All posts by Adam Fish

Adam Fish

I am a cultural anthropologist and media studies scholar currently teaching and researching in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, UK. I investigate media technologies, digital finance, and network activism. @mediacultures

A US Soldier’s Experience in Iraq on 9/11

Here is some raw data–a second interview with my friend serving his second term in Baghdad. We talk about his ‘cultural training’ exercises, Bradley Manning, and his engagement with the local Iraqis.

 *

What type of cultural training are you given? What are you told about Iraqi culture? Where would you go if you needed a translator?

We were given very basic cultural training before my last deployment. This deployment I don’t remember any classes or anything being said much. I do remember that I was told at JRTC (month training exercise in Louisiana) that I should take it upon myself to learn some basic Arabic words. Arabic is a tough language. I’ve learned and forgotten many words and phrases. The truth is we don’t need to learn the language, we have an interpreter with us at all times outside the wire and we never use them anyhow. Anything a soldier learns about the culture here is on there own accord. I could go on for quite some time about the varying lifestyles of Iraqis from the illiterate rural farmers to the college educated inner city modern Iraqis. The people here in eastern Baghdad are mostly Shiite and … are strictly religious and are concerned mostly with the world as it applies to Shiites. The last big uproar these zealots had with the US was the fact that we weren’t doing enough to help there Shia bretheren in Bahrain. Anyhow most of what I learn about the Iraqis is through our Iraqi interpreters. They live with us on base and live the life of secret agents. They keep it a secret from even their families that they work with the US and have many times told me that they’d be dead if word got out. Our interpreters work with us for three years for their US citizenship. Our current two interpreters with our platoon have been on more route clearance missions than any American soldier that I know. Perhaps 4 to 5 hundred.

You are asked to go out and be friendly with the locals but then you are told not to. What is up with that? This is really interesting, why the mix messages?

The suggestions to mingle with the locals is coming from one echelon, while our missions are being commanded by another. The two echelons obviously have a different idea of how things should be done. I’m not sure what the right decision is. I know it’s a risk to walk around in the neighborhoods of eastern Baghdad, but it’s not like driving through them is any safer. I think if it were up to me we would stop at a different local market every time we went on mission and simply ask random Iraqis what were in for that day. I would as well stop and talk to the Sons of Iraq and ask them what is up. The SOI or Sons of Iraq are like volunteer police. They used to be paid by the government but now I believe they are free agents so to speak. Sometimes the locals pay them and sometimes they are burned alive by the local insurgents. They are the brave son of a bitches who stand on the streets with their AK 47’s everyday so they are in the know. Why we don’t interact with them more is beyond me. I think anyway you slice it we are in for a bad day, so my view is we should be doing as much as possible to figure out when and where it is coming from. If we get shot at or blown up while doing so, at least were dictating where and when.

What is the going consensus around the base regarding Bradley Manning? Are your fellow soldiers into discussing politics, watching news? What issues do you guys talk about alot? Are the majority of your soldier friend cynical or optimistic about what we are doing there?

The only military people optimistic about what we are doing are the ones who’s job it is to be optimistic. Every conversation about Iraq amongst soldiers is the same. We are wasting our lives in this shithole and I don’t care what any general on up has to say, we are accomplishing nothing. Of course you can’t say that at a soldiers memorial or funeral. But we all say the same thing. Its a fucking waste of time.

Bradley Manning is a traitor. He sold himself out to make a name for himself. Anyone in the military will tell you the same thing. No matter what the situation is, if you are in the military you take an oath and give up certain rights. It’s one of the few things soldiers can take pride in. Loyalty to your fellow man. You turn your back on your peers in the Army by leaking classified information, well good riddance and good luck. He won’t see the light of day for some time. The Universal Code of Military Justice is pretty black and white. You don’t play by the rules and you go away for a long time.

