS, night vision and an assortment of other TV crime show devices. Notice the quasi-’70s-era bongo suspense music. Thing is, gardens take nurturing, building and developing their niches, in other words, an ecological context. Additionally, what about starting a *community* garden? In this case I at least hope once they plant these beautiful set pieces that someone will water them!
Sadly, as much as I think guerrilla gardening is a cool action worth promoting, the ad is so trite and contrived I think most that would potentially be inspired by the idea will see through Adidas’ ploy as yet another tactic to equate fashion with revolution. Rather than pass itself off as a device for urban rebellion, just sell the damn product for what it is: a shoe! And stop pretending your dumb-ass sneakers are a tool for social transformation.
Still in case you are enthused, here’s a link to a nonpartison group, Guerilla Gardening, which may inspire you to do your own action (with or without corporate sponsorship).
And not to disappoint, there are a number of DIY books on how to start your own urban (gardening) revolution:
“On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries” (Richard Reynolds)
“Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto” (David Tracey)
“Guerrilla Gardening: How to Create Gorgeous Gardens for Free” (Barbara Pallenberg)
Greenpeace is both marketer of ideas and media critic. The above video is a recent attack on Dove, parodying its “Onslaught” campaign to criticize Dove’s use of palm oil because it destroys rain forests. The Greenpeace version is pretty intense, although a bit manipulative. What do you think?
Now Greenpeace has a “StopGreenwashing” site that allows users to submit examples of “greenwash”– “Used to describe the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service.” I applaud their effort but have a small (constructive) criticism of the project. You are asked to vote on greenwash videos, but there is no context given. You are supposed to automatically understand why the commercial is bad. Furthermore, the site offers no tools for reading ads. I hope that in the future Greenpeace will make the effort to incorporate media literacy tools into the site.
Technorati Tags: Greenpeace
Rising Voices published a report on successes and challenges of the OLPC XO-1, AKA the $100 Laptop. This comes from a sixth grade class blog in Uruguay.
Bloggers Desde La Infancia » Blog Archive » Analyzing the use of laptops in the first month of class:
Use of Laptop:
Weaknesses:
They freeze up and it is slow to fix them
I lose my work every time they freeze up
They are very slow
The keyboards have different layouts
The battery life finishes quickly
It continuously disconnects from the internet and I lose the connection to the web page I am reading
You can only connect at school because the wi-fi antennas don’t have much range
It lacks a Flash plug-in and so there are websites and activities that we can not see
We can not upload images to make slideshows.
It takes a long time to load images.
We are not able to see the videos on the Internet
We lose the desire to work
I see warnings online that say “these seem to take longer than usual,” which doesn’t allow us to work continuously.
We are losing a lot of time in class because of the delay.Strengths:
Free access to the internet
We can write, take pictures, record audio, film, paint, and edit images.
The text and images from the web can copied and pasted in some cases
Easy to carry.
We can work collaboratively.
Image from Romanyg’s photostream
Banksy helped organize the Cans Festival, an open source stencil art event that anyone can join. The AP has more.
Here is a link to Cans Festival photostream.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT*
This is an open event and coming with your own stencil is positively encouraged but please observe the following
- This is a stencil only event no freehand lettering or characters
- Report to reception on arrival and they’ll show you where to paint
- No going over other artists* Painting outside the designated area may well result in prosecution.
Update:
Technorati Tags: Banksy, Cans Festival
Image by Giuseppe Arcimboldo
I just discovered two interesting reports on media and sustainability produced by SustainAbility and WWF-UK, Through the Looking Glass and Good News & Bad. These PDFs are linked on their Media Spotlight page. You have to register to download them (it’s free).
Film, music, news, documentaries, soaps all have an enormous impact on modern society – what we read, hear, watch, believe and feel, some talke in terms of the media’s ‘brainprint’. Media and Entertainment companies powerfully influence how people and politicians relate to corporate responsibility and sustainable development. How could they be accountable for this profound impact on society?
