Assignment 2: Homeless Hotspots

My delicious stack contains the three links that form the subtitles below.

Advocacy 2.0 - Collective action and social media

Much ado has been made about the reach of social media and its capability to abet social change. Recent prominent examples, such as the defeat of the PIPA and SOPA acts and the Arab Spring, are  first to jump to mind when speaking of social change. But is social media truly an effective tool in mobilizing collective action? 

Obar, Zube and Lampe (2011) examines this question in their article, Advocacy 2.0: An analysis of how advocacy groups in the United States perceive and use social media as tools for facilitating civic engagement and collective action. Obar et al surveyed 53 advocacy groups of varying sizes, ideological and political focus in the United States on their social media use and the “perceived effectiveness of social media for achieving specific advocacy-related tasks” (p. 9). Their results showed that despite some drawbacks, social media “provide a variety of benefits that help facilitate civic engagement and collective action” (p. 13) through its ability to strengthen outreach efforts, enable engaging feedback loops, strengthen collective action efforts through an increased speed of communication, and low cost. 

While the positive perception of social media held by advocacy organizations is encouraging, the key issue with this study lies in its focus on perception versus quantifiable results. As Lisan Jutras (2009) pointed out in the Globe and Mail, slacktivism does not equate activism. Malcolm Gladwell put it most succinctly when he wrote “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice”. So does social media truly mobilize collective action?  I think it can - as long as the subject is sexy enough, or retweeted by the beautiful people. So what happens when the subject is not sexy?

Homeless Hotspots

Homelessness is not a sexy subject, nor is it populated by sexy people. But over a four-day period from March 9 - 13, 2012, homelessness moved into the spotlight, first on Twitter, then over to various blogs and tradition media, thanks to the Homeless Hotspots project. The controversy sparked when marketing agency BBH Labs conducted a “charitable innovation initiative” (homelesshotspots.org, 2012) at the South by Southwest (SXSW) technology conference by enlisting 13 individuals from a homeless shelter to carry mobile WiFi devices and offer conference attendees Internet access in exchange for donations, which were kept by the homeless vendors. The intent was to modernize the street newspaper model by enabling the homeless to sell a digital service that’s in demand. 

The experiment caused a storm of controversy from Vancouver to Brisbane, with people like Tim Carmody of Wired condemning it as corporate exploitation and dehumanization of the homeless into “walking, talking billboards” (Carmody, 2012). Proponents of this project, including Mark Horvath, founder of InvisiblePeople.tv and social media activist, were just as vocal in its support. They pointed out that the homeless are the invisible pariahs of the community, and this project not only provided honest labor and wage for the participants, but also enabled them to connect to society and have a voice. 

According to Twee.co, the Homeless Hotspots (#homelesshotspots) controversy was the ninth top trending topic worldwide at 2:40 p.m. on March 13, 2012. Is this indicative of social media’s ability to promote collective action? I would disagree. Blogs and tweets flew fast and furious on this subject, but ‘real’ participatory action to end homelessness did not arise out of the conversation. What did happen, however, is still extremely valuable: social media raised global awareness and started conversations on the homeless issue, an issue that is uncomfortable, that most of us would prefer to ignore. As Laura June (2012) eloquently observed in The Verge, 

...the marketing gimmick itself requires something else: recognition of another human being, one who is suffering. Whereas plenty of people seemed to think that was dehumanizing, it’s actually kind of the opposite: it’s literally humanizing. Thinking about and looking at the homeless is hard...humanizing a person makes them hard to ignore, to walk away from. 

We Are Visible

As Gladwell (2010) pointed out, it is very hard to confront socially entrenched norms and practices;  and not seeing the homeless is very much a common social practice. In 2008 Mark Horvath decided to address this issue with We Are Visible (wearevisible.com), a website devoted to teaching social media skills to the homeless and raising their participatory literacy. Henry Jenkins (2007) observed that in order to reap the rewards of participatory culture, the user must develop a full set of cultural competencies and social skills to successfully navigate today’s new media landscape. The homeless are often faced with both access issues and the participation gap: the denial of learning experiences to grow those social skills and cultural competencies and the sense of empowerment and entitlement that enable them to be full participants in this emerging society. The lack of participatory literacy will leave the homeless farther behind, pushing these faceless, silent outcasts even more into the peripheries of this emergent societal norm.  

