social media

NAMAC Members and Affiliates: Bring your social media and communications questions to a FREE, informational and small-group consultation with digital strategist, Adam Schweigert! The consultation will be held online on Thursday March 14 at 11 AM PST / 2 PM EST. To join the conversation, register here! But register fast! Because this will be an open-foum discussion to provide specific guidance for your social media concerns, partcipation is limited to 15 attendees (first come, first-served).

"Business Man" image courtesy of Shutterstock.

In these first two months of 2011, we have witnessed an extraordinary sequence of events demonstrating the transformative possibilities of social media when employed in the area of social change.  While it is crucial that we not erase the specific contexts of activist engagement or the diverse organizing elements involved in particular political movements and protests, it is also clear that the tools of social media have played a vital role in an ongoing series of upheavals in Northern Africa and the Middle East.  Closer to home, I was intrigued by ongoing references to connections between events in Cairo and the labor protests in Madison, which circulated though a variety of social media from Flickr to Facebook to Twitter.  The continued linkage of these two very different political events, albeit tenuous or indeed maladroit, illustrates both the power of the new media forms as well as the global reach of the conversation around questions of democracy and social justice.

Storytelling is at the forefront of every stage of content creation and it is the theme of my second NAMAC blog 'travelogue'. Here I begin exactly one day after the SIEGE 2010 Expo concluded when the FutureMedia Fest kicks off at Georgia Tech. I offer my personal experience with computer-based media as a backstory.