Most soldiers political conversations are very uneducated and uninteresting. Occasionally I’ll have a good argument with an officer or one of the few intelligent soldiers. You’ve gotta look hard but there are a few smart grunts out there. Perhaps you should have asked me this question before I’d spent 7 months in this shithole. Most of our conversations have been reduced to laughing at things that would make most people shutter. 8 or 9 nine months into a deployment is when the mind starts to turn to mush. Speaking for myself I don’t give a shit about much of anything other than going home. I don’t care people about dying that I don’t know and have never met. I don’t care about 80 civilians being killed by a car bomb at a funeral. I don’t care about Al Qaeda taking 30 government officials hostage and blowing themselves and their hostages up. Perhaps I should care but I think I’ve soaked up as much as I can take and really at some point you have to put up your defenses. All that matters to me is getting myself and my friends home alive. Everyone else is on there own. That is as much as I can do for myself or anyone else.

Forget Steve Jobs

I can’t stand this tech bubble blowing hagiography that has gone down since Jobs’s retirement as Apple’s CEO. Tech rag Gigaom founder Om Malik found out and cried: “It is incredibly hard for me to write right now. To me, like many of you, it is an incredibly emotional moment. I cannot look at Twitter, and through the mist in my eyes, I am having a tough time focusing on the screen of this computer.” Wired just an hour ago posted an article consisting of fawning billionaires dreamily revisiting touching Him. Come on Om, just take my hand, you can look at Twitter! So much for the illusion of journalist impartiality. Malik’s sentiment is serious though. He is one of the many who’ve gotten rich on selling the illusion of Jobs as a visionary auteur. Silicon Valley, ever the retailers of vaporware–technology that facilitates experiences we neither need nor want nor, often, come to market–needs fantasy as much as Hollywood need the illusion of celebrity to prop ups its market domination in the selling of stardust.
Jobs is an excellent example of the way a social imaginaire comes into form through corporate performance. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls social imaginaires “the way people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings, and this is often…carried in images, stories, and legends.” This notion goes back to Sahlins’s “charter myths,” B. Anderson’s “imagined communities,” and Ortner’s “serious games.” Social imaginaires are internalized and form a range of practical responses not unlike Bourdieu’s “habitus.” Anthropologists are good at recognizing the mental hardware that drive action. This may be a product of our emphasis on para-biological motivation (“culture”) as well as our methodologies. Look at the emphasis on narrative in the works of Richard Sennet and Paul Rabinow, both investigating the new economies of technology through subjective stories about work and its meaning.

Anthropologist Chris Kelty, influenced by Taylor, carried the imaginaire into the world of technology with his notion of the “moral-technical imaginaire” which is a cultural situated and persuasive moral philosophy attached to the use of both open and proprietary systems. Patrice Flichy in his book Internet Imaginaire uses the work of Paul Ricœur to show how utopian and ideological discourse are two poles of a technological imaginaire. The original euphoria of a technology is utopian, as that fades, the imaginaire is mobilized to hide or mask the ideological and dominating potential of the technological assemblage. More recently, sociologist Thomas Streeter, discusses how “romantic” imaginaires of ruggedly individual hackers, inventors, countercultural tramps, and psychedelic engineers helped to encourage the federal funding and venture capital that built the infrastructure of the internet. Finally, the most accessible of these accounts of internet imaginaires is the work of Vincent Mosco who simply refers to the myth of technological transcendence with the idea of the “digital sublime.” The transhumanist movement is ripe for such an analysis.
Continue reading →

Egypt’s Revolution & the Internets, Redux

Ramesh Srinivasan, UCLA professor, and media activist/scholar polymath, spent a few weeks in Cairo last month to test the wildly divergent theories of internet activism and revolution. He is going to be on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition tomorrow, August 10, 2011, at various times throughout the day. I asked him three questions.

Where did you go, for how long, and what did do there?