We Are Visible addresses this simply by teaching basic media and participatory literacy skills and connecting new users with a safe, supportive online community at the start. As part of this initiative, there is a @WeAreVisible Twitter account and a We Are Visible Facebook account, both with over 3400 followers. The power of the community is evident through the many heartwarming anecdotes on the various social media channels, such as @alleycat22469’s recounting of how he received food, necessities, and even employment through Twitter when he was homeless (@alleycat22469, n.d.). Many more stories abound of renewed dignity, identity, connection, and belonging, all thanks to engagement in social media. 

I began by asking whether social media is truly an effective tool in mobilizing collective action. Examples like the Arab Spring had predisposed me towards very large-scale events as the only valid examples of collective action. But as smaller initiatives like We Are Visible illustrates, collective action is not just about mobilizing nations.  It’s about working towards a common goal together, with success sometimes measured on the granular level. And from that viewpoint, social media is indeed a critical, and effective, enabler for collective action. 

References

@alleycat22469 (n.d.). Why social media. Retrieved from http://wearevisible.com/why-social-media.html

Carmody, T. (2012, March 12). The damning backstory behind ‘homeless hotspots’ at SXSW. Wired. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/the-damning-backstory-behind-homeless-hotspots-at-sxswi/ 

Gladwell, M. (2010, October 4). Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

Homelesshotspots.org. (2012). Collaborators. Retrieved from http://homelesshotspots.org/ 

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., and Weigel, M. (2007). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Retrieved from 

http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF 

June, L. (2012, March 13). Homeless hotspots: The best, worst, smartest, dumbest part of SXSW. The Verge. Retrieved from http://www.readability.com/read?url=http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/13/2866786/homeless-hotspots-sxsw-bbh-smartest-dumbest-idea

Jutras, L. (2009, December 7) Facebook mobilizes masses - but what for?  The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/personal-tech/facebook-mobilizes-masses---but-what-for/article1390916/

Obar, J.A., Zube, P. and Lampe, C. (2011).  Advocacy 2.0: An analysis of how advocacy groups in the United States perceive and use social media as tools for facilitating civic engagement and collective action. Journal of Information Policy, 2, 1-25. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1956352r  

Twee.co (2012). Homeless hotspots was popular on twitter. Retrieved from http://www.twee.co/topics/homeless-hotspots

Week 10: Libraries and Transliteracy

If transliteracy is the future of literacy, what happens to publishing and how does the role of libraries change? Some key ideas: •future of libraries •democratization of publishing Ian Clark writes on the need for libraries in the digital age at guardian.co.uk Libraries are a bridge between the information-rich and the information-poor.  They need reinforcing, not dismantling. We need to continue to provide a  highly skilled service that is able to meet the needs of the general public. The service ought to continue to innovate to take advantage of the way in which  people are interacting with the service in a different way. It needs to continue  to bridge the gap between those who have access to the internet and those  who do not, while also ensuring it delivers on other aspects of its core service  (book loans, local studies materials, etc). If the service is cut, we run the risk of an ill-informed society that is ill-equipped to prosper in the “information age” – a dangerous prospect for any democracy. From the Libraries and Transliteracy blog (by Lane Wilkinson) incorporating social media into the library instruction curriculum can add a familiar, effective, and transferable skill-set for addressing the critical ACRL Information Literacy Standards. As Bobish concludes his article, social media and related technologiespresent a golden opportunity, not generally available previously, for students to see the real world relevance of the skills that they learn through information literacy instruction and to learn how information is created and shared by doing it themselves rather than hearing about it. (p. 63) Discussion Questions: Q1. Elizabeth Daley encourages us to expand the concept of literacy. We’ve talked about transliteracy. What role do you think transliteracy plays (will play) in the development of publishing (and reading and writing)? Q2. If publishing, traditionally, evoked ideas of editors, gatekeepers, experts and credibility and current online publishing is synonymous (usually) with interconnected conversation, legitimacy of interaction and communication - how do we as writers and readers legitimise both credibility and interconnected conversation? Q3. According to Lawrence Lessig (founder of Creative Commons): “I think it is a great thing when amateurs create, even if the thing they create is not as great as what the professional creates. I want my kids to write. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop reading Hemingway and read only what they write. What Keen misses is the value to a culture that comes from developing the capacity to create—independent of the quality created. That doesn’t mean we should not criticise works created badly (such as, for example, Keen’s book…). But it does mean you’re missing the point if you simply compare the average blog to the NY times.” What does Lessig’s quote imply about (critical) literacies and literary practises concerned with publishing? Q3. This week we’ve talked about the role of libraries in the new landscape of publishing. Some people see libraries as passe, “If you plopped a library down 30 years from now there would be cobwebs growing everywhere because people would look at it and wouldn’t think of it as a legitimate institution because it would be so far behind...” What transliterate practises might libraries employ in order to place libraries at the centre of an informational social web?

