3. ... they could scarcely afford to be anything but confident about
the agency of the written word and the power and authority
of fresh ideas.Various and multihued pamphlets and flyers,
densely printed newspapers, crude bulletins, circular letters,
and delicate, smudgy carbons--this was the stuff through which
SDS aimed to change the world. (15)
Friday, April 1, 2011
13. Tim:
How does this line up with the fears we all have to some extent
around Facebook’s or Twitter’s public/private obliteration? How
does this show us that Facebook is nothing new? How, though, has
Facebook’s public/private conflation far outpaced Max’s earlier
worries? Since people from all moments and spheres of your life
can now read your every thought, should we be writing more like
J-school grads and less like SDS letter writers? Why? Why not?
Friday, April 1, 2011
14. