7 posts tagged “media”
just found out 2months later from kenyatta cheese that this is the best recap of the obama inauguration experience as told by Baratunde through his twitter and flickr stream. Baratunde is funny. I like him.
Jessica forwarded me a great blog, THE GAZA STRIP, that links to articles, commentary and videos about the Israeli-Palestine conflict that is taking place in the Gaza strip. We aren't hearing about any of this here in the US. Please take a chance to read through some of the articles - see which ones you agree with, disagree with - which ones are educational or badly researched. I like this blog because it does a job at linking to writers who take a more objective point of view.
My friend Nada Mattah is from Haifa and is a Phd student at NYU, and she is telling me that the Gaza has not been so harshly attacked since 1967. She is living in the US researching with Jeff Goodwin of NYU, and coding the number of combatants and civilains killed since 2000. "The Israeli policy of attacking civilians is consistant through out the years in violation of international humna rights laws," says Ms. Mattah. The Israeli army is currently launching a full on war against a civilian population that has already been starved of resources for two years. They are continuing the ethnic cleansing that they started in 1948.
As I watch this disaster unfold, I keep comparing how the news frames the San Diego 2007 Firestorm in contrast to how they framed New Orlean's Hurrican Katrina. Race and class are at the heart of the comparisons. So much of this sounds different when you are talking about SD's primarily Caucasian middle-upper class communities being affected by the fire - whereas in new Orleans it was primarily poor black people stranded in the hurricane.
we can see many differences just by comparing how the media and government talks about the evacuees who stayed behind despite a mandatory evacuation. In New Orleans, helicopters didn't rescue all the black people on their roofs, supposedly because they were hearing "gun shots." I remember the reaction from the news and online community was that those who didn't listen to the mandatory evacuation were complete "idiots" or people trying to defy the law- essentially those stupid poor blacks folks. In San Diego - firefighters can't focus their resources on fighting the fires because of the winds and because they are also busy doing emergency rescues on people who didnt' listen to the mandatory evacuation. HOWEVER - the news frames these people in a more sympathetic light - by saying well you can understand why these people are so attached to their beautiful homes they own because of all the hard work they've put into it and even though they should have listened we understand the pain they are - essentially we are sympathetic to middle-upper class folks for staying behind in the face of a fire if they are protecting their houses. White people again are reinforced as HARD-WORKING and PERSISTENT even when they FAIL to evacuate while blacks are framed as LAZY and UNOBEDIENT for not evacuating.
Remember how the media
said black folks were raping, murdering and eating each other in the
New Orleans Superdome? Now the media in San Diego frames the 10,000
primarily white middle-upper class folks from North County in the
Qualcom Stadium as peacefully sharing oral stories about their homes
and eating home-baked brownies dropped off by sympathetic volunteers, and getting massages by compassionate massage therapist volunteers!!!! And please notice the headline of the article by ABC about those who are giving massages, "CIVILITY REIGNS IN SAN DIEGO," as if the opposite - UNCIVILITY - reigns in other places. CIVILITY refers so much to those who are CIVILIZED and separates the civilized from the uncivilized. This implies that the situation in Qualcomm stadium is totally different from the situation in other uncivilized evacuee areas - like the Superdome, where the black evacuees were supposedly unpolite, violent, sweaty, dirty and smelly - and where the Black Evacuees were called REFUGEES. So at least San Diego has learned so much from Katrina - they are taking the names of people who enter the stadium, and they are not referring to them non-US citizens. We have no white refugees in San Diego- truly they are first-class civilized citizens! 
I have to admit that I am so upset right now that I am having a hard time finishing a deconstruction of this headline and the images - so if anyone wants to write more about this please do - and I will link to you.
I know the situations (Katrina and Southern California Wildfires) are completely different and do not stand for a sound comparison, but a comparison in media representation is worthwhile and reveals how the class and race of community matter. . For a reminder at how much race and class does matter in media discourse- here's a photo where I examined from the Hurrican Katrina and how the news framed a black man wading in water as "looting" while they framed a white man wading in water as "finding" floating goods. Btw- Many New Orleans evacuees are STILL homeless and not doing ok 2 years after the disaster. For those in Malibu and San Diego who had their mansions burn down - I wonder what will happen?
I am so mad that the city I live in is filled with so much sweet words of prejudice. Not that this doesn't happen everyday everywhere - but it's just really intense when your city is burning down and there is so much racial and class politics in the media. As Raquel has written - the whole South side of San Diego county is burning down, but it the press coverage is scant compared to North County of San Diego - where all the super-rich super-luxury mansions are loacted. It's where people, like this person, go to escape their 2nd home or to their friend's hotel or book a room at the Aviara for $350 a night with sculpted flamingos and golf courses.
(South County is more middle-low income, racially and ethnically mixed and 10-5 miles from Mexico.)
You can read my other thoughts about the National news coverage of SD fires here, distortion of wildfires here, emphasis of LA over SD here, and what a Sociologist would do during a fire here.
UPDATE: NPR just did a piece on how bloggers are either comparing or arguing against a comparison of Katrina vs.Southern Ca. Wildfires. They link to many other excellent blog posts that do some great comparisons.
this photo was taken by ABC News and was part of this story and part of The Stencil.
Congrats Josh for completing the Odeo (Sonic Mountain) Acquisition of FireAnt and for going on board to be their VP of Product Development! Jen I am sooo happy you came in at the right time!