Participatory Literacy and Implications for Education

In searching for three types of text related to participatory literacy and collective action, I have found a combined theme related to the role of our education system in developing students who will be effective users of new media.

In the video interview, Mimi Ito on Participation Literacy, Part One of Three, new media expert Howard Rheingold interviews Mizuko (Mimi) Ito about the social media habits of teens and young adults. Ito is the co-author of one of the largest studies of online youth media habits and in the video, she shares insight into what parents and educators should know about youth online habits and what they should be teaching young people.

Ito effectively separates the learning that occurs for young people in social and recreational settings from the learning that occurs in schools. For teens and young adults, who are exploring both their self-identity in terms of social relations and specialized interests, the Internet has significant value in their lives. As Ito says, “Often digital media plays into both of those things, both their social lives when their peer culture becomes very central to their social lives and the development of their interests and specializations” (Rheingold & Ito, 2010).  She says the baseline literacies around things like information seeking, posting, linking, forwarding and modifying simple websites have increased dramatically over the past 10 years, but also suggests that the skills are not evenly distributed amongst kids. Because the learning is happening outside of a formal setting, most kids do not necessarily pick up more critical literacies or advanced technical and media production skills. She clearly identifies three stages of participation moving from casual use of technology to ‘messing around’ (which includes tweaking or modifying content as well as starting to create things) to ‘geeking out’ (which includes coding programs, modifying games or creating videos for youtube).  Different kids are gaining different new media literacies because the engagement is occurring outside of the formal school setting.

One of the challenges for parents and educators according to Ito is to build more links between the social informal learning that occurs outside of school and the learning that they are getting inside of school. She suggests astutely that schools should focus on a certain set of baseline literacies and then move into more critical literacies that allow them to reflect on the more social and everyday practices they are engaged in.

But what are those literacies? What should schools focus on in ensuring that students are well prepared to be active meaningful participants in the online communities they engage in around social groupings and special interests? These required skills for Web 2.0 engagement might accurately be described as participatory literacies and a text by Axel Bruns can begin to identify the roles that are being demanded by social web participants.

Axel Bruns is a noted scholar in the field of social media and has published a seminal book entitled Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: from Production to Produsage that examines how online communities collaborate using social media tools for content development. The article, Produsage: A Working Definition, is featured on the website produsage.org which was developed by Bruns to support the book and explore the key concept of produsage further.

The term produsage, coined by Bruns, is a hybrid of the words production and usage. According to him the industrial model of producers and consumers of content does not apply in the collaborative communities enabled by “networked, participatory environment(s)” (Bruns, 2007, para 1). The outcomes of the produsage process are no longer products, as defined by the industrial model, but rather are artefacts of collaboration, which “are inherently incomplete, always evolving, modular, networked, and never finished” (para 3).

This compelling argument helps us not only understand the people who are involved in participatory online communities but also the nature of the content that exists there when other users discover it. The tools for communication are not broadcast in nature with senders and receivers, but are peer-to-peer (one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many) and thus participants are allowed and required to fluctuate between the roles of senders/producers and receivers/users. Ito also discusses this fluctuating role for new media users when she talks about reciprocity. She says, “one of the things that’s different from the school environment is that there is an ethic of reciprocity where you are both creator of media - of knowledge - as well as somebody who is commenting and assessing other people’s work” (Rheingold & Ito, 2010). A collective group of produsers would likely qualify as what Rheingold calls a smart mob. In mobs, there are no clear set of leaders or followers as the content being advanced is likely to direct the actions of the group – in a traditional mob it may be the volume or persuasiveness of the content that carries the day, whereas in a smart mob the focus is more appropriately on the quality of the content and leaders will pass on control as they shift from a producer back to a user.

Bruns also points out that the result of collaboration might not just be the creation of artefacts but would also include the construct of rules, processes and spaces for the collaboration itself. This is what he calls the information commons. “The object of the communal effort is almost always as much the development of social structures to support and sustain the shared project as it is the development of that project itself” (Bruns, 2007, para 4).

