Howard Rheingold, a brilliant lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford and author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution is a major influence in our thinking about what internet-mediated video can do for public health research and advocacy. Howard Rheingold writes, and I completely agree, about the salience of this historical moment in technological and social change.

“If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty-first-century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates)” (Rheingold, 2008, pp 99-100)

His talk at the TED conference — viewable here — encapsulates some of the thrilling possibilities for democracy, collaboration, and (in my mind) health promotion in our century.

Sitting back in San Francisco, I’m taking a moment to reflect on the beginning stages of our VideoVoice project in New Orleans. Caricia and I facilitated the Train-the-Trainers weekend in which we organized the grass roots of NOLA VideoVoice. This includes (but is not limited to) hands-on-camera work and interviews, community public health discussions, basic film theory concepts, and concept models.

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Have you ever created a word or excel document with a bunch of website addresses, just so you wouldn’t forget them all? Have you ever sent a friend or colleague a bunch of links that you ran across, because you knew it was right up their alley? Is it getting hard for you to manage the hundreds of bookmarks that you saved on browser? Well… then you were working a lot harder than you have to! Online bookmarking makes all of this easier. And, as a doctoral student that spends a lot of time finding resources on the web, this has helped me to stay sane… and even be helpful to other researchers in my field.

Here is an excerpt by Lisa Pickoff-White from our Participatory Media Guidebook, which I describe in the last blog, explaining what bookmarking is and how to use it to make your life easier.

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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.

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Those who do not have power over the stories that dominate their lives, power to retell them, rethink them. deconstruct them, joke about them, and change them as times change, truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts. Salman Rushdie

Shirley White, the editor and primary author of the book “Participatory Video: Images that Transform and Empower” (2003), has taught participatory video methods since the 1970s. She is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communications at Cornell University.

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Contributor: Caricia Catalani

Just to begin writing in this blog, I feel like a lot of introductions are necessary. Not just people, but also ideas. Idea 1, meet idea 2. This kind of meet and greet is happening in my head all of the time.

So, here is a new idea to participatory research and a well known idea to participatory media. I have a bit of a crush on this idea and feel pretty proud to introduce it around.

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