Having done work in the past exploring how technologies impact and interact with cultures and communities, I became interested (with you!) in looking at how the deregulated internet shaped citizen journalism and dissident blogging in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. I was energized and sent into something of a frenzy by the overstated binaries of Malcolm Gladwell’s beautifully written and painfully wrong New Yorker Article and the wonderful black and white Soviet world painted by Evgeny Morozov in his Net Delusion. Why would these brilliant thinkers privilege technology in their explanations over social and cultural context? So given the ‘Facebook Revolution’ of the Arab Spring and specifically in Egypt, I spent nearly one month this last June-July in and around Egypt speaking with scholars, politicians, journalists, activists, and others about how political networks form and function from the January revolution onward. I also spoke with laborers and taxi drivers about their perspectives and unsurprisingly found that they were not actively connected to networked technologies but still impacted by the ways in which these shaped journalism that they were exposed to.

I noticed you are doing NPR and Al Jazeera English. Why are you branching out of typical academic scenes?

I care, like all of us on Savage Minds, about the importance of taking our tools of critically analyzing, distilling, narrating, and in my case designing, to the public. We’re all dismayed by how mainstream media is fraught with soundbytes, lack of deliberative discourse, and lack of bridging. This pattern has replicated itself with internet activity, unfortunately, as Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out. How can we take a step together past this? To me, there’s a place for stories to be told that are critical, that deeply respect cultural context, yet also present what we see as patterns, in captivating language. My recent appearances on Al Jazeera English, and upcoming National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and Washington Post are all attempts for me to find common ground between soundbyte cultures that speak to publics and stories that are reflective and critical.

Why is technoutopianism so prevalent?

It’s interesting because almost anyone you speak to after some reflection concludes that technologies rarely cause or create anything in and of themselves. But I feel we’re still in a stage of infancy where we marvel so easily at the incredible pace of innovation around new media, and particularly can only dream when trying to comprehend what that might mean in a village without electricity, or a mass mobilization in a part of the world like the Middle East that many claim to know little of.  So it’s easy to think that technologies in and of themselves radically shape these global locations because they have worked with organizations, cultures, and institutions to shape our own. When I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory, we developed, for example, wonderful technologies for rural poverty eradication that we thought we could easily export to India, especially in the hands of Indian graduate students like myself. But we realized immediately that the tools were at best bizarre and at worst alienating to the people we met in villages when we arrived. So I believe it’s important to remember is that unevenness of access, literacy, infrastructure, and power over these networks is the other common pattern without the West and the rest of the world. That thought may complicate but it presents opportunities to develop greater insight and respect of the power of culture.

 

Google+’s Corporate Culture & Filter Bubble

Inside the walls of the Mountain View, CA. Googleplex, Google encourages the formation of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). These are little or large affinity gangs for Google employees or Googlers. ERGs include Gayglers for GLBT employees and Greyglers or older employees. There are also employee groups for pilots, new mothers, and veterans. Camille James, a Noogler, or a new employee, said ERGs help “you to find your little micro community.” The article I am citing appeared in the Los Angeles Times (July 7th, B6, Business Section), a week or two after the beta roll-out of Google+, Google’s social media platform whose distinguishing feature is the capacity to create precise “micro communities” or Circles. I perceive a connection between corporate culture, social media, and the political economy of personalization—the for-profit pursuit of an individualized internet.

Both ERGs and Circles express logics internal to Google about the agency to make tribes based on taste affinities into smaller, select groups. While this movement towards greater agency, localization, personalization, and privacy appears as a corrective to the callous notion of Zuckerbergian transparency it does represent a reiteration of the filter bubble. The filter bubble is the tendency towards echo chambers and siloing online. Because filter bubbles isolate like minds and inhibit cross-cultural contact it may have an eroding impact on democracy and the efficacy of democratic services such as journalism.

Google’s ERGs and Google+’s Circles both enshrine subjectivity. Eli Pariser, in his new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You… Continue reading →

Eco-Chic Burning Man Hipsters

That curious identity politic that mixes neo-primitive fashion, ecological coolness, spiritual openness, upper middle class ambition, multiculturalism, and conscious consumerism can be coalesced under the moniker eco-chic–an elite contradictory expression of social justice and neoliberalism. It will be explored in the conference Eco–Chic: Connecting Ethical, Sustainable and Elite Consumption, put on by the European Science Foundation in October. The conference organizers see this expressive culture accurately in its rich contradictions. Eco-chic “is both the product of and a move against globalization processes. It is a set of practices, an ideological frame and a marketing strategy.” If you’ve spent anytime in Shoreditch, Haight, Williamsburg, or Silverlake you’ve got some experience with these hip, trendy elites. Ramesh calls them “Burning Man Hipsters.” I’ve been studying new media producers in America and eco-chic describes an important cultural incarnation of these knowledge producer’s value set. As far as anthropology is concerned, meta-categories such as eco-chic, liberalism, or transhumanism that cross cultural boundaries while remaining bound by class, challenge our discipline to revisit totalizing notions such as “culture” and “tribe.”