So, if the world of the social web is asking participant to be produsers and to participate in building the information commons, what sorts of participatory literacies should be emphasized? Bruns would likely include literacies that enable both the production elements required as well as the user elements. On the production side, elements of creativity, reasoning and collaboration would be critical, whereas on the usage side literacies related to attention, critical thinking and analysis would be favourable. These literacies with some overlap mesh nicely with ones outlined elsewhere by Howard Rheingold: attention, participation, credibility, collaboration and network awareness (Rheingold, 2010).

The use and teaching of participatory literacies in the classroom is the subject of Marlene Asselin and Maryam Moayeri’s paper, The Participatory Classroom: Web 2.0 in the Classroom (2011). In it, they describe how the new web has emphasized a new set of critical literacies. They demonstrate that tools being used in schools today “are still being used in a 1.0 or consumerist manner” (p. 2). They argue for supporting participatory literacies in the classroom, outline what literacies are important and suggest how they should be implemented in the classroom.

The work of Asselin and Moayeri complement Bruns and reinforce Rheingold. While not referring directly to the work of Bruns, they discuss the need for literacies that support both “consumer activities” and “content production activities” (p. 2) thus acknowledging the role of an engaged participant in the social web is both of producer and consumer/user. They write, “expanding literacies for learning include criticality, metacognition, reflection, and skills for creating and publishing content” (p. 2). The new literacies are expanded on in the paper, through being grouped into the following themes: locating and organizing information, critical literacy of the internet, and building knowledge (sharing and presenting). All of this, Asselin and Maoyeri suggest, is moving us towards a literacy of empowerment. “The crucial role of schools in the world of the evolving web is not only to use it to engage students and support their learning, but to guide students in ethical and socially responsible use of the increasingly complex and global worlds of the web” (p. 6).

Asselin and Maoyeri, like Ito, do a good job of demonstrating that traditional literacies are not serving students well into the 21^st century and that significant shifts in curriculum are needed to ensure that students have the skills they need to appropriately use web 2.0 technologies. They add some good suggestions to the list of important participatory literacies, even if their list might not be completely comprehensive. They have picked up well on the importance of locating and sorting information, which Rhiengold seems to have missed, but they left out things he suggested like attention and network awareness. Of course, their addition of literacies related to metacognition and reflection demonstrate thoughtfulness about  skills seemingly far removed from the actual tools, but which are incredibly important for thinking critically, analyzing sources of information and establishing one’s own credibility.

Taken together, these three works seem to suggest that the role of education and schooling in today’s digital age is not just to provide students with a set of facts or key pieces of knowledge, but rather to present students with the skills they will need to become full and active participants in the social web. Teaching appropriate participatory literacies will ensure that students become critical and effective users of new media as well as thoughtful and creative producers of informed content. Ito lays out a case for change in the current education system, Bruns outlines the fundamental role transformation that is required and Asselin and Maoyeri outline how educators can effectively implement participatory literacy in classrooms.

References

Asselin, M. & Moayeri, M. (2011). The Participatory Classroom: Web 2.0 in the Classroom. Practical Strategies – Literacy Learning: the Middle Years: 19(2).

Bruns, A. (2007). Produsage: A Working Definition [Online]. Available: http://produsage.org/node/9 [2012, Mar 17].

Rheingold, H. & Ito, M. (2010). Video Interview: Mimi Ito on Participation Literacy, Part One of Three [Video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.smartmobs.com/2010/01/02/video-interview-mimi-ito-on-participation-literacy-part-one-of-three/.

Rheingold, H. (2010). Adora Svitak: A 12 Year Old on Digital Literacy [Video

file]. Retrieved from: http://vlog.rheingold.com/index.php/site/video/adora-svitak-a-12-year-old-on-digital-literacy/.

Comment on Ilona’s Assignment 2 – Lawrence Lessig blog

Lawrence Lessig’s (2007) rebuttal to Andrew Keen's book (2007), The Cult of the Amateur” was entertaining and enlightening. I have to agree with Lessig that Keen's book contained too many factual errors that took away from his credibility and when I reviewed his current website, the errors remained (2012). 

As David Silver writes in his article, Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000, writing about the impact of the Internet often takes one of two sides: “dystopian rants or utopian raves” (2000). Keen’s work does the ranting, Lessig covers the raving.

