Save the Frogs!

Picture this, a large garden shed in the backyard, the ground was damp, it had been raining and it was about to start again.  Two young girls snuck out from under their mother’s watchful eye, behind the shed where they knew the fence was lined with baby ‘frogs’.  The girls were on a mission! The frogs must be saved! They can’t be left out in the rain to catch cold! No! So handful by handful they were relocated to indoor pot plants, the mail box, their father’s work boots…

Needless to say the young girls were my sister and I and the ‘frogs’ were really toads.  Dad placed his foot into his work boots only to be met with the squelchy bodies of baby toads and we were in immense trouble.  Let’s just say it didn’t do much for his fear of frogs.      

(Ridge Haven 2010)
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That had been one of my first forms of eco-activism, followed by a recycling crusade, water saving campaign (thanks Sesame Street) and a need to save trees at my local primary school.  I am thankful that back then I didn’t have access to the means of communication that now enables digital activism.  Digital activism uses digital technology as a platform (think blogs and social media websites) to increase the effectiveness of a social or political change campaign (Sivitanides & Shah 2011).  Many years later I’m not the Green Peace activist that I originally envisioned in fact I lead a remarkably uncontroversial life. 

Looking at my broader engagement of digital activism a few years ago I joined the Facebook group ‘1,000,000 people in search for Daniel Morcombe’.  In December 2003, Daniel Morcombe was abducted from a bus shelter near the Sunshine Coast.  I joined that group to raise awareness, hoping that more and more people would join through exposure to my Facebook profile and that Daniel would eventually be found.  His family used both traditional media outlets (television, radio and print) as well as digital media (websites and social networks) as a platform to reach people encouraging people to put forth information whilst also highlighting the issue of children safety.

Digital activism can occur in different forms other than social media.  Culture jammers may feel they need to highlight particular issues often using detournment.  Culture jammers resist cultural hegemony by means of guerrilla communication strategies where they’ll reuse a well-known text creating a new text that carries a message contrary to the message the producer intended (Bainbridge, Goc & Tynan 2011, p.192).  An example of this is the use of the Harry Potter series texts through fan-fictions sites where fans can create stories based on the original Harry Potter novels where they explore the relationships between characters, create new adventures, etc.   I’ve read fans’ stories where they explore the homosexual relationship between the character Dumbledore and Grindelwald. 

Cultural critic, Mark Dery (2010) views cultural jammers as ‘part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics’.   Dery describes what culture jammers do to texts as ‘media sabotage’.

One would think that well-known books such as Harry Potter would be covered by stringent copyright laws.  However, these culture jammers are able to use Rowling’s story altering her intended message.  Dery (2010) states ‘jammers offer irrefutable evidence that the right has no copyright of war waged with incantations and simulations’.  Media sabotage indeed.

I honestly don’t think that the authors of these fan-fictions mean to detract from Rowling’s original story but more so that by writing these altered versions of Harry Potter they are representing issues they’re passionate about; their own form of digital activism. 

However, there are some culture jammers that participate in ‘Anti-branding’ a type of consumer activism that’s seen as a counter attack against capitalism, there has been a growing resistance towards certain brands and globalisation (Sivitanides & Shah 2011, p.5).  Such as Greenpeace pressuring Levi jeans through social network campaigns using Levi’s logos on signs and altering Levi’s advertisements to create a new message.

I think social media will continue to be a strong contributor to activism in the future.  Social media is a free and is an easy way of reaching the masses and is becoming more and more accessible with the growing number of mobile devices that can access social media at any time of the day or night.  Essentially it’s like we’re carrying these activists’ messages in our pockets.

References

Bainbridge, J, Goc, N & Tynan, L 2011, Media and Journalism. 2. Oxford University Press Australia Higher Education, VitalSource Bookshelf, viewed 15 December 2012.