Eco-chic, like many other socio-cultural manifestations of neoliberalism is rife with contradiction. The fundamental contradiction being that it is a social justice movement within consumer capitalism. The producers of eco-chic goods and experiences are structured by capitalism’s profit motive. Likewise consumers of eco-chic goods and experiences are motivated by ideals that try to transcend or correct the ecological or deleterious human impacts of capitalism. Thus both producer and consumer of eco-chic are caught in a contradiction between their social justice drives and their suspension in the logic of neoliberalism. Eco chic events such as Burning Man and television networks such as Al Gore’s Current TV also express the fundamental contradiction between the social and the entrepreneurial in social entrepreneurialism. How do the contradictions within eco-chic represent themselves in American West Coast’s cultural expressions such as Burning Man and Current TV? Continue reading →

Netroots, America, and Progressivism

Honestly, I did not know what a “progressive” really was until working the videocamera for Free Speech TV at the 2011 Netroots Nation conference in Minneapolis lat month. I thought a progressive was just another name for a Democrat or a liberal. I was wrong.

It is corny to admit it but what I discovered was a worldview and mode of political action that aligned with my own belief system as a person and an anthropologist. The core concept of progressivism is progress–that culture changes through time because of the actions of vision-driven groups and individuals. Now, how much agency individuals actually have to enact cultural change is a hotly debated topic in both political and academic circles but few disagree that “a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has” as it was that activist anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who said that most famous of hummus container quotes.

Progressive philosophy is aligned with the base theory of cultural anthropology, that is: culture is not a static or conservative thing that we need to stabilize at some nostalgic and unrealistic moment but rather a dynamic process. Progressives want to direct that process towards a more inclusive future. Progressives are not hung-up on retaining or reverting to an antique sense of ethnic, gendered, or national purity. They don’t romanticize some false sense of the securities of 1950s Americana. However, as I will describe below, The American Dream as a concept was a focal point for progressives at Netroots Nation this year. Continue reading →

I Got Remixed by a Palestinian Hip-Hop Activist

A while back I wrote an incendiary post Remix Culture is a Myth that got me accused of elitism and other signs of unhipness. Stepping off of a tweet by Andrew Keen (“remix is a myth. … Barely anyone is remixing…”), I claimed remix culture receives way more academic attention than it’s small examples deserved. Biella Coleman and others correctly reminded me that it isn’t its quantity or quality but its challenge to legal institutions and liberal philosophy, as well as novel modes of production within and maybe beyond capitalism that make remix important. They convinced me of these points but I am still reeling from a new experience that added another perspective to my understanding of the impact of remix culture. My footage just got remixed by a Palestinian activist. 

A little over a month ago I uploaded 24 minutes of raw footage of the Palestine/Israel Wall I shot in 2009. This is footage for a documentary I am making about divided cities. I’ve finished the sections on Nicosia, Cyprus and Belfast, North Ireland and I’ve finished shooting but not editing this story on East Jerusalem. Unedited and with its natural sounds I thought it was gritty and evocative enough to stand alone on YouTube. I uploaded it and titled it “Palestine Apartheid Wall Raw Footage.” Last week I got a YouTube message from user WHW680 who kindly informed me that he remixed my footage into the French pro-independent Palestine hip-hop video “the Wall of Zionist Racist Freedom for Palestine.” Shocked and honored I watched the video.

