HONK! Fest is an annual gathering of activist street bands around the country. While the festival has satellites in Austin and Seattle, it got its start in Somerville, Mass. five years ago. Last weekend, some 30 bands descended on our northern neighbor, and a pedagogical symposium on Monday topped it off.

In class last week, my group proffered a somewhat poetic vision of social change. We called it "The Floods of Change."

Change is natural, inevitable, ongoing. In our model, the "mountain" of society constantly interacts with the "river" of ideas flowing down it. This river shifts over time, with some tributaries growing steadily or even spawning new branches. Meanwhile, other sections are at risk of drying up altogether. Some sections can even be forcibly blocked by man-made "censorship" dams. Ideas pool in the ocean at the bottom, and can later recycle through the ecosystem through evaporation. The overall change "climate" -- monsoon season? drought? -- may also play a significant role.

All the while, the shifting waters reshape the mountain, just as the mountain can reroute the waters.

In coming up with theories for change in Intro to Civic Media last week, many of us started or ended with the goal of policy change at the highest levels of government. My final project for the class, collecting and interpreting marketplace stories of origin, does not have a specific built-in policy goal, but rather attempts to analyze and participate in an existing cultural phenomenon. So I started thinking about the relationship between policy change and changes in modes of cultural production -- for example, which policies (or, the absence of which policies that exist elsewhere) contributed to the emergence of persuasive storytelling on American product labels? will the work of my final project, analyzing and interpreting stories of origin, reveal policies that could be updated or reversed in the name of honest exchange between companies and consumers? More generally, how does a researcher identify relationships between policy and cultural production?

Which are the "key issues" for social change? How many "keys" do we need to open "the door of change"? What if the door is stuck? Does it mean that we need more pressure (aka stronger social movements)?

Here my personal basic representation, where "change" is figured as a door to open:
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At the end of our last Intro to Civic Media class, we split up into groups to develop models of theory of change. And for the second time doing this type of activity in this class, I was in the group that came up with a reference to nature — this time, we modeled change with... the water cycle.

And since water cycles remind me of one of my favorite childhood books — The Magic School Bus At the Waterworks —, I’m going to describe a method of change and how it relates to my semester-long project through The Magic School Bus (by Joanna Cole — oh wait, I mean Joanna Kao).

[Imagine Magic School Bus intro music]

Ms. Frizzle seemed a little different the other day. She’s normally a little different, but that day, she was even more different. When she walked into the classroom, she didn’t say her normal “Good morning, class!” and “Are you ready to learn about...” Instead, she just walked to her desk and stared off into space.

Every week one of us is assigned to write a blog about the last Introduction to Civic Media class. So this week is my turn.

We started the class reviewing a few of the projects that were presented in this blog the week before. The projects are receiving faculty advice, either personally, through e-mails or blog comments on the posts.

Then we went through the theory which, for most of us in class, was very dense this week. The texts assigned for reading were all anchored on Marxist based communication theory. For starters, Sasha drove us through a review of some basic Marxist concepts, like capital, time and labor, modes of production, classes, means of production, base and superstructure.

We hosted our first Vojo community webinar this week to bring Vojo users together to learn and practice customizing their groups' appearance and audio prompts. We'll be hosting these calls on the 1st and 3rd Tues of every month 3pm-4pm EST. Our next call will be on Tues Oct 16 and we'll practice embedding Vojo feeds into our other media spaces -- organization web sites, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Video capture from this week's call: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4JYkiIMtgEJZbXkKsno11A
Notes from the call: http://bit.ly/vojocommcalls

Earlier this year I came across a news piece on Wired, about Klout, What Your Klout Score Really Means. The company created a score that ranks people on the internet according to their activity in Social Media, mainly Twitter and Facebook. The piece describes how people gain “points” on their Klout score, according to number of tweets, products promotion, etc. Basically, Klout is a market oriented tool, that will use and stimulate people's activity on social media to promote products. A person with a high Klout score will be offered shopping coupons, promotions, access to concerts etc. What intrigued me was that Klout is extremely market oriented and doesn’t really analyse the quality of the person’s activity on the web. It also ranks Justin Bieber with a perfect Klout score.

As it turns out, I opted out of Klout.