Dery, M 2010, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs, Shovelware, October 8, viewed 15 December 2012 http://markdery.com/?page_id=154

Sivitanides, M & Shah, V 2011, The Era of Digital Activism, CONISAR Proceedings, viewed 15 December 2012 http://proc.conisar.org/2011/pdf/1842.pdf

Bracale, R 2008, (c)20090614 [image], Ridge Haven, viewed 16 December 2012 http://www.ourridgehaven.com/A_Menu_Photos_RH03.htm

 

Colvin, M 2012, Morcombe laid to rest 9 years on, ABC News, viewed 16 December 2012 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-07/morecombe-laid-to-rest-9-years-on/4415806

Mugglenet 1999, viewed 16 December 2012 http://www.mugglenet.com/

 

 

Twitter: What is it good for! Absolutely Nothing?

Twitter is :

 A short burst of inconsequential information.

OR

Chirps from birds.

(Cross 2011, p. 58)

This is exactly what Twitter is, short status updates made up of 140 characters or less.  Twitter has evolved using other technologies such as the first mobile phones that could use up to 160 characters in a text and other social networks such as Facebook and Myspace.
 
Though is it all inconsequential information?

 Well most of it is, such as the aesthetically pleasing photos of your breakfast.  However, Twitter is also being used for political, social and cultural reasons.   An example of political usage is during President Obama’s election campaign he used Twitter as a platform to connect with potential voters.  It gave him a distinct advantage and was a first for politics.

Past reports have also linked people to using Twitter in a crisis.  In November 2008, 10 terrorists took over 2 hotels in Mumbai.  The television feeds were shut down as the terrorist were using it for their own purposes and so the victims in the hotel tweeted for help.  They were able to provide up-to-the-minute updates on the situation as it unfolded (Cross 2011, p. 58).  Twitter has also been used in other times of crisis; the earthquakes in both Haiti and Japan and the Victorian bushfires. 

The situation with Japan is actually quite close to my heart my host sister, Nami lived in one of the affected areas. Through social networking she let us know that she was OK.
 

When using Twitter you’re not constrained to a computer, it’s portable as long as you have a smart phone device hence why Nami could tell me she was OK.  On a global scale Twitter is available in 6 languages; English, French, Japanese, German, Italian and Spanish and is available in 26 countries for mobile device users.  This can lead to the exclusion of some audiences such as people that don’t own mobile devices (older generations).

Some countries would rather social media sites did not exist.  The Iranian government attempted to cut off sites such as Facebook and Twitter to stop the flow of information in and out of the country to stop activists from communicating in regards to their protests.  Henry Jenkins, media scholar and theorist says that we’re living in a world of participatory culture ‘where we take media into our own hands, where we have the capacity to produce media, to share media’ (DMLResearchHub 2011).

So whilst we’re practicing using media i.e. posting photos of our breakfast, some of us go onto tackling major issues such as sharing protest information. And so where there is a will there is a way… Activists used proxy servers to get past this and used sites such as Twitter to communicate in real time to ex-patriots in America and other Western Nations (Acohido 2009). 

However, Twitter is primarily used socially and you can connect with friends at any time of the day.  As opposed to a text message Twitter’s major drawcard is that it is free.  I can’t say that I’m a regular user of Twitter but one of the main reasons I have a Twitter account is that I can ‘follow’ celebrities. 

One of my favourite celebrities is Xfactor judge, Demi Lovato.  Lovato has built a strong following of fans which she has affectionately dubbed ‘Lovatics’.  Demi tweets well throughout the day but she also ‘retweets’.  Just recently the Xfactor judge asked her ‘Lovatics’ to vote the contestant she was mentoring and ‘retweeted’ her followers messages, acknowledging them and making them feel special.      

So what next for Twitter? 

Will it be around forever? Or will it drop off the face of the Earth? Like Myspace did. 

There isn’t anything conclusive to say what the future has in store for Twitter and the organisation of Twitter certainly holds its cards close to their chest.  Though with the increase of people aligning together, in what theorist, Howard Rheingold calls virtual communities (people linked by their participation in computer networks) (ScottLondon, n.d.).   Twitter seems to be growing faster than ever.  So we’ll see.

Reference List

Cross, M 2007, Bloggerati, Twitterarti: How Blogs and Twitter are Transforming Popular Culture, Greenwood Publishing /group, EBL Ebook Library, viewed 7 December 2012.