Faulty argument

In my opinion, this book and Keen have received more attention than they deserved because he is one of the few people who are openly advocating against amateur publishing. While other people share his opinion, the majority of people who think blogs are a waste of space don’t bother to write about them – they simply ignore them.

From the single chapter I read from Keen’s book, his argument that amateur writers and publishers are hurting the world of professional journalism is simply not true (2007). Journalism is not a regulated profession – there is no entrance exam, no required educational training and no clubs to join prior to obtaining employment. Although I am a communications professional who holds a bachelor of journalism, I will be the first person to say that education does not make someone a professional journalist. A paycheque turns an amateur into a professional -that's it. There are poor professionals in every profession and just because someone earns a living performing work, does not mean that an amateur could not do better.

First step is awareness

Keen’s quote (2007), “the YouTubification of politics is a threat to civic culture. It infantilizes the political process, silencing public discourse and leaving the future of government up to thirty-second video clips shot by camcorder-wielding amateurs with political agendas" (p. 68) ignores the benefits of awareness. The first step toward change is learning about the problem. Our class is now talking about Joseph Kony, Invisible Children and the welfare of children in Uganda. Kim’s post highlights the need to actively challenge the ideas that are presented to us, both in the past and in the future.

Although the facts in the video have been disputed, the main essence of the video was - if Americans and the rest of the world were aware of the atrocities, citizens would convince their local politicians to send money and support to stop Kony and his forces. As of Sunday, March 18, there were over 83 million views of the video on YouTube.

From 2007 until now

While reading Lessig’s blog, I realized that Keen released the book in 2007, and I was curious to see if he has a newfound appreciation for amateur publishing. He hasn’t. According to his website, his new book, called Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Social Revolution is Dividing, Diminishing and Disorienting Us” comes out in May 2012 and Keen hasn’t changed. Here’s the text from the back cover

Using one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films – Vertigo – as his starting point, [Keen] argues that social media, with its generation of massive amounts of personal data, is encouraging us to fall in love with something that is too good to be true – a radically transparent 21st century society in which we can all supposedly realize our authentic identities on the Internet (2012).

His website goes on to say, “Digital Vertigo is the first substantial critique of Web 3.0” (2012). If you take the time to peruse the rest of his site, you’ll see his YouTube video, photographs from Flckr, tweets from his Twitter account, his podcasts and his blog. I was surprised to see the number of collaborative Web 2.0 tools being used, because as Marshall McLuhan (1964) said, “the medium is the message” (p. 7). I was even more surprised to find spelling mistakes in the links on the site. They make the site seem amateurish.

References

Keen, A. (2007). The cult of the amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. New York, NY: Doubleday Publishing.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man (Critical ed.). Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press.

Lessig, L. (2007, May 31). "Keen's "the Cult of the Amateur": Brilliant!" [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/05/keens_the_cult_of_the_amateur.html

Silver, D. (2000). Looking backwards, looking forward: Cyberculture studies 1990-2000.
Web.studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, 19-30. Retrieved from http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp

Vandivort, K., Longerbeam, H., Clendinen, C., Jouglet, N. (Producers), & Russell, J. (Director). (2012). Kony 2012 [YouTube video]. United States: Invisible Children Inc. Retrieved March 18, 2012 from www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc

Assignment 2, Part 1

Collective Action: A long, long time ago


In its January, 2011 edition, Newsweek published online a list of dying cities in the United States, a survey based, in part, on census figures that showed which urban centres were most quickly losing their young people to economic possibilities elsewhere. The original article

The article pointed out that “Michigan dominates much of this list, with several cities experiencing significant decline in population as the state suffered high unemployment rates and above average foreclosures in recent years due mainly to the collapse of the auto industry.” Over the period of 2000-2009, for instance, Grand Rapids suffered a 2.1 per cent population drop, and, most significantly, a 2.2 per cent popluation decline in the under-18 cohort.

For that, Grand Rapids landed the 10th position in the Newsweek poll. Predictably, the ranking drew fire from the usual political and economic leaders, typical of which was an online letter sent by the mayor:  http://therapidian.org/dear-newsweek.

Unpredictably, a pair of 22-year-old Grand Rapidians from the local video-music-production set, Rob Bliss and Scott Erickson, fired up their imaginations and produced what Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert would call the greatest music video ever made.

It was the Grand Rapids LipDub, a reported one-shot, eight-minute plus tour of Grand Rapids featuring about 5,000 people lip syncing to Don McLean’s “American Pie,” a song, like the city, you may think you know.