Artistically, WHW680 doesn’t use the shots I would; he doesn’t get the projection ratios right; I wouldn’t quite be so intense with the title; and he cuts the edits too early or too late, making the viewing experience choppy. I am being intentionally superficial here for a reason, as I am trying to express the first round of mental dissonance experienced when remixed. As a cinematographer it is an enlightening if challenging ordeal. It gets deeper, too, when your work is not only remixed in a way that challenges your technical and artistic vision but is used politically in surprising ways.

The footage was used to make a music video for the track “Palestine” by Le Ministère des Affaires Populaires, a popular Arab-French hip-hip group in Paris, off of “Les Bronzés Font du Ch’ti” described as “an album that sounds like a call to rebellion, insurrection and disobedience but also solidarity.” They tour Palestine, including Gaza. The music is fantastic, mixing breaks, good flows, meaningful lyrics, and longing violins. Obviously I can get behind the activism of a liberated Palestine but becoming a tool for propaganda, despite my agreement with it, without my vocal consent, is a creatively dissonant experience.

Political semiotic engineering for the right causes I can dig, but agency denying actions are experienced as a type of cognitive violation nonetheless. The quintessential sign of this is the final few second of the video. After the footage ends and while the music still lingers, the words “Freedom, Return, and Equality,” and “Free Palestine-Boycott Israel,” and www.bdsmovement.net circle a Palestinian flag. This final frame essentially brands this video for the BDS Movement, a civil rights organization focused on “boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights.”

This isn’t “my” footage anymore, WHW680 generously cites me in the description, but the semiotic potential of the footage previously shot by me is mobilized for the BDS Movement. The aesthetic and the political fold into each other in remix activities in which preceding agencies, my own as cameraman, is incorporated or replaced by the technical agencies of the French remixer, WHW680, and reformulated into the political vision of the pro-Palestinian BDS Movement. Which is all good, but it gives me a new look at remix culture.

This experience has forced me to eat some of my words. Remix culture isn’t a myth. I agree with my earlier detractors who stated that it isn’t about the volume of the activity nor the impact of this remixed song or that music video. I would add something more. Being remixed is personally transformative for those being reformatted by values and practices beyond their control. Not only does remix challenge jurisprudence and liberalism, and present new modes of knowledge production, it also modifies the subjective constitution of agency in artistic and political social sphere.

Information Imperialism?

By the end of the year the US State department will spend $70 million on stealth communications technologies to enable activists to communicate beyond the reach of dictators according to a recent NYT article. Prototypes include a suitcase capable of quickly blanketing a region with a free wifi network, bluetooth devices that can silently share data, software that protects the anonymity of Chinese users, independent cellphone networks in Afghanistan, and underground buried cell phones on the border of North Korea for desperate phone calls to “freedom.” These are political tools deployed to promote the agenda of one nation over that of another. How should we address information imperialism? The use of networked communications tools to subvert so-called regimes exposes a proclivity for digital intervention that likely also includes digital literacy projects to provoke revolutionary actions, propaganda campaigns to make celebrities out of bloggers, and covert code warfare. Let’s review the spectrum of information interventions to ascertain the ways and hows of information imperialism. Continue reading →

A Memorial Day Interview with a U.S. Soldier in Iraq

My oldest and best friend, who has elected to be anonymous, is 100 days away from ending his second U.S. Army tour of Iraq. To commemorate his survival and soon departure he honestly answered some questions for us about Army culture, the U.S. ‘mission’, and his contact with Iraqi culture.

Describe your two tours, what you do, and how the 2 tours have differed.

I do route clearance as a combat engineer in the army. Route clearance is just as it sounds, we are clearing the route for those who follow behind us. We are simply looking for IED’s to make sure the people behind us don’t have to deal with them. The first one year tour was a cake walk compared to this one. The first tour I was in Western Baghdad whereas now I’m in eastern Baghdad. It has nothing to do with the overall condition of Iraq, but rather the eastern Sadr City district is a bad region to be doing route clearance. We get blown up by IED’s on more than half our missions and two months into our tour we lost spc. Jose Torre to RPG fire. My unit got lucky on our first tour. We were seldom attacked and only suffered minor injuries when we were attacked. I feel we have been lucky this tour as well. Though we lost one of our most respected platoon members in Jose, there could have been more. My first tour I never dealt with incoming or rpg’s or half the shit we deal with on a weekly basis this go round. The two tours couldn’t be more starkly contrasted.

