Media, Education and knowledge in the Digital Age
Public broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, and network newscasts have all played a central role in our democracy, informing citizens and guiding public conversation. But the top-down dissemination technologies that supported them are being supplanted by an open, many-to-many networked media environment. What platforms, standards, and practices will replace or transform legacy public media.
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One of the points raised by Prof. Nelson Brissac this semester was about the need for appropriation of existing technologies to the collective, breaking with the purely private use. Since then I have thought of how achieving it. Today, Howard Rheingold published a Videocast on Ushahidi project which is an excellent example how to do this. Ushahidi uses Google Maps to map violations of human rights through the collaboration of citizens reporters.
“Ushahidi, which means ”testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis.”
“This lecture presents the major thesis of Professor Manuel Castells’ most recent work to be published in the book ‘Communication Power’. The book argues that power is ‘based on the control of communication and information’ and develops the theoretical and empirical foundations of the many aspects of this argument.”
