Thomas Harding: The Video Activist Handbook, 2nd ed. (1998/2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, community, documentary film, human rights, independent media, journalism, mass media, media activism, television, video
This second edition of the highly popular The Video Activist Handbook includes numerous examples of contemporary video activism from around the world. The first book to provide the basic skills and know-how required for beginning video activism, it also offers a wealth of ideas on video strategies to those with some prior experience. Whether you are involved in campaigning, non-violent direct action, or simply want to know how to make use of video as a political tool, this book is for you. • Covers the key topics in a step-by-step guide – from choosing and using the right equipment and planning when and where to shoot, to supplying to TV, making a campaign video and legal considerations • Combines clearly written and illustrated practical advice, backed up by a wealth of resources, with first-hand examples of successful video activism • Critically assesses the mainstream media agendas and offers a lively survey of the international video activist scene.
Foreword by Anita Roddick
Publisher Pluto Press, 2001
ISBN 0745317707, 9780745317700
Length 255 pages
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Elizabeth Losh: Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, hypertext, marketing, mass media, p2p, politics, video games, viral marketing, virtual communities
Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government—even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and videos. In Virtualpolitik, Elizabeth Losh closely examines the government’s digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator. Looking beyond the usual focus on interfaces, operations, and procedures, Losh analyzes the ideologies revealed in government’s digital discourse, its anxieties about new online practices, and what happens when officially sanctioned material is parodied, remixed, or recontextualized by users.
Losh reports on a video game that panicked the House Intelligence Committee, pedagogic and therapeutic digital products aimed at American soldiers, government Web sites in the weeks and months following 9/11, PowerPoint presentations by government officials and gadflies, e-mail as a channel for whistleblowing, digital satire of surveillance practices, national digital libraries, and computer-based training for health professionals.
Losh concludes that the government’s virtualpolitik—its digital realpolitik aimed at preserving its own power—is focused on regulation, casting as criminal such common online activities as file sharing, videogame play, and social networking. This policy approach, she warns, indefinitely postpones building effective institutions for electronic governance, ignores constituents’ need to shape electronic identities to suit their personal politics, and misses an opportunity to learn how citizens can have meaningful interaction with the virtual manifestations of the state.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262123045, 9780262123044
416 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-9-14)
Comment (0)Ronald E. Day: The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, critical theory, cybernetics, cyberspace, cyborg, deterritorialization, information society, information technology, information theory, mass media, technological determinism, utopia
“Ronald E. Day provides a historically informed critical analysis of the concept and politics of information in the twentieth century. Analyzing texts in Europe and the United States, his critical reading method goes beyond traditional historiographical readings of communication and information by engaging specific historical texts in terms of their attempts to construct and reshape history.
After laying the groundwork and justifying his method of close reading for this study, Day examines the texts of two pre-World War II documentalists, Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. Through the work of Otlet and Briet, Day shows how documentation and information were associated with concepts of cultural progress. Day also discusses the social expansion of the conduit metaphor in the works of Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener. He then shows how the work of contemporary French multimedia theorist Pierre Lévy refracts the earlier philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through the prism of the capitalist understanding of the “virtual society.”
Turning back to the pre-World War II period, Day examines two critics of the information society: Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. He explains Heidegger’s philosophical critique of the information culture’s model of language and truth as well as Benjamin’s aesthetic and historical critique of mass information and communication. Day concludes by contemplating the relation of critical theory and information, particularly in regard to the information culture’s transformation of history, historiography, and historicity into positive categories of assumed and represented knowledge.”
Publisher SIU Press, 2001
ISBN 0809323907, 9780809323906
152 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-1)
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