Erhardt Graeff – Page 14

Civic Media: Communities Making Change

13 September 2015Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Description

From http://www.nextlibrary.net/page/erhardt-graeff-nextlibrary-innovation-keynote

Civic Media encompasses a broad array of tools, practices, content, and communities that foster or enhance civic engagement. While civic media has always existed, it has recently flourished and been transformed thanks to technologies like smartphones and social media.

At its heart, civic media is best understood as a social phenomenon empowered by technology. Civic media reaches and engages a diverse audience, inviting all to create, share, remix, and share again. Young people are creating memes as political speech, as naturally as they might share a photo of their last meal. Developers are volunteering to build humanitarian software after disasters, enjoying the thrill of solving a hard problem and producing something that matters. And libraries, working at the nexus of information and public interest, are creating spaces in which communities can make change.

“Civic Media: Communities Making Change” will explore prominent examples of civic media; how tools, practices, content, and communities can be designed to be more civic; and the roles libraries can, and already are, playing in making civic media.

Slides

Participatory Politics book review

18 August 2015Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Participatory Politics: Next-Generation Tactics to Remake Public Spheres by Elisabeth Soep

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Quick overview of the work of the Youth Participatory Politics research network. Soep takes the research and outlines a set of literacies, tactics, and risks connected to contemporary youth civic practices. She frames the research summary with anecdotal insights from her own research and practice as the head of Youth Radio in Oakland. The short book serves as a helpful introduction to this research area for those unacquainted with it, but for civic studies scholars it may be more of a very cursory review. However, there is some helpful new language around literacies and practices offered and a useful bibliography for looking into some of the primary empirical work done by the YPP research network members.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Making Drones Civic

12 June 2015Erhardt Graeff

Link to Conference Paper

graeff-matias_makingdronescivic_isa2015

Abstract

Can drones be fully accepted as civic technologies? Are there values embodied by drones that undermine their ability to perform in a civic capacity? What design principles might make drones more civic? Where does responsibility lie between civil society actors, drone designers, and policymakers in pursuing this goal while balancing privacy, security, and innovation? Although drones have several proposed civic use cases, particularly involving practices described as monitorial citizenship, drones are different from other civic technologies. Civic technologies are about shifting power away from corrupt actors and toward virtuous actors. And a motivating concept and ethic for civic technologies, whether used for interacting with governments or against them, is participatory practice. If we aspire to a definition of civic action that is fundamentally participatory and we hope for our civic technologies to embody that value of participatory practice, we must investigate whether drones can be fully accepted as civic technologies. This paper will address these questions and issues, problematizing the use of drones for civic purposes by defining a set of values and design principles for civic technologies and by showing where drones may play a role, situating contemporary cases among relevant political and ethical questions.

Net Locality book review

16 May 2015Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World by Eric Gordon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gordon and de Souza e Silva propose “net locality” to describe the nature of communications and society whereby location becomes a more important attribute and catalyst as data is augmented with location information and our primary and secondary channels of communication are mobile allowing us to move through and experience spaces with these new augmentations and filters. Most usefully the book is a cohesive summary of early experiments in games, social networks, and civic interventions that use this location-aware technology to change behavior and test new forms of interaction between people and space. The authors also do a nice job of revisiting place and social performance related social theory from the past century and a half—walking readers through Goffman, Baudrillard, and Debord and how their ideas play out and are in some ways energized in an age of net locality. Whether you agree with their proposed new form of socio-technical configuration “net locality” there is much to learn here if you study or design mobile and location-aware computing.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Binders Full of Election Memes

1 May 2015Erhardt Graeff

Link

http://civicmediaproject.org/works/civic-media-project/binders-full-of-election-memes-participatory-culture-invades-the-2012-us-election

Excerpt

“Participatory culture handed the 2012 U.S. presidential election season a bumper crop of political memes. These “election memes,” largely in the form of image macros, took sound bites from the candidates’ debates and speeches and turned them into “digital content units” of political satire “circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users,” to paraphrase Limor Schifman’s definition of “internet meme” (2013, 177).

“Image macros like the lolcat, feature bold text on top of an image, often a “stock character,” and like all Internet memes are “multi-participant creative expressions through which cultural and political identities are communicated and negotiated” (Ibid.). This case study focuses on three popular image macro-based election memes that came out of the 2012 US presidential election cycle: “Fired Big Bird,” “Binders Full of Women,” and “You Didn’t Build That,” and argues that sharing such memes is a valid form of political participation in the style of what Tommie Shelby calls “impure dissent” (forthcoming).”