In September of this year, I joined a team of graduate students from various disciplines at UC Berkeley to learn about participatory new media and to engage in collective action. As journalists, environmental justice advocates, mass communications specialists, information theory researchers, and public health researchers, we brought a lot of perspectives to the table. Our professors Howard Rheingold (a renowned new media philosopher and collective action maven) and Xiao Qiang (a public scholar and activist blogger from China) led us through many months of new media bootcamp.

After months of reading, analyzing, discussing, blogging, and tagging, we are happy to announce our final project: The Participatory Media Guidebook.

We created the Participatory Media Guidebook to introduce a range of participatory media tools for collective action to activists and social justice organizations around the world. The guide discussed what tools to use and when to use them. It is a wiki, so it will always be evolving and updating. Please participate by adding your own expertise on how to use new media to change the world.

New media offer an incredibly unique and new opportunity to address our current public health crisis. There are countless examples of this already happening with enormous success around the world. Sharing videos about condoms online can educate people in India about HIV, despite the mass media ban on such conversations. Blogging about outbreaks can get information about deadly epidemics to the World Health Organization well before a national government would admit to having a problem that might discourage tourist from coming to their coasts. Social networking sites can facilitate community organizing and mobilization of diasporas, such as Mexican migrant workers, that would otherwise not have the numbers to be a political force to demand healthy working conditions or access to medical treatment.

Caricia Catalani

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Conceptual Roots, Introduction, Video Production Tips, VideoVoice News, Videos.