Connecting the Pieces

What exactly is the Internet and what role does it play in our movement for social change?

In this collection of essays, May First/People Link techie-organizers explore this remarkable social movement:

• analyzing its growth and character as an expression of humanity's resistance and resilience;
• offering an analysis of how it impacts the progressive movement and how we should impact it;
• taking up Internet issues like access, race and gender, threats to the Internet's independence and freedom, free and open source software, spam, email, security and privacy, dns and other Internet protocols;
• and suggesting strategies for the use, protection and expansion of the Internet's technology.

It's a must-read for every progressive activist who participates in the Internet and a good starting point for the movement-wide discussion that has become essential.

The book features:

• The Organic Internet by Alfredo López
• The Political Techie by Jamie McClelland
• Domain Names by Alfredo López
• The Internet Protocol by Eric Goldhagen
• Technical Architecture Shapes Social Structure by Daniel Kahn Gillmor
• The Email Crisis by Jamie McClelland
• FOSS and Proprietary Software by Amanda B. Hickman

You can download a copy of the Organic Internet on line as a pdf file or purchase printed paperback copies for $7.00

The World Information Access Project has published their 2007
report, presenting trends in the distribution of information and
communication technologies around the world. The report includes an
interesting map of the distribution of government websites and costs of
internet access across the world.

See link for full report.

The results of this study reveal a dismally low level of minority and
female ownership of radio stations in America that has left two-thirds
of the U.S. population with few stations representing their communities
or serving their needs. Racial or ethnic minorities own just 7.7
percent of all full-power commercial broadcast radio stations, though
they account for 33 percent of the U.S. population.

• Latinos own just 2.9 percent of all U.S. full-power commercial broadcast radio stations.
• African-Americans own only 3.4 percent of this country's full-power commercial broadcast radio stations.
• People of Asian descent own less than 1 percent of full-power commercial broadcast radio stations.

For months I have been studying what I thought were new
technologies to find that in the education world the social networking
was all the rage. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:

Media Education for the 21st Century

This introduction of the motivation for study is from the white
paper by Henry Jenkins Director of the Comparative Media Studies
Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published this
white paper that explores new digital media and ways of collaborating.

It got my attention....

The 2007 ICA Conference's theme was Creating Communication:
Content, Control, and Critique. Many interesting academic
contributions about this theme appeared in the Keynote Panels,
Theme Sessions, and many other sessions.

But the 2007 ICA Conference did not just feature academic
reflections. In three so-called grassroots discussion panels,
alternative voices from outside academia also animated the
conference theme. These panels produced interesting dialogues
between academia and the people that actually organize, realize,
and live the participatory and bottom-up processes that we
academics so eagerly analyze.

Now, practitioners' contributions from these panels are available
as an ebook entitled "Alternatives on media content, journalism,
and regulation." Edited by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Benjamin De
Cleen and Nico Carpentier, and published by the University of Tartu
Press, this book brings together the fascinating stories of how
civil society intervenes (sometimes successfully, sometimes less
successfully) in the creation of alternative content, in the
organization of alternative journalism, and in the attempts to
influence the regulation that impacts upon the communicative
processes.

The pdf version of the book can be downloaded (for free) from this
URL:
http://www.researchingcommunication.eu/reco_book2.pdf
(please note there is an underscore between reco and book2)

It is part of the Researching and Teaching Communication Book
Series, which you can find at this URL:
http://www.researchingcommunication.eu/

Alternatively, you can visit the website we have built on the basis
of all the ebook contributions. The URL of that website is:
http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/grass/grassindex.html

Helen DeMichiel, NAMAC's Co-Director, recently attended the National Conference for Media Reform and moderated a session called The
Invisible Network: Connecting to Community-Based Media Organizations Across America. Session participants included Louis Massiah, Scribe Media Center; Loris Ann Taylor, Center for Native American Public Radio; Fred Johnson, UMass -Boston; and Pamela Colby, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network. This session recording highlights the history of media reform activities in the media arts sector and it's relationship to current issues in policy change, advocacy, academia, media justice and multi-issue social change.

Key documents from the Geneva prep phases, regional conferences and summit. This link includes Principles, Action Plans & Final Reports, as well as background materials organized thematically (see related link).