At this writing, its main YouTube page had drawn 4,602,287 views. It is a visual feast of marching bands, parades, pillow fights, weddings, football practices, cheerleaders, exploding bridges, acoustic guitars, helicopter aerials and a closing shot that celebrates text. Try to watch it without shaking your head in amazement at the exuberance and collective effort asked for and delivered. You can’t.

Erickson, who was still 18 years away from being born when “American Pie” was released, told WGVU’s West Michigan Week current affairs television broadcast that “the Grand Rapids lip dub video is a memorial and testament to how open and wonderful the community of Grand Rapids is. Not just its inhabitants, but its local government.” And, speaking of his creative partner, that “Rob wanted a song with a lot of visual imagery. To paraphrase what he tells people, it has very colourful lyrics, it is an all-American song, and it communicates a lot of cool ideas that he wanted to draw from.”

In this space, I would like to briefly venture out and make some tentative observations about what is going on, other than the the actual lip dub, in the lip dub video.

1.  Collective Action. In his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky (2008) explains that new technology, including YouTube, enables new kinds of group-forming: “The core idea is the same: we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations” (pp. 20-21).

It is worth remembering that Bliss and Erickson did not write a letter or take their displeasure about the Newsweek article to Newsweek or WGVU or the Chicago Sun-Times. They went to YouTube.

And they went to YouTube with an example of what Shirky has in mind when he distinguishes collective action from collaborative production, cooperation and sharing (the mayor’s letter, for instance), elements of which are also visible in the LipDip effort and anti-Newsweek effort. Collective action, Shirky says, is the most difficult kind of group effort to achieve because it demands that “a group of people...commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members.”

In historical terms, a potluck dinner or a barn raising is collaborative production (the members work together to create something), while a union or government engages in collective action, action that is undertaken in the name of the members to change something out in the world, often in opposition to other groups committed to different outcomes. (p. 51)

Shirky’s scaffolding helps us build an understanding of how the LipDub project, aimed at changing the impression of Grand Rapids left by the Newsweek ranking, is more than just cool or neat or worth liking, but is, rather, an example of collective action.

2. New Media As Metamedia. Lev Manovich, in the article “New Media from Borges to HTML,” argues that by the 1980s (we observe that this was the decade of the birth of Bliss and and Erickson) there was a recognition that culture had become “more concerned with reworking already existing content, idioms and style, rather than genially creating new ones.” Bliss, although a musician himself, did not write a new song for Grand Rapids, Michigan. Erickson did not produce a new, chamber of commerce style video celebrating the architecture of Grand Rapids. What they devised and created was a collective action video that employed a widely known folk-pop song, developing a new narrative for both it and Grand Rapids in the process.

3. The Media Mind. These guys know what they are doing. In And Then There’s This: How Stories Live And Die In Viral Culture, Bill Wasik, who introduced the mob project to the world, makes us consider that “the relevant actors of so-called consumer-generated media...are every bit as savvy, as ambitious, and as calculating as aspiring culture-makers have ever been.” (11)

In the WGVU interview, Erickson reveals that the idea for the LipDub came first as a frame that had not connection to Newsweek. Only later, once the Newsweek article appeared, did the content get added. Erickson says: “In November of 2010, Rob and I were talking and he said, ‘I kinda wanna do one of those lipdub videos, downtown, with the whole community. And this was actually before the Newsweek article came out. And I was kinda like, okay.”

The Grand Rapids LipDub was an effect waiting for a spark.

Erickson himself makes Wasik’s point in the middle of a paean to the spirit of cooperation in Grand Rapids (the fire department actually recommended the pyrotechnician, Captain Boom!) when he provides some unsolicited autobiography.

In the WGVU interview he says:  “You have to remember, Rob and I are both 22. We are looking forward to our 23rd birthdays this year. And we’re very ambitious [emphasis added] and progressive, I think, in what we want to do professionally. But, at the end of the day, we’re kids who like to blow things up.”

Besides the column of fireworks on the bridge, what they have blown up in the Grand Rapids LipDub video have included old ideas of what collective action looks like.

References

Heartwell, G. K. (2011, January 25). “Dear Newsweek: An open letter from Mayor George K. Heartwell.” The Rapidian [online magazine].

Shirky, C. 2008. Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New    York: Penguin.