Through the Looking Glass, produced in partnership with WWF-UK, takes a look at how a select group of M&E companies measure up in their efforts to be accountable for their influence on society.
Good News & Bad takes a look at the role of media in building the corporate responsibility agenda for business as well as how corporate responsibility, climate change, ozone depletion, endocrine disrupters, GM foods and socially responsible investment are perceived, prioritised and covered by the media.
Amnesty International is running a campaign to make sure the Internet is not a tool for censorship and control. You can read some background here, and take action here. Please do.
The Surveillance Camera Players doing tactical media.
One of my favorite media theorists, Geert Lovink, wrote the indispensable Dark Fiber, a collection of critical essays published by MIT about media activism and networks. His discussion of tactical media as an alternative to culture jamming is why I put any kind of media activism under that category of the same name.
In a recent interview, he discusses politics and social media.
SBJ: Have social medias taken over the political debate and activism or do real life debates and organisation still serve a purpose–and if so which?
GL: Taken over? No, there isn’t any statistical evidence for that. Television, assisted by newspapers and radio, are still dominating the political agenda. The Web is playing a strange, new role in all this. For many, Internet is the perfect place to hang out and escape the boring, pre-programmed world of the ‘old media’. Simultaneously, society is moving into the Internet at the same time, just think of the re-invention of advertisement out there. What we see happening is not an easy convergence of media. Real and virtual mix but in unexpected manners. That’s the fun of it. However, the current crises are not properly addressed either in cyberspace. It’s really questionable to think that the paperless Internet is contributing in a positive way to the global warning and environmental pollution that we have in China as the place of production and Africa as the waste basket. But I remain positive. Remember that all these hyped-up self-important dotcom people in the late nineties had no idea about their own upcoming crash, let alone about the social aspects of Web 2.0. This makes me optimistic about Web 3.0, 4.0 and so on. Why won’t some Afro-Brazilian consortium draw up the principles for the Internet architecture in 20 years time?
I have mixed feelings about the freeway blogger. On the one hand I appreciate his DIY, grassroots media approach to getting an antiwar message to thousands of drivers. Better than billboards, to be sure. But I quibble with the idea that this is blogging– it’s not, it’s sloganeering. Blogging is an interactive linking scenario that is beyond information as objects. It’s a collective, distributed activity among millions of people tethered together by filaments of information on a vast rhizomatic network. A slogan on a freeway is just a competing ad message– albeit one that I agree with– but I no longer believe this kind of thing is social change, just a big giant bumper sticker tagged on a freeway. The benefit of this kind of action is that reminds people that the war is not fought by consensus, but the reality of any political advertising is that it tends to reinforce the “base” message. Conversion, as past studies have shown, tend to be incredibly small. I guess my frustration is that we mistake the message war for social change. We engage in “independent” media, but forsake interdependence. Call me a disillusioned culture jammer, but I simply have lost faith in the program of counter ads. With that said, I’d still rather have a society with freeway bloggers than not.
I don’t mean to just be a complainer. I do advocate alternative media, but done in the context of education and community. I think we need more one-on-one interaction and less mass media, less framing and more organizing, fewer media heroes, and more social programs.
Technorati Tags: freeway blogger
Never before have I seen a symbol treated like a head of state, but such is the treacherous journey of the Olympic torch as it wends its way from one protest to another across the globe.
The brilliant graphic from Reporters sans frontières.
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Daniel Pinchbeck has teamed up with awesome animator Joao Amorim to produce a series of video shorts designed to change our thinking about the world. The above video is a teaser for a longer video entitled, Another Green World which feature the inspiring vision of Kevin Danaher.
I encourage you to go over to Postmodern Times at clips.com to see the longer piece and the the other videos in the series.
