RYNSA: WORDS

Since starting my job lat month as a ‘computer literacy tutor’ with/for disabled adults in southeast Melbourne, I have become acutely aware of how difficult it can be for some members of our society (in this case Australia) to access certain institutions, services and cultural experiences.  These are things that individuals without disability often take for granted, and addressing them goes far beyond wheelchair ramps at the courthouse or braille consoles on public elevators.  It’s more complex than that.  Actually, it pretty much includes everything… even the web.

Last week, Xu Yan, who has been teaching herself all about CSS, discovered that my website is not particularly HTML compatible.  After the initial annoyance of this fact wore off, it got me thinking about universal access.  Right now the vast majority of people around the world who use IE (Yan says it’s around 55% now) cannot visit my blog without having to deal with some fairly obvious design flaws, issues that are not all that serious but may yet affect readability.  This then got me thinking about the small minority of global disabled internet users who probably face similar ‘compatibility’ issues all the time, whether it’s font size, color schemes, frame location, or something else that might make viewing a given website particularly difficult.

It suddenly seemed really, really unfair that this population of human beings, often the least-recognized or publicly accommadated minority in the world, couldn’t peruse the web with the same degree of care-free whimsy that I enjoy on a near daily basis.  It’s just wrong, really.  Everyone should have the privilege of reading my crappy writing, damnit!

Seriously, I am a little embarrassed that despite my technological (Web 2.0) interests over the years, in conjunction with my progressive political efforts, that I have not been more conscious about disability access until now.  In order to remedy this, then, I will be working towards redesigning my website, both the blog and the vlog.  I am therefore collecting URLs to code and design resources for making websites more accessible.  Currently my focus is on WordPress themes, and here’s what I’ve found so far:

Nice2All
Rapid Access

I’ll post more information as my research progresses.  Hopefully, time permitting, a new version of my website will be up an running within the next few months.

I love Canadians.

Ars Technica recently published an article about a Canadian member of parliament (MP) named Charlie Angus, and his struggle to fight ‘traffic shaping’ by telecom giant and all-around badie, Bell Canada. Angus is a vocal advocate for net neutrality, and he apparently presented a response bill before the Canadian congress in order to spark a debate on the matter. You can hear a fairly interesting interview with the man on the May 22nd episode from Search Engine, a radio show and CBC podcast.

Key quote from the MP3 interview (00:14:09) with Charlie Angus:

“The language around the internet, at best its a consumer at worst you’re a hacker and a pirate. We should be talking about online citizens. It’s a cultural commons that’s been created. If we don’t respect that, we’re gonna be in a situation where–whether its legislation like the DMCA or net neutrality being taken away–the internet is gonna be reduced to something that, again, the few large media giants are in charge of and not the citizens.”

Mr. Angus’s efforts in government are indeed admirable, but what makes this story all the more interesting is that before crafting public policy, Angus was once (perhaps still is) a Canadian guitar hero–a master of the ‘low end’ (bass) to be precise. In the early 1980s, Angus wielded his axe for a three-piece, socially-conscious, Montreal punk band called L’Etranger, and now he’s a musician and founding member of the well-known alt-country outfit, Grievous Angels.

I found a proto music video on YouTube for ‘Goliath,’ a song by L’Etrangers. It’s sort of like the Clash meets a bottle of Labatt. Rawk!

Let’s hope the our quirky neighbors to the north can do better than my fellow Americans have in stemming the growth of privatized networks…eh?!

So there’s this professor named Mark Bauerlein in the English Department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s recently published a book provocatively entitled, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Catchy, eh?!

But, wait! There’s more! Mr. Bauerlein somehow decided it prudent to beef-up his already lengthy sub-line with the following–very revealing–parenthetical statement: (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).

Wow! Mr. Bauerlein’s got some balls, aint he?!

If it wasn’t already clear from my dismissive tone, I fall (just barely) within this maligned age demographic. Subsequently, I am having a hard time taking Mr. Bauerlein, and his polemic text, seriously. That old adage passed down to me from my parents is only half right, it seems. For my generation at least, we’d better not judge a book by its cover, for the cover’s just gonna judge us right back!

In any case, I actually agree with some of what Mr. Bauerlein appears to be suggesting about the so-called ‘digital age.’ In an interview with YouthWorker Journal, he says of internet alienation:

“The Internet allows people to create their own little universe. They only make contact with things that interest them. They enclose themselves in the music they like, the politics they like—and what we see is an isolation of young people who really get into this world. This is spiritually withering.”

From personal experience I can attest to the validity of this claim. Maybe I’m wrong here, but the cosmopolitan promise of digital technology hasn’t necessarily been realized in the way that it is sometimes envisioned. Isolated cliques are forming online (in CCD we describe it in slightly less damning terms as ‘communities of interest’), and in much the same way they form in the real world–by language, nationality, race, gender, political persuasion, etc. ‘Social networking,’ in this sense, is anything but; it’s more like ‘ghetto networking’ with fancy electronics. Needless to say, this doesn’t bode well for engaging public policy, much less real socio-political transformation.

That being said, I have to ask… what is it with baby-boomers and their relentless deconstruction of today’s youth culture?! I’m getting a little tired of all these elite, me-generation pundits deflecting their own mistakes onto other people. I mean, really, y’all, who’s running the show here?! Who’s leading academia, the government, the corporate giants that fund and mold the online (and offline) media environments in their own self-interest? Is it the Xers? The Millennials? Forty years ago we weren’t supposed to trust anyone over thirty, and now we’ve flipped the script?! Make up your damn mind already, will ya?!!