How have things changed?

Continue reading →

@_Capitalism_

I wasn’t so sure that it reflexively understood what it was doing with the whole global bio-political-cash-techno-domination thing–so it is an honor to finally hear from @capitalism_ itself on Twitter! Here @_capitalism describes its Twitterverse suchly:

“This is my house, this is where I speak my thoughts, this is where I brutalize the masses.”

In the great model of other revealers such as @MuammarLGaddafi, @OsamaInHell, and @BPGlobalPR–here is a representative sample of what @capitalism is thinking about today. Check out the transparency that can be achieve when grand narratives take it upon themselves to use the spiritual technology of the world wide web. No more investigative reporting, academic activism, or critical theory is necessary to interpret disaster capitalism. It is all right here! Zuckerberg is right, the world is becoming more transparent ‘cuz of the internets. Thanks Biz Stone and thank you @capitalism for coming clean with your intents!

_Capitalism_

Cash grabbing is an altruistic behaviors, grab that cash, put your consciousness on hold for another fifty years.  Continue reading →

Introducing Guest Blogger Eleanor King

In a series of forthcoming posts, my friend Eleanor King is going to reflect upon the tsunami in Japan and the use of social media in attempts to resist the ways in which catastrophes are taken out of time and spun according to particular political, economic, and social trajectories that in turn shape our modes for consuming images of disasters.

Please give her a Savage welcome!

This is how others describe her:

A third year graduate student in Cultural Anthropology, Eleanor came to the University of Iowa with an M. Div from Union Theological Seminary in New York.  Before landing in Iowa with her two cats, Eleanor worked a variety of non-profit jobs from facilitating social justice seminars at the Church Center for the United Nations to assisting elderly New York and displaced New Orleans jazz musicians through the Jazz Foundation of America.   Eleanor’s interests are diverse, but she continually returns to issues of ethnographic representation, technology, desire, the (gendered, racialized, sexualized) body, and new formulations of personhood and “life”. After writing her Master’s paper on voice, language ideology, and early film narration in Japan, Eleanor continues to explore the effects of new technological forms in Japan.  For her dissertation research she will be looking into the relationships, subjectivities and affects created between humans and machines, and the ethical implications of such encounters.

Critical Pessimism & Media Reform Movements

The American satellite television network Free Speech TV asked me to write up a blurb for their monthly newsletter about my participatory/observatory trip with them to the National Conference on Media Reform in Boston. This is my attempt at what Henry Jenkins calls “critical pessimism”–an “exaggeration” that “frighten readers into taking action” to stop media consolidation, exclusion, and the absence of televisual diversity.

Free Speech TV at the National Conference on Media Reform

From its inception in 1995, Free Speech TV’s goal has been to infiltrate and subvert the vapid, shrill and corporately controlled American television newscape with challenging and unheard voices. Fast forward to 2011, and in the age of viral videos, social media and ubiquitous computing, the same issues persist.

An excellent young pro-freedom-of-speech organization, Free Press, called all media activists to Boston for the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), April 8-10, to celebrate independent media and incubate strategies to fight the tide of corporate personhood, monopolization in communication industries, and the denial of access to the public airwaves.

These are issues FSTV has long fought, first with VHS tapes of radical documentaries shipped to community access stations throughout the nation, then through satellite carriage in 30 million homes, and now via live internet video and direct dialogues with the audience through social media.

FSTV was at NCMR in full force, covering live panels on everything from the role of social media in North African revolutions to media’s sexualization of women; developing strategic relationships with print, radio, internet and television collaborators; interviewing luminaries like FCC Commissioner Copps; and inspiring the delegates by opening up the otherwise closed and corporatized satellite television world to the voices of media activists fighting for access and diversity during a frankly terrifying period in American media freedom.

One question haunted the many stages, daises and dialogues at the NCMR: Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet – by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized – becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?

