Hi Sasha, Becky, Class, and World,
My name’s Arlene Ducao. I’m a second year Media Lab student in the Info Eco (http://eco.media.mit.edu) group. I’m looking forward to participating in the class in some way, particularly in the civic maps session; maps are at the central part of my thesis OpenIR (http://openir.media.mit.edu) and my Brooklyn design studio (http://dukode.com). I will conduct OpenIR user studies in Indonesia in January, and I’m hoping this class will give me a broad understanding of Civic Media in preparation for the study.
As our class devised Ten Key Principles of Civic Media, “civic media is self critical and iterative” received the least number of votes, but the exercise of forming the tenets was both self critical and iterative! It’s interesting to examine civic media, Intro to Civic Media, and the Center for Civic Media, in the context of the Media Lab, for few ML classes, if any, spend the first session focused on defining its own subject and syllabus. This is a wonderful participatory exercise lacking in most ML classes, which tend to be quite top-down, but it’s also chaotic, inefficient, and effort-intensive. The use of Charlie’s 10 Points Tool, shows how technology and new media have played a key role in mediating this tension between participatory and messy. In that respect, even though the Center for Civic Media occupies are strange position on the edge of the Media Lab, it makes complete sense as a part of the lab, and contributes to its balance.
This is a tension that I struggle with when engaging with all kinds of media, particularly civic media. I have a hard time participating in most media, especially social media platforms, yet I’m interested in making tools that allow more folks to participate and particularly interact with their institutions. With all that said, here are some aspects of civic media that play a key role in my work:
– Civic Media’s core unit is that of the individual person.
– Civic Media is polyphonic and chaotic.
– Civic Media aided by an understanding of micro- and macro-scales.
– Civic Media’s progress has been greatly accelerated by technology.
The Internet’s qualitative allowance of individual voices, combined with its quantitative affordances of aggregated analysis, is something that has changed the face of media. I’m not quite ready to cite links for these “principles,” as they’re a bit too general right now, but it’s something I hope to explore more deeply this semester, and then post some links!