Josh writes: When we first launched “ANTs Not TV” at Vloggercon in January 2005, there were about 20 active videobloggers – we knew each of them personally and worked with most of them to create those magical RSS feeds with enclosures. It was amazing to see all these video channels updating over time and to watch them in a unified experience. There was nothing else like it. It was clear that something powerful was happening. It was a new kind of television, and yet it was not like TV at all – it was open to anyone and the possibilities seemed endless...
While FireAnt had its share of struggles along the way as a start up, I’m encouraged that the ideas we helped pioneer have grown incredibly stronger over the past few years. This “Not TV” (now more often called “Internet TV”) is really changing the media culture, and it’s having profound social effects. The medium is enabling new voices and conversations. The playing field is being leveled – the barriers between “Internet TV” and “TV” are disintegrating."
congrats to Zadi and Steve for winning a Webby! woohooo! not only are zadi and steve some of the coolest brooklynites ever - the are the coolest brooklynites - well along with me - in california! But seriously, I love Jetset show - so much that I wish they produced it every single day. Click on the play button below to watch one of my favorite episodes - then go to JETSET and watch the rest - Zadi and Steve are amazing editor!
From Unmediated:
Java Sys-Con: Social Media Goes Mainstream. Web 2.0 in depth. Excerpt:
Wikipedia has the most easily accessible definition of social media, describing it as "online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs." The key here is that people are the ones that use and control these tools and platforms instead of organizations and large institutions. Further, I would add to this that social media platforms tend to work best in networked environments , particularly on the Web ...
Defining Social Media: Some Ground Rules
1. Communication in the form of conversation, not monologue. This implies that social media must facilitate two-way discussion, discourse, and debate with little or no moderation or censorship. ...
2. Participants in social media are people, not organizations. Third-person voice is discouraged and the source of ideas and participation is clearly identified and associated with the individuals that contributed them. Anonymity is also discouraged but permissible in some very limited situations.
3. Honesty and transparency are core values. Spin and attempting to control, manipulate, or even spam the conversation are thoroughly discouraged. ...
4. It's all about pull, not push. ... In social media, people are in control of their conversations, not the pushers.
5. Distribution instead of centralization. ... Social media is highly distributed and made up of tens of millions of voices making it far more textured, rich, and heterogeneous than old media could ever be (or want to be). Encouraging conversations on the vast edges of our networks, rather than in the middle, is what this point is all about.
Hollabacktalk's Brittany and Hillary wrote a very critical post about my response on Ryanne's cat call video. They felt I was out of line for questioning what Ryanne did and they didn't think I made valid points and did not understand her method. I tried to post my response to what they wrote, but they deleted my comment. That's too bad. this is public conversation - so why censor some people's opinions? Especially when I am the subject of their post - shouldn't I have the right to response?
I am happy that blogging makes this all transparent and that responses like Hollaback's have an audience. Everyone can see the kind of exchanges that are taking place and I think its great for the purposes of dialoguing.
At the same time, I felt that my writing was not interpreted correctly, so I wrote this response to to their post.
RESPONSE TO HOLLABACKTALK:
1. You say "When women start questioning other women's experiences like Tricia felt so compelled to do, we do nothing but work backwards and against one another." Are you suggesting that as a woman, I am not allowed to express my own opinions? Opinions that may represent a different point of view?
2. you say that I shouldn't compare the video to lynching, a "period of state-sponsored racism." Actually, lynching in the south was never state sponsored. It was completely ignored by the state. The KKK was a citizen vigilante group that took justice into their own hands.
I did not say the video is the same as lynching - I draw parallels to lynching and I think the culture around vigilantism can turn into mob actions perpertrated for the wrong reasons. I was concerned about how many of ryanne's commentators took on a mob mentality and didn't see them as human beings - calling the cat callers "morons," "assholes", and judging their work as "shitty" brick chopping, and that they didn't get an education in 6th grade on acceptable behavior. It really made me upset - b.c being a cat caller does not correlate to bad education and low levels of intelligence. The cat call itself is sexist, but it was out of line for the commentators to jump on the bandwagon of making a value judgements on the character of these 4 men - who are black - as morons and doing un-valuable work. This is what I am worried about when I saw web 2.0 vigilantism - that unchecked vlogging vigilantism can lead to a mob mentality, which parallels other periods of mob mentality in the US.
A true example of state sponsored racism is South Africa. In such an extremely racist aparteid society, lynching culture never developed because the state sanctioned and institutionalized racism through a high degree of bureacracy. therefore, citzens didn't have to overtly dirty their hands, the state did it for them. for more on this argument, please read Ivan Evan's book, Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa.
3. Where is it that I "claims to be concerned for the rights of the unrepresented men on sites like HollaBackBoston?" I believe its important to hold men accountable for their actions. Taking someone's pic, unless their penis is hanging out, isn't that effective in stopping the action. But sites like yours empower the woman who is posting the picture - which is an important part of the process of stopping sexism.
Actually, I believe recording video is more effective, like what ryanne did - I was just concerned about the tone - which I clarified in my e-mail to Ryanne.
From my e-mail exchanges with Ryanne, she is planning on doing some follow video to show what has come out of this - and I think that's incredibly empowering - to confront the cat caller, and then to come to some understanding with the cat caller (This was also suggested by kenyatta).
If its really about revenge and public humilation of men who cat call, harrass and threaten women, you should encourage your partipants to shoot video on their phones of men cat calling and being violent, and post it to youtube or blip.tv. There's a much greater chance men and their friends/families will see these videos than the still pictures on your site. And it's a lot more powerful when you can record men being sexist, then just a picture of their face. With so many cell phones that have video cameras, this is quite feasible for your audience.
