The introduction I wrote for our seminal We Media report is soon to be part of the educational lexicon in France. Here’s what I wrote in 2003: “There are three ways to look at how society is informed. The first is that people are gullible and will read, listen to, or watch just about anything. […]
What is revealing about this revolution is the way in which citizens discovered it, how they informed one another, and how they mobilized around it. They used their mobile phones, now ubiquitous in North Africa, to communicate via text messaging and Twitter. For many Tunisians, their phones are their Internet. Theirs is a story about the democratization of media, a social revolution that wields the power to change lives as well as governments
By SUSAN MERNIT Net-enabled social tools have enabled new models for grassroots activism and community building, and they have changed how we function in society — how we communicate globally and locally, how we form ties and how we organize and connect. What’s tricky about deploying social media today is not access to the technology, […]
An update on Social Citizens By ALLISON FINE Social Citizens BETA is a paper commissioned by The Case Foundation in early 2008 to help bring attention to the ways that young people are using new, social media to affect social change. The notion of young people as “Social Citizens” comes from the intersection of several […]
There’s a story going around that touts the Internet as a perpetual money machine. It goes something like this: many pieces of old content on the digital-now network have aggregate residual value that, over time, exceed present value of fresh content, which spikes and subsides quickly. The story is called the Long Tail. It is […]
The 800 reporters from the world’s news organizations who descended upon Blacksburg, Va., on April 16, 2007, to cover the shootings of students at Virginia Tech quickly discovered an inconvenient truth. Though remote, Blacksburg was hardly isolated. Students, educators and citizens reported the horrific events first-hand through long-established digital and social networks. The news reached […]