“The Grand Rapids LipDub.” (2011, May 26). YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPjjZCO67WI

“West Michigan Week: LipDub Producer Interview on WGVU.” (2012, February 19). YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0GCgo8tve0

Manovich, L. (2003). New media from Borges to HTML. In Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. (Eds), The new media reader (pp. 13-25). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Wasik, B. 2009. And then there’s this: How stories live and die in viral culture. New York: Penguin

Assignment 2, Part 2

“I don’t need a tape recorder any more. I am a tape recorder.” (from Miracleman by Neil Gaiman, cited in Cyborg)


Smart Mobs: Cyborgs At Queen’s Park


In the spring of 2000, protesters angry about ongoing welfare and social services reforms directed by then-Ontario Premier Mike Harris gathered around Queen’s Park to make their voices heard and faces seen.  Part of what they saw was captured by videographers whose work was compiled and shared on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJkxe-UJtU8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jKn3HJ8go8.

Among those who were in the crowd were University of Toronto Professor Steve Mann and some of his students who were wearing the latest version of his EyeTap wearable technology devices attached to eyeglasses or mounted on construction hard hats. Cyborgs, Haraway (2003) reminds us, “are creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.”

Mann wouldn’t argue with this definition. In fact, he titled his 2001 book Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the age of the Wearable Computer. He calls himself a cyborg. And on that June day in 2000, he and the other cyborgs were at Queen’s Park.

In the book, he recalls the new significance to witnessing the events and broadcasting them live to the Internet. “Our perspective on the event was captured and transmitted to remote locations, and the official, typical response to the protest as put forward in the media -- that a dangerous bunch of radicals threatened to storm the legislature for no apparent reason -- was countered by our poignant images of police massing and moving in on the primarily peaceful protesters. The images of police preparing to rush the crowd are frightening, but perhaps more ominous was the relative absence of those images from the local news.” (176)

Writing two years later, Howard Rheingold (2003) puts a name to Mann’s cyborg effort. He calls them smart mobs. “Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices and possess both communication and computing capabilities.”

In an autobiographical video, Mann describes his work as occurring at the intersection of computing, communication and graphics. Rheingold goes on to make a key point about this cheap coupling:

Dirt-cheap microprocessors are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, and neighborhoods; products, including, everything from box tops to shoes, are embedded with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote-control devices for the physical world. (xii)

This is at the heart of what a smart mob is, or, rather, what a smart mob does. What they do is use mobile media to “incite and organize collective action.” (225)

We return to Mann, at this point, to consider his view of the deeper significance of what smart mobs are up to. To appreciate his argument, and the motivation behind his dedication to wearable technology, we have to see media convergence through his lens. Convergence is nothing to be proud of, Mann warns. When media conglomerates acquire platforms across televsion, film, video, print, radio, web, and, importantly, when only a small percentage of the population are granted access to that convergence web, what results is, first,  the quiet disappearance information quietly deemed not appropriate, and, second, the downplaying and distortion of opposing points of view “in favour of opinions that shore up a system of mindless consumption -- whether of movies, junk food or technological tidbits.” (177)

Once a greater number of media-equipped cyborgs populate our landscapes, choice will, Mann, contends, fight its way up and out from under convergence.

Don’t like what’s on TV? Make your own show tonight and send out a million emails to alert the cyborg community of your broadcast. Disagree with the version of the protest the one-sided nightly news is putting forward? Set up your own Internet broadcast to address the issue. (pp. 178-179)

Mann has since helped develop this argument and place it within the broader perspective of equiveillance, a concept that includes both surveillance (to watch from above, as in the myriad cameras connected to buildings, light standards, satellites, etc) and sousveillance (to watch from below, as in the cyborg technology used at Queen’s Park). Sousveillance provides a smart-mobbed counterpoint to the ubiquitous surveillance devices in modern society, says Mann, writing, “This real-time live monitoring creates a social commentary and discourse that runs parallel to the widespread surveillance already present in the world around us. Unlike surveillance, which often happens in secrecy, our tools for sousveillance are freely available and moves personal experience capture into the realm of the everyday, with an open forum for public discourse.” (177)

This gets closer to Rheingold’s prophecy that “mobile Internet, when it really arrives, will not be just a way to do old things while moving. It will be a way to do things that couldn’t be done before.”

Steve Mann explains http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiFtmrpuwNY some things about computing. “Computers were once traditionally about calculations. In the old days, you had computers that were designed for adding up numbers and calculations, and so on.  But I had a different vision and that would be computers were much more used for doing communications, like the telephone rather than the calculator. And, so, I envisioned that we would have a new world where computers were bringing people together.”