Technorati Tags: Daniel Pinchbeck, Joao Amorim, Kevin Danahe
Wall are communication devices - image by Antonio Lopez (see flickr sets)
Is China’s great “Firewall” having its Berlin Wall moment? Recall that the same year– 1989– that barriers crumbled between Europe and the former Soviet Union, we had Tiananmen Square and the strengthening of the electronic border around Chinese dissent. But the Chinese leadership must know that they are playing with digital fire as the proverbial foot is jammed on the economy’s gas peddle, which, like it or not, means greater integration into the global info economy, making an already porous border even more permeable. Despite the Berlin Wall’s seemingly stone-like invincibility, there was an indication that some day it would eventually crash: the ubiquitous cover of graffiti, AKA citizen diplomacy. Same can be said about that horrendous wall being erected across Palestine. Though walls close in as much as they lock out, inevitably they also become media themselves, that is, a medium of communication. Walls– whether made of solids or electrons– are membranes of semiotic worlds, and ideas are a bit like radio waves which magically disregard physical barriers. I was once reminded of this as I took a Mexican cab across the the US border into Juarez and the whole time the network of taxies were loudly chirping with their radios as if no border existed between them.
Walls of fear can be overcome - Chines riot police in Tibet
With the bold defiance of Buddhist monks against Chinese illegal occupation of Tibet, the coming summer Olympics might present the perfect catalyst that opens debate and spurns action on Tibet. But don’t expect the US to do much. With the Chinese holding purse strings on US bonds and an another military occupation across the globe of dubious legality, there is no moral or practical high ground for US officials to stand on. But there is us. So please do your part to dismantle the great Chinese Firewall and do something for Tibetans. You can start by going to Amnesty International and supporting this campaign to help Tibetan monks arrested for peacefully demonstrating.
The Whole World is Watching: China’s Media War:
With the advent of the World Wide Web, it was thought that such barriers to information would topple. Instead the Chinese government created what has ironically come to be known as “The Great Firewall of China,” a well-funded, sophisticated, and ultimately successful effort to control the Internet and ensure that reporting and discussion about Tibet and other sensitive subjects such as relations with Taiwan — or what really happened at Tiananmen Square — remained severely constrained.
Will the world media now allow the Chinese government to establish “information dominance” over the Tibetans – and the rest of us? Or will the protests succeed in focusing world attention on China’s human rights record ahead of the Beijing Olympics — intended by the Communist government to boost its international image?
One of Greenpeace’s most important campaigns is to push electronics companies to go green. Here is the latest report.
Samsung and Toshiba new leaders in greener electronics ranking | Greenpeace USA:
The Greener Electronics Guide is our way of getting the electronics industry to face up to the problem of e-waste. We want manufacturers to get rid of harmful chemicals in their products. We want to see an end to the stories of unprotected child laborers scavenging mountains of cast-off gadgets created by society’s gizmo-loving ways.
The Guide ranks top market leaders of the mobile phone, computer, TV and games console markets according to their policies and practices on toxic chemicals and takeback. Samsung and Toshiba share top spot with 7.7/10 closely followed by Nokia, Sony, Dell and Lenovo all on 7.3. Apple continues its steady rise due to new products like the MacBook Air with less toxic chemicals helping boost Apple to 6.7.
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Some Iraqi War vets staged mock raids in Chicago based on patrols they performed in Iraq. It’s in interesting guerrilla theater tactic to get people to switch mental gears. Frankly, it scared the crap out of me.
PS As I was thinking about the action depicted in the video, it occurred to me that post-9-11 doing guerrilla theater is so much more dangerous. Essentially the security industry is outsourcing to uneducated people to detect out-of-the-ordinary events that defy patterns of “normal” behavior. Additionally, there is a rattled and scared citizenry who are so nervous that even a chap reciting the lyrics of a Clash song becomes a threat. People are grasping so tightly to the shreds of reality that bind them to the old world that disturbances and disruptions can send them over the edge. For this reason I think the video scared me. I was worried about the “performers” being misconstrued and misinterpreted because at this point terrorism has been reduced to spectacle and theater, and under those conditions, the security apparatus can decide that performance of any kind is now suspicious activity, in the same way that England is starting to criminalize photography. Is it possible that in the near future, if the current trajectory continues, that any art outside the establish commodities market will be construed as subversive?