Week 5 Reading and Class Reflection

Week five’s reading, We Are All Boat People by Graham Meikle, was awesome! It was a case study of the Internet activist group, We Are All Boat People and how they use the Internet. It focused upon three main parts; the dilemmas of the activist, the influence of tactical media and intercreativity - the campaigners’ emphasis on distributing tools for others to make their own media interventions. The latter interested me the most. The organization uses various tools such as kits, stencils, manipulated images, diagrams and more that can be downloaded from their site. The Internet plays a major role for them in terms of distributing these tools. The tools encourage people to initiate their own actions and therefore become producers of their own, which is very much a DIY culture thing. I thought this was great! I found it really interesting how the group use more passive approaches; “events to date have concentrated more on spectacle than on mass participation, on creating images rather than creating crowds”. I think this is such a clever and creative way to approach activism. The other reading, Mexico’s Zapatistas: the first information guerilla movement by Manuel Castells, gave another example of a movement that utilized the media and the Internet to diffuse information. The Zapatistas are much more extreme than the Boat People in terms of their mass protests and the use of weapons but they still use the Internet to create support networks. The Zapatistas use the Internet in a very political way; making it impossible for the Mexican government to use repression on a large scale. The readings highlighted how two different groups, worlds apart, could use the same tool to achieve such a significant outcome.

The week five lab session included a discussion about our submitted mailing lists and virtual communities. There were some interesting ones, eg: a cake recipe mailing list. We also practiced our chat room discussions. I was placed in the ‘politics’ chat room with four other guys. I think they need my female perspective. It was a bit frustrating because they kept going off on a tangent about things I didn’t know about or they discussed breasts, haha. But we have an agenda for next week so I will keep them in line, hehe.