What is revealing about this revolution is the way in which citizens discovered it, how they informed one another, and how they mobilized around it. They used their mobile phones, now ubiquitous in North Africa, to communicate via text messaging and Twitter. For many Tunisians, their phones are their Internet. Theirs is a story about the democratization of media, a social revolution that wields the power to change lives as well as governments
Earlier this month a New York University student went “undercover” into her own journalism classroom to report on the class for Mediashift, a blog published by the US public television network PBS. She didn’t tell the professor or fellow students what she was up to, or ask their permission. In her report, student Alana Taylor […]
Jay Rosen has posted his cogent take on “semi-pro journalism” on TechPresident. Provocative metaphor about the news tribe and its survival drama. Dale PeskinDale is co-founder emeritus of We Media. www.wemedia.com
At this week’s Personal Democracy Forum, a sponsor distributed a low-tech, but highly effective stress toy to attendees willing to listen to their pitch: a rubber ball on an elastic string that connects to a velcro band. Strap the band to your finger and you can play catch with yourself. Which is what I came […]
Here’s a chance for members of the We Media Community to get involved in something new, practical and ambitious. Bread for the City, a food bank, health clinic and social services provider for the poor in Washington, DC, wants to use the tools of media creation and distribution to help its clients and community members […]
We’re about to start this panel, located on a floor accessible only by two elevators, so people are coming in in batches of 8. The topic: “Who can you trust in the We Media landscape? Where’s the line between commerce and information? No more is it a question of parsing the biases of individual media […]
For the second year in a row we’ve documented a devastating lack of satisfaction with journalism in American – and an opportunity to do something about it. Here’s the formal press release of the new research, which we discussed in the opening session of this year’s We Media Miami Forum and Festival. The good news: […]
For class, I had my students watch the wonderful documentary, Revolution OS. It features a cast of characters that could people a graphic novel — Richard Stallman the GNUman, Gandolf to Linus Torvalds’ Aragorn. Eric Raymond, a sort of Bilbo Baggins, moving between the Cathedral and Bazaar, Bruce Perens, appearing as an Elrond figure–anyway, the […]
The social web depends on content, tagging and utility created or improved by the good will of the people formerly known as the audience. Where does good will end and greed take over? That depends on whether you’re a giver or taker. Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media is bothered by the free […]