For example, while we were in the conference, the House voted to block the FCC from protecting our right to access an open Internet. The mergers of Comcast and NBC-Universal and AT&T/T-Mobile loomed behind every passionate oration. And yet FSTV was there to document when FCC Commissioner Copps took the stage stating he would resist the denial of network neutrality and such monopolizing mergers.

Internationally, examples of the power and problems of the internet exist. The Egypt-based Facebook group “We are all Khaled Said” had 80,000 members, many who amassed at Tahrir Square on January 26, instigating a wave of democratization that began in Tunisia – also fueled by social media – and hopefully continuing to Libya. Two days later, however, the Mubarak regime was able effectively to hit a “kill switch” on the internet and target activists using Facebook for arrest, an activity that worked against the desires of the repressive regime. At the NCMR, Democracy Now! reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous said,  “Facebook was down … so they hit the streets. It had the reverse desire and effect that the government wanted to happen.”

In 2010, Reporters Without Borders compiled a list of 13 internet enemies – countries that suppress free speech online. The U.S. wasn’t on the list, but U.S. companies Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and Apple were pressured to cut digital and financial support for whistleblowing WikiLeaks. The point is obvious: A vigilant press aided by an open, uncensored and unprivatized internet are necessary yet threatened and are the focus of FSTV’s coverage at NCMR.

FSTV embodies that ancient movement of ordinary people taking back power from entrenched elites. Today, every issue, from class inequality to ecological justice – is a media issue. However, our media sources, from journalists to internet and television delivery systems, are being co-opted by monopolizing corporations and lobbyists. As an independent, open and interactive television network, FSTV is an antidote to the problems facing free speech and democracy as more media power is centralized in fewer hands. Thankfully, as we found out in Boston, FSTV is not alone in this dangerous and difficult operation of media liberation.

Jenkins hyperbolically describes “critical pessimists” as people who “opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses”. This is a false exaggeration of a movement that is providing a necessary check on corporate power and mindfully working for greater civic, community, and citizen involvement in media production.

Participation, Collaboration, and Mergers

I work at UCLA’s Part.Public.Part.Lab where we investigate new modes of co-production and participation facilitated by networked technologies. Internet-enabled citizen journalism such as Current TV, public science like PatientsLikeMe, and free and open software development like Wikipedia are key foci. In the lab I investigate the vitality or closure of a moment of freedom and openness within cable television, news production, and internet video when the amateur and the alternative disrupted the professional and the mainstream. What are the promises and perils of social justice video in the age of internet/television convergence? Will internet video become as inaccessible, vapid, and homogenous as cable television? In our recent paper, Birds of the Internet: Towards a field guide to the organization and governance of participation, we draft a guide to identify two species flourishing in the internet ecology: what we call “formal social enterprises,” which include firms and non-profits, as well as the “organized publics” the enterprises foster or from which they emerge. These two types share a vertical or inverted relationship, power comes down from visionary CEOs and charismatic NGO directors to provoke rabid social media production, or a viable movement foments amongst grassroots makers that percolates upwards towards the formation of semi-elitist institutions. In light of this research and with a discreet fieldwork experience to think through I would like to clarify and address three types of social interaction: participation, collaboration, and mergers. Continue reading →

Dead Wrong Scholars or Future Collaborators?

We’ve all been there. You’ve read a book or article closely aligned to your own research. In your opinion your peer has made one or two mistakes, one factual, malum in se, or dead wrong, and another, malum prohibitum, or theoretically suspect. What to do?

You’ve got several options, 1) write a book review, tearing apart the author for poor research, 2) kindly fold in a gentle critique into your future writing, or 3) contact the author with the goal of establishing a collaboration. Scholars deal with appearances of theoretical mistakes, oversights and overstatements, or malum prohibitum, all the time. It is our engagement with what we perceive as disciplinarily not accurate in generative and creative ways that builds theory and nudges the future of the discipline. This is theory building and this is what we do.

But what is our professional responsibility to malum in se, claims that are factually wrong? Continue reading →