It is the height of arrogance and hypocrisy for Mr. Bauerlein to belittle young folk with such ridiculous, postmodern rhetoric. Perhaps I should redirect my ire at the pissy little editors at the publishing house who thought they were being clever with this title. After all, seems like the boomer thing to do–pass the buck.

UPDATE:

There’s a fairly interesting interview, by the way, over at NPR. It eventually develops into an ironic, Broadway-inspired send-up of Bauerlein’s curmudgeonly position.

Take that, boomers!

According to this Boing Boing post from last week, ccMixter is now planning on leaving Creative Commons to reform as an independent project of its own, and they’re looking for someone to lead the team. They’ve graciously opened up the project coordinator search process to include us everyday folks. So get those brilliant project proposals in quick! 

If you didn’t already know, ccMixter is a great website for finding legal and entirely downloadable music and music samples. It’s a tremendously helpful resource for media-makers trying to obtain some fairly high-quality tunes to support their various multimedia productions. I’ve used ccMixter a number of times for this-and-that video soundtrack, and I love it. It’s especially helpful in you’re in a pinch, and you need something interesting but not-too-distracting to play under the imagery.

Actually, I really hope ccMixter can find a suitable candidate for the job. On the FAQs page they blandly self-describe as a “community music remixing site,” though it’s really much more than that. Some feel, myself included, that ccMixter might just represent a prototype of what’s to come in mainstream media sharing–a kind of public platform for dynamic, transparent and almost amoeba-like flows of information between creators. It would be a digital ocean, if you will, wherein artists share, trade and build upon each other’s work outside the rigid boundaries of the land-locked, stagnant and corporate controlled intellectual property rights system.

Perhaps that’s a little naive, I don’t know. I’m still working on the theory…

A week ago, Ars Technica had a brief but interesting article on the meager unveiling of YouTube’s so-called ‘Citizen News Channel,’ a user-generated media project with aims of “…highlighting some of the best news content on YouTube.”  They’ve got a well-spoken young woman named Olivia Ma serving as the ‘News Manager.’ 

The fresh-faced Ma, a Harvard grad, appeared slightly awkward but enthusiastic in her jump-off post. The two-minute ‘welcome’ video was very optimistic, as you might expect from a corporate launch, during which time she proclaimed, ever-so-bubbly:

“This stuff is awesome, you guys! And we want to see lots and lots of it. Because we believe that you YouTubers out there are changing the world of journalism.”

Hmm. Well. We’ll see.

To Olivia Ma’s great credit, Dan Gillmor, director of a the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the esteemed author of  We The Media: Grassroots Journalism By The People, For The People (which was released on a Creative Commons license, by the way), has given his hesitant approval of the project. Gillmore blogged his initial response to the online channel on the Center for Citizen Media website, stating: 

So far so good — another worthwhile experiment in citizen media. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works… But as they monetize this, I hope they’re going to find a way to reward the people who are doing the work. As I’ve said again and again, I’m not a fan of business models that say “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.”

I’m a little more skeptical of YouTube’s ‘Citizen News Channel’ than is Mr. Gillmor, though I will withhold judgement for the time being.  But, and just to keep things in perspective, I do feel compelled to remind people that YouTube is owned by Google, a publicly traded multinational corporation and a global goliath in the tech industry.

As of late, Google seems to have strayed a bit from their much-publicized motto of ‘Do No Evil.’ The company has been called to task for participating in what some have identified as unethical, media-related human rights abuses in the ‘developing’ world. Many feel that Google, and other western tech and info firms, have given away their moral legitimacy in China, for example, in order to cash-in on growing economic markets overseas.

The NY Times Magazine had a fairly comprehensive article on Google in China. I don’t personally agree with the equivocation made between offenses of capital and that of the state, as presented by columnist Clive Thompson, but this text will give you a good start on what amounts to a very, very complex issue. 

That being said, then, some folks are rightly concerned that media are increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people and with damning consequences on the quality of news journalism. Ironically, one of those concerned citizens is Dan Gillmor himself. In this YouTube video via PBS (will the irony never end?!?), Gillmor hints at the web censorship taking place all around the world (00:01:48). Though he doesn’t connect the dots as clearly as I would like, it is readily apparent that wide-spread restrictions on internet use by foreign governments are enabled in large measure by western (i.e., American) corporations that seek only to earn money abroad. And Google is right in the middle of this global phenomenon.  

For a more playful analysis, check out this animation entitled ‘iRepress’ from former journalist turned citizen animator, Mark Fiore.

So, in my mind at least, the potential in YouTube’s efforts to promote citizen journalism, incidentally or otherwise, is kinda behind the curve.  I mean, in Web 2.0 terms, they’re really, really late to the party. There are currently many well-established, NON-profit alternatives in the field of participatory news media, and their reputations haven’t been called into question with the fervor of a gazillion pithy tech writers. Here’s a brief list of the citizen journalism websites I frequent:

Indymedia
Witness: The Hub
Global Voices Online

The wisdom of the academics and media advocates notwithstanding, I guess I’d have to encourage people to avoid mainstream versions of citizen journalism. Start with what is already known to be truly humanitarian, not to mention supported by means outside the narrow agenda of capitalistic enterprise. Maybe Google (via YouTube) will make of a fool of me later on down the road. But for now, I will be holding the ‘Citizen News Channel’ at arms length.