Hello all again! This is Molly Sauter. I’m a second year graduate student in Comparative Media Studies and at RA here at the Center for Civic Media. I took the Networked Social Movements class last semester, and this semester I’m looking forward to spending more time poking at the function of technology in social movements and protest.

This particular interest of mine made our first class meeting very interesting. In an effort to come up with 10 aspects of what we as a class though civic media should be (though this in and of itself proved contentious!), we used Charlie DeTar’s 10 Points tool to engage in a group composition process. The 10 Points system facilitates consensus building, but I enjoyed its competitive and gamifying aspects. I particularly liked how the group identification icons (from the Noun Project) made it easier to focus on the content of the points than on who posted them. Instead of profoundly disagreeing with my friends or my professor, which might have been awkward to articulate, I was disagreeing with the flower or beer mug. Even though there were some spirited disagreements (we apparently take the different definitions of “accessible” very seriously in this group), the 10 Points tool helped make the whole experience fun and productive.

A major tension we encountered in this process was whether what we were created was a list of idealized virtues of civic media, or a description of how civic media currently exists. I was initially pulling for the “reality-based” side, though I switched to the idealist view in the interest of finishing the list by the end of class. However, I think it’s possible to describe the current state of civic media hopefully, without building an entirely idealize castle-in-the-sky view of its capacities. In that vein, I present a few of my defining characteristics for civic media:

Civic media is continually evolving

Civic media invites self-analysis

Civic media challenges old models and methodologies