November 24 - New Social Media and the G20: The Revolution Online - Maggie's Tutorial

The lecture opened with a samba squad YouTube video, a prime example of one of the many ways in which social media can be used to spread a message. The lecture continued with a brief look at some of the main themes brought up in the readings and YouTube videos for the week. We explored the use of new social media in building community and social movements (Shirky) and considered the difference between alternative media and autonomous media (Uzelman).

Alternative media attempts to change mainstream media content. An example would be independent broadcasters.

Autonomous media tries to create more democratic forms of communication media. An example would be the creation of an open forum.

New media is a different tool which can be used to challenge power relations which focus on the professional expert and exclude the everyday person from contributing. This challenge can be at a local, provincial, national or even global scale.

Breaking into smaller groups we looked up social media coverage of the G20. Each group had one of three social media tools, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

A panel comprised of Farah, Tim and Hassan, all organizers in different capacities of G20 protest facilitation, and documentation addressed some of the finer points of different social media.

Leading up to G20 social media was used to build new relationship, and make new connections, even as Toronto police were using media to create fear, telling people to stay out of Toronto and to frame the potential protests as police versus protestors. Toronto Mobilization, one of the organizations involved in the protests attempted to reframe the potential protests as the G20 versus the people and build hype around the event with the use of social media.

The draw backs of the type of reframing that was done was that it lacked a singular message which means very few people responded to it. The use of social media helped to raise awareness of the movement involving people superficially but failing to inspire action in many. Social media like twitter and Facebook are powerful because they allow almost anyone to have a voice to communicate with a broad public the risk in this is the spread of misinformation and in the case of the G20 the spread of paranoia. The panellists identified the use of social media leading up to, during, and following the G20 as only the tip of the iceberg.

In Maggie’s tutorial the presenting group brought fruits and vegetables for the snack, red and green peppers, broccoli, grapes, carrots and cucumbers, and asked each of us to use toothpicks to create a veggie protestor complete with an issue we feel strongly about on a paper sign.

Meanwhile the group wrote quotes from a variety of media sources on the board and asked us to identify the ones we thought came from mainstream media, alternative media and autonomous media.

As a group we identified problems with mainstream media as well as alternative and autonomous media. Some of the questions which came up were:

Mainstream media often lacks context. Does YouTube give context?

Does a synthesis of different media types offer better context?
Social media too offers a biased perspective of issues. Can any media ever be unbiased if all people have inherent biases?

Following our discussion of social media we broke up into our peer reviewing triads and went over the feedback and review of the final paper drafts.