Everything for me this week is relating to the late Vaclav Havel, and this "imbeciles" story makes me think of Havel's 1965 speech/article "On Evasive Thinking".

He opens with an episode from earlier that year when a girl was crushed by a stone window ledge that fell after the state failed to maintain it. Havel tells how the state acknowledged the issue and abstractly promised that things would get better. He tells how spineless writers wrote how wonderful it is that their society was now open enough for criticism.

As in…

A girl being crushed resulted in praise for the very gov't that allowed her to be crushed, because the writers were too chicken to ask the primary question, "Dear gov't, why do our window ledges fall?"

(For MIT undergraduates only.)

With the increasing proliferation of mobile digital media tools and online video distribution, there is a need for secure easy-to-use platforms for sharing and organizing media content among youth. While capturing and tagging digital media with time and location is possible, editing and organizing it for producing seamless narrativesthat can be easily shared online remains complicated. This project seeks to undertake development of mobile tools and online platforms that support young media makers and citizen journalists to create, organize and share digital narratives produced in their own neighborhoods over time, while allowing new forms ofinter-generational learning, location-based storytelling and civicadvocacy.