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.

With the growth of social media and various forms of participatory media, the line between the traditional content generators and the content consumers is fading. As a result, conversations and comments from consumers as well as their posts on social media are starting to become considered content itself.

As media moves towards utilizing conversations and comments to provide more content and context, it’s important to think about the definition of having a “good” conversation, the motives and incentives to get people to contribute to a good conversation, and also how to get a diverse set of commenters to avoid bias.

"Join us, tell us your story" is the prompt given by the Kitchen Sisters for their most recent project, "The Hidden World of Girls." This is one of 3 storytelling projects I've been enjoying lately that center women as storytellers about their lives and histories.

The Hidden World of Girls

The Hidden World of Girls, is a recent project by NPR radio production duo, The Kitchen Sisters. It's a series of radio documentaries featuring women and stories about women that people called in responding to the full prompt, "Who are the women that inspire you? What are the rituals for girls in your community? Whose stories have yet to be told? Help us on our quest for tales of the extraordinary and everyday, from the past to the present" by calling into the Hidden World of Girls message line (202-408-9576) or leaving stories in writing, images, audio and video on the web form.

This post was co-written by Aviva Hope Rutkin and Alexander Ho.

We gathered together this week to discuss the current struggles of modern media and to explore the concept of digital inequality.

First, we reviewed a 2011 report from The Economist on the news industry. The report argues that the very idea of a “crisis in media” is U.S.-centric. India, China, and Brazil are all experiencing a significant increase in newspaper subscriptions. Meanwhile, in the United States, newspaper subscriptions are dropping, TV continues to be many people’s dominant source of information, and new digital platforms are complicating the media landscape.

I visited Cambridge Community Television (CCTV) today to do a Vojo workshop with CCTV staff and Neighbormedia reporters. We practiced posting stories, created accounts, and discussed how Neighbormedia will use Vojo on Friday's PARK(ing) Day to collect stories from the CCTV parking space about Central Square. To see some of the stories we posted, check out the CCTV group on Vojo.

We're beginning to standardize our workshop agendas which have their basis in workshops that the VozMob team run, customized for Vojo and groups we're working with.

Liveblog of the first Media Lab Conversations event of the semester, with help from Nathan Matias and Molly Sauter. You can view tweets from this event here.

“We’re a nonprofit, and we’re moving into the media business.”

Carroll Bogert (@carrollbogert) is the Deputy Executive Director for External Relations at Human Rights Watch. She also spent more than a decade as a reporter, bureau chief and editor of international news at Newsweek. Since 1978, Human Rights Watch (HRW) is one of the leading human rights organizations.

Francis Steen, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Library Communication Studies Archive, spoke at the Media Lab for an event organised by the ICE (Imagination, Computation, and Expression) Lab today. Denise and I liveblogged it, so let us know where the errors are and we'll fix them. 

Francis Steen begins by posing the question: why do we have news?

It's not a question of accuracy, he argues; we should look at the news as a way of thinking. Think of the news as a state space that includes what is possible and what is valuable. That is, the news take events that occur in the world and place them in terms of what is valuable and what is possible.

This blog post was first posted at numeroteca.org on June 6th 2012.

View this datavis full size at gigapan and the related post about May 2012 social  mobilizations in Spain.

Today's post is to present the tool we are building this summer: PageOneX. The idea behind is to make online and easier the coding process of front page newspapers. Make  this visualization process available for researchers, advocacy groups and anyone interested. I'll will give some background about this process.

Sara Critchfield and Adam Mordecai's talk at Netroots Nation (#nnupFTW) was less-than-standing-room only, so I've combined the parts of his talk we were able to catch with a similar talk by their colleague Peter Koechley at the Conversational Marketing Summit. Thanks to Deepa Kunapuli for her notes.