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?

Slave Lake: One year later

Tomorrow the community of Slave Lake marks a sombre anniversary. It was one year ago that a wildfire rolled through their community, destroying most of the buildings and infrastructure and forcing many families scrambling for cover.

I remember a year ago sitting at my computer writing a paper for COMM 503 and watching with horror as my Twitter feed filled with photos and panicked pleas from shelters and organizations as they mobilized to help the displaced population.

I blogged about Slave Lake last year, the tragedy and horror that I witnessed the night of the fires. But in the days following the fire, I remember classmate Dianne tweeting locations where others could drop off clothing and personal hygiene items. I remember my co-blogger Felicia mobilizing her social network on Twitter and Facebook, collecting enough items to fit in a shipping container to be sent to the families in Slave Lake.

Out of so much heartbreak and tragedy I saw people come together, whether they knew each other or not to help others who needed it. That is really the power of a social network to me.

Crowdsourcing my abstract - feedback please!

Well bloggy followers I need your help. Below is my abstract for our research poster presentations next week. Deadline to have this in is 9 a.m. Sunday morning. It is now 11:16 Saturday night. Nothing like leaving it until the last second. I'd love your feedback please and thanks!

Making connections: An evaluative study of the role of social media in alumni engagement

or

Using Linkedin as a tool to foster alumni engagement, affinity and participation within a higher educational institution

Andrea Lauder

The School of Public Health (SPH) at the University of Alberta was formed in 2006 bringing together the Alberta Centre for Injury Control Research (ACICR), the Centre for Health Promotion Studies (CHPS) and the Department of Public Health Sciences (PHS) under the umbrella of one faculty. Alumni from the centres and department have expressed feelings of disconnection from SPH. As such, in the past two years SPH has dedicated resources to help build affinity, strengthen relationships and foster engagement, communicating that all alumni are part of the SPH family.

Literature indicates that certain social media platforms can help facilitate communications and engagement with those tied to higher education institutions. The purpose of this evaluation study is to examine alumni engagement through social media, focusing on the professional platform Linkedin. Applying Rogers theory of diffusion of innovation, this study will incorporate a census survey sample and semi-structured interviews to evaluate if the social media that SPH is using is engaging alumni in a satisfactory way.

Findings from this study will provide insight into the views of alumni and create the basis for further research in how they engage and communicate with their alma mater using today’s technology.

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.

Birds of a feather don't always flock together

This post is dedicated to @leahmcyyc, a rebuttal of her post What is your innovative threshold? (you know I couldn't resist answering back).

Leah makes a great case for Rogers' diffusion of innovation theory, referencing a bit of Kadushin, to explain how she got onto the Facebook bandwagon early into the adoption process. She also references the "tipping point" when Facebook exploded in front of everyone's eyes and her "snobby friends" finally joined the worlds largest social network.

Ok, here's my soapbox moment. I'm not on Facebook. Never have been, and if I have my way, never will be. Why? Well at first it was a principle thing for me - I watched my PR classmates jump on the bandwagon, trying their hardest to see who could collect more friends than the other. Ugh, popularity contest? Count me out please.

Then I started thinking of how I stay connected with people socially and it solidified my rationale to not be involved with Facebook. My good friends (high school, both undergrad degrees, throughout my travels, etc.) I still keep in touch with through other means. Most of them I still have a mailing address, email address and/or telephone numbers for and I'd prefer to pick up a phone and call them or write them a letter any day. I'm pretty good at staying in touch so I DO actually call and write.

I was talking about this with @hburridge yesterday and I explained that I've chosen different social technologies to increase and maintain my networks. It's helped me personally and professionally, connecting me with friends present and past. I was not an early adopter to Twitter (I joined in 2009), but within my group of good friends I was the first on the scene, and they are just finally joining me now. I look forward to networking with them in this space, and they've told me that if I've held out this long from joining Facebook, to stay off...that it's a dying network.

Not being on Facebook doesn't make me a snob (at least I hope that's not what I portray), it just means I've found different, equally robust ways to stay in touch with those that I mean to.

Image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48110918@N06/

Exercising influence in social networks

I will readily admit that I'm an early adopter with a lot of social media and technology and because of that, my social networks have grown exponentially. For example when I first moved to Edmonton, I knew only a handful of people that I used to be friends with in high school and during my first undergrad. I was fresh to the city and really keen to get involved in my community ~ Twitter offered the best platform for me to network with the movers and shakers of Edmonton and get my name and face out there.

Fast forward two years ~ I had already been operating personally on Twitter and LinkedIn and I started to see opportunities where my workplace could be connecting with community partners through social media, helping to build our online presence.

It took a bit of time, and use of anecdotal evidence, but eventually I was given the green light to research and create social media profiles for work. As Kadushin discusses in Chapter 9 of the text, through diffusion of innovation, as an early adopter in our organization I had credibility to create and then influence others to join social media.

Kadushin calls this the "Two-Step Flow" of communications - how media influences influencers who in turn adopt the technology and in turn become influencers on others (p. 140). Influencers model desired behaviours with the hope that through their enthusiasm they can hook others into joining.

Kadushin also talks about how potential adopters of innovation and technology tend to imitate the previous adopters within social networks ( p. 138). He mentions how later on, adopters tend to jump on the "bandwagon" with their interest. Early adopters on the other hand, get into the social space early and evaluate how the technology fills their needs as they go.

I am now happy to say that after setting up our social media accounts, I'm now conversing and connecting with our researchers, staff, students and alumni. I am also fortunate to have a supportive dean who is keen to learn about social media and how she can model behaviour so others in the organization follow.

Strong and weak ties and the Alberta election

In round two of our networked collaboration lectures perspectives from Clay Shirky and Keith Hampton shed further light into the grassroots of networked groups and in particular, the Hampton article looks at how social networks motivate people through the democratic process.


The concept of bonding and bridging is introduced by Hampton to help readers understand where the strong and weak ties lay within social network relationships. It is that relationships of strong and weak ties where Hampton believes people feel safe to discuss such hot button things like politics (sound familiar ~ safety in social networks....Kadushin).

Hampton writes that, "citizens and society benefit from individual and collective action to address issues of public concern through activities outside of elections and government" (p. 4). He goes on to discuss that the collectives that are motivated along political lines demonstrate homophilous tendencies and if there is any dissention it comes from the periphery or those with weak ties.

This article was an 'a-ha' moment for me as I further saw concepts that we've covered in Phelan, Kadushin, Shirky and Benkler solidified in this simple paper. And on the heels of the Alberta election I could see the case study that unfolded on my Twitter feed for 23 days before we headed to the polls.

When the writ was dropped immediately the voices of some of my stronger Twitter ties were the loudest - and I expected them to be quick out of the gates, throwing their support behind a candidate. Thanks to the many ways that we are networked, as Hampton iterates, "these new technologies have the potential to fundamentally change the nature of social interaction and democratic engagement" (p. 8). 

After about two weeks of constant, in-your-face campaigning on behalf of political candidates, suddenly my strong Twitter ties grew silent as each of their candidates navigated PR minefields. As election day drew closer and the panic of a potential Wildrose Party government loomed it was the weaker of my Twitter ties that began to chime in ~ those who are traditionally not comfortable talking about their political choices in a public forum. I remember being fascinated by the action leading up to April 23 as panic settled in and Alberta residents felt threatened. 

Much like the Calgary mayoral campaign this past provincial election really motivated the netizens to become involved and cast their vote. Surprisingly though, voter turnout did not hit an all-time high. Just imagine the ways people can be engaged and inspired by the time the next election rolls around?

Image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/royography/