Creating Technology for Social Change

Creator-consumers, relationships between people, Whole Earth, LittleSis

My name is Anne Callahan. I’m a second-year graduate student in Art, Culture and Technology, a studio-based art program at MIT descended from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. I’m taking Introduction to Civic Media to follow my interests in publishing history and relationships between medium and content, and because in my life’s work I want to help cultivate a lively, diverse, ethical media culture. I had many good experiences with Center for Civic Media and Comparative Media Studies public programs last year, and taking this class seemed like a way to get closer.

Of the ten principles of civic media we came up with in class last week, I keep coming back to 6, “Civic media educates and empowers users to be creators as well as consumers,” because I think taking up these two roles simultaneously—creator and consumer—is the key to our meaning of civic, as in “civic duty” or “civic pride.” The statement is open-ended about what we are creators and consumers of—civic media might help us become creator-consumers of govt policy, of the built environment, of maps, of food, of electronics, or of media itself.

One retro example that’s interesting in relation to this principle is the Whole Earth Catalog (subhead: “Access to Tools”), a publication devised by Stewart Brand in the U.S. in the late 60s that compiled and provided vendor information for a huge array of ‘tools’—broadly defined to include anything that might help people make or learn—that could be ordered directly from the supplier. New editions of the catalog incorporated feedback from readers, including new listings and updates and stories about products. The Whole Earth Catalog sometimes gets described as a precursor to the web, partly because of its goal to collect and transfer information to a geographically-dispersed community and partly because the publishers prioritized feedback and what today we might call user-generated content. It’s interesting to really think about how the Whole Earth Catalog is and isn’t like the web, and what other useful analogies can be made to present-day media.

Of the other principles we came up with, I see 1/2 of 8 “civic media is iterative” + 9 “Civic media is open and extensible” as principles for describing its structure, and 1 “Civic media aspires to be participatory”, 2 “Civic media promotes action and engagement” and 10 “Civic media fosters transparency and accountability” as describing characteristics that tend to accompany that structure. I would add another fostering, following Rogelio’s comments about people-centeredness: “Civic media fosters relationships between people.”

Some of the other points on our list of 10 sound like potential outcomes further along down the line, ex. “civic media challenges people to rethink social structures”, and “civic media fights against social injustice.”

An example that fits here is LittleSis, a website that tracks connections between people in power in the U.S. government and in national and international scale business. LittleSis collects, organizes and makes searchable information that was already available from other sources, and makes its raw data available via the LittleSis API. Everyone is invited to get involved.There is no specific mandate to use the data one way or another.

Other examples I’m interested in thinking about in the context of this course are local public-access television stations like NY1 or CCTV here in Cambridge. These organizations support training and staff and offer significant resources to their communities, in addition to producing something like civic media. I wonder what form they’ll take if/when the funding structures change, and what we can learn from how they work now.

Last thoughts on 10 Points: it is a great tool for setting down and getting immediate feedback on a set of ideas. Culling and clarifying and editing in order to reach anything like consensus happened over the table, as Erhardt observed, and was slow-going. I am looking forward to being better-informed next time around.