Beautiful Burlington Vermont

My sincere apologies for lagging on the blogging. It's been a crazy summer, but it's a good crazy if that explains things at all. I've been traveling quite a bit lately, for work and for pleasure, and it's high time I shared where I've been.

It all kicked off with a four-day visit to Burlington, Vermont, nestled on the edges of Lake Champlain. I was attending a summer institute on alumni relations held at the University of Vermont. I learned so much from my American neighbours and I made some great friends!

 Dorm living

We spent our first night at Echo Aquarium getting to know one another, share our work stories and enjoy gorgeous sunsets. 

The next two nights found us enjoying downtown Burlington's gorgeous architecture, the lively scene on Church Street, excellent shopping, amazing boutiques and delicious restaurants. We even stopped for a little bit of what makes Burlington famous - Ben & Jerry's!

 These frat houses are just gorgeous!

Church Street at night is magical!

Our final evening in Burlington was spent cruising Lake Champlain on The Spirit of the Ethan Allen III. It was a low-key, celebratory evening of taking pictures, swapping business cards, talking about work, lots of dancing and thanking the faculty members for all they shared with us. I made great friends, I saw a new part of the world, I relaxed, I learned and I had fun. I can't wait to get back to Burlington and the rest of Vermont very soon!

Independent media and citizen journalism

The Independent Media Centre (IMC) is not a new concept - empowering citizens to share their own news, as they see it, in real time. The IMC has gained attention and fostered partnerships around the world  based on their coverage of the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings and citizen protests.

In her article The Independent Media Centre: A new model, Dorothy Kidd examines the circumstances around the birth of IMC, the ongoing events that IMC has been involved with and the components (technological and human) that keep the organization running and thriving.

Kidd acknowledges in the article that the IMC was not the first independent media network to stand up in the face of big corporations or to support neo-liberalism. What makes IMC unique is the breadth of their reach, the diversity of the volunteers that participate, the countries and organizations that are involved and the open source technology that is used.

The central premise of Kidd's article and the modus operandi of the IMC is for the public to not just fight the media - become the media. The hope behind this comment is that maybe citizen journalists can interrupt and change the patterns and behaviours between producers of media and the audiences who consume it.

Unfortunately when you take on big corporate on a global stage, it also opens you up to criticism and hostility from exactly those people. Big corporate and governments have interests to protect and their own security measures that have been employed in attempts to scare and/or shut IMC down.

Being a provider of open access and openly sourced media for people has it's pitfalls - the IMC has had their system hacked and had it populated with hate messages. As such the IMC has had to begun to monitor their networks to reduce the number of trolls. Monitoring networks has met with resistance from within the movement because they don't like gate-keeping tactics being used.

So the two questions I leave everyone with from this brief lesson on the Independent Media Centre are these:

1. This article was written in 2003. How would you see the advancements in today's technology helping or hindering the IMC cause?
2. Kidd mentions the resistance to network monitoring and gate-keeping of information within the IMC. Do you see the IMC being editors or librarians of the information they share with their networks?

Globally networked movements

Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous, the Vancouver riots of 2011, the on-going student protests over tuition hikes in Quebec. What do these all have in common? For one these are movements spanning across Canada and around the world. Secondly they document specific events that have defined who and what they are, drawing attention worldwide.

In Jeffrey Juris' article Networked Social Movements: Global Movements for Global Justice, he references Manuel Castells, a well-known researcher of networks of power. According to Castells, the information age has helped cultivate groups of communal resistance "that have arisen in opposition to economic globalization, capitalist restructuring, and the disruption caused by global financial and cultural flows...Beyond creating alternative cultural codes, however, activists are generating new networking forms and practices that allow for the production of global webs of resistance, while providing diverse models for building an alternative, more directly democratic and globally networked society" (p. 345). 

I can't help but think about Castells' thoughts and how it applies to some of our most recent networked movements. Occupy and Anonymous have really been reaching out to audiences through social media to draw attention to their situation and motivate the masses in support.

The Vancouver riots captured delinquency as it happened, and eventually the photos and videos posted to online accounts like Twitter and Facebook were used to incriminate and charge those who had committed the crimes. Even at the moment there are ongoing blog posts, tweets and media stories being filed about the tuition hike protests in Quebec.

These movements are loose and uncoordinated, lacking true leaders. According to Castells all militant actions and protests are forms of symbolic communication (p. 346). I know I personally have come down pretty hard on the different movements and specific events, mostly because I was viewing them through my personal lens. What Juris, Cleaver, Kadushin and Castells have done is make me appreciate the different contexts that these movements have grown and thrived from.