References

Haraway, D. (2003). A Cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. (Eds), The new media reader (pp. 516-523). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Mann, S. (2010, January 16). “Steven Mann Explains the EyeTap.” YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiFtmrpuwNY

Mann, S., & Niedzviecki, H. (2001). Cyborg: Digital destiny and human possibility in the age of the wearable computer. Toronto: Doubleday Canada.

Rheingold, H. (2003). Smart mobs: The next social revolution. Cambrige, MA: Perseus.

Assignment 2, part 3

Smart Mobs: Roads Scholarship

For my third smart mob text, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. I at more at home with the arts and the news and the sociology and political science of it all than I am with science, so I went out looking for some science I didn’t really understand. And I found it.

MobEyes: Smart Mobs For Urban Monitoring With A Vehicular Sensor Network is a paper by Uichin Lee et al., that proposes the installation of recording and diffusion software in automobiles, which, thereby, become mobile nodes in a network of data sharing and harvesting.

The authors, who are from UCLA and the University of Bologna, view such a network as possible only because of the ubiquity of mobile wireless devices such as cellphones, PDAs and wi-fi laptops. “Not only do such devices enrich our daily activities, but also create an environment such that epidemics of cooperation can thrive.” (52)

This talk of cooperation echoes Rheingold’s simple defintion of smart mobs as “people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other.” (xii). The diffusion of mobile devices, says Rheingold, “ will help people coordinate actions with others around the world -- and, perhaps more importantly, with people nearby. Groups of people using these tools will gain new forms of social power, new ways to organize their interactions... . Tomorrow’s fortunes will be made by businesses that find a way to profit from these changes, and yesterday’s fortunes are already being lost by businesses that don’t understand them.” (xii-xiii)

Not surprisingly, the authors trace their inspiration back to Rheingold, who they credit as being the first to name these kinds of cooperated activities as smart mobs, “where people with shared interests/goals can pervasively and seamlessly collaborate using wireless mobile devices.” (52)

As I understand the proposal, MobEyes transmitting and receiving senors would be installed in public and private vehicles that would broadcast packets of information comprised of sensed data, including atmospheric pollution, road conditions, congestion, and licence plate information speed and location, to be analyzed by a central police agency as part of a larger vehicular sensor network that also includes existing surveillance cameras.

(Interestingly, the nouns and pronouns used to describe interaction between data-transmitting vehicles echo those of the human world. “Encounters,” the authors write [emphasis added], “occur when two nodes exhange summaries, that is, when they are within their radio ranges and have a new summary packet to advertise.” (54)

We are asked to imagine MobEyes at work after a terrorist attack in which the criminals have released in an urban environment poisonous chemicals, and then fled in a vehicle. We are asked to assume that other vehicles are equipped with cameras and chemical sensors. “They continuously generate a huge amount of sensed data store and process them locally, and produce short summaries periodically or in an event-driven way, for example, when chemical
readings overcome specified thresholds” (53).


The reader is left to imagine other uses of the MobEyes protocol, and we can easily submit that vehicles equipped with speed sensors could record speeding vehicles more extensively than existing radar traps and photo-radar locations would qualify as an additional use.

And that returns us to the cautionary note that Rheingold hits in all of his smart rob writings. Indeed, something significant is happening with the rapid adoption of multimedia communication. The positives are easy to see. In the case of MobEyes being adopted, police would have more information in real time, and drivers may be persuaded, when a neighbouring vehicle also doubles as a police vehicle, to regulate their speed. Here, Rheingold is a good guide:

Perhaps the most important question about the future of augmenting collective action through the use of the Internet and mobile communication is the degree to which trustworthy and accurate information can be distinguished and screened from misleading, false, missourced information. (237)

To me, this returns the smart mob discussion to ancient questions of what you can trust.


References

Lee, U., Zhou, B., Gerla, M., Magistretti, E., Bellavista, P., & Corradi, A. (October 2006). MobEyes: Smart mobs for a urban monitoring with a vehicular sensor network.” IEEE Wireless Communications, 52-57.

Rheingold, H. (2008). Mobile media and political collective action. In J. E. Katz (Ed.), Handbook of mobile communication studies (pp. 225-237). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rheingold, H. (2003). Smart mobs: The next social revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.