Acohido, B, 2009, Iranian activists use Twitter, proxy servers to deliver news from the streets, The Last Watchdog, viewed 7 December 2012, http://lastwatchdog.com/iranian-activists-twitter-proxy-servers-deliver-news/

DMLResearchHub 2011, Media Scholar Henry Jenkins on Participatory Culture and Civic Engagement, 4 August, viewed 8 December 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZ4ph3dSmY

ScottLondon n.d., Book Review: The Virtual Community, n.d. viewed 8 December 2012, http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/rheingold.html

Talk To The Phone, I'm Not Home!

 

“Back in my day (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) we didn’t text people we used to just show up to their place or we’d use the land line”
(everyone over forty)

I’ve heard this dozens of times from parents, grandparents and elder co-workers.  They would then proceed to tell me about what the land line looked like with its spin dialer.   As I was born in ‘90s I do not remember a time without mobile devices (I also cringe when I hear the words “back in my day…”) though as I’ve grown up mobile devices have advanced in technology and become more prevalent in everyday life.  Before the smart phone was the humble flip phone with its push buttons as opposed to touch screens and applications.  Though I do miss a good game of ‘snake’, mobile devices have advanced combining other technologies such as the digital camera, the mp3 player and the internet.   The smart phone is seen as a revolutionary device though it has evolved from other technologies (Haddon, L & Green, N 2009). 

My phone saves me time I can send and receive emails for work and texts are quicker than calling.  I can connect with my friends at any hour of the day with social networking applications such as facebook and instagram.  My phone often takes better quality photos than a digital camera and I can directly post them to social networking sites. 

In many ways my phone is also my security blanket.  When I’m on a night out and I’m walking back to my car I feel safer with my phone being there.  I’ll admit that when I go to a friend’s place I’ll text them to let me in.  I’ll call if they don’t answer but my last resort is actually knocking!  To be honest knocking actually makes me feel apprehensive.   

I personally have an android smart phone that I have a love/hate relationship with.  I have identified a pattern that whenever I’m lonely or bored that I send a text or I connect to social networking sites  and though I’m communicating with people it often makes me feel more alone than when I started.  I was very interested listening to psychologist, Sherry Turkle’s TED talk ‘Connected, but alone’ and I identified strongly with a few of the points she made.  Turkle (2012) mentions ‘we’re alone but we’re afraid of intimacy’.  Does this explain my apprehension with the front door?  That knocking and greeting someone face to face is too intimate? 

Turkle (2012) goes on to say that ‘being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved’. We connect with our devices when we’re lonely as we don’t how to deal with solitude.  In the past I have made concerted efforts to be ‘in the moment’ with friends having dinner, at board game nights, at parties only to be met with their mobile device beeping away with every text, facebook comment, etc .  It’s disconcerting that they are physically in your presence but really they’re consumed in their virtual world.  Our use of these devices is distancing ourselves from others and is actually making us more alone. 

So I’m putting a little challenge out there for both myself and everyone else to live ‘in the moment’, gain a little bit of independence and reduce the usage of mobile devices…well at least whilst we’re at dinner.    

 

References

'DIY Dinosaur iPhone Dock Roarr...'[image], Craziest Gadgets, viewed 1 December 2012 http://www.google.com.au/imgres?hl=en&tbo=d&biw=1920&bih=911&tbm=isch&tbnid=J19V0f2A4o9sgM:&imgrefurl=http://craziestgadgets.com/2010/01/27/nes-controller-dress/&docid=L7Q3_mM1zAW2eM&imgurl=http://craziestgadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/diy-dino-iphone-dock.jpg&w=490&h=422&ei=_pO5UKWCJ5GviQei4YGABA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=2&vpy=116&dur=1883&hovh=208&hovw=242&tx=59&ty=102&sig=111375401927617921527&page=1&tbnh=135&tbnw=153&start=0&ndsp=54&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:81

Haddon, L. and Green, N. 2009, Mobile Communications: an introduction to new media, EBL Ebook Library, Berg, viewed 30 November 2012.

Turkle, S 2012, Connected, but alone? TED Conversations, viewed 26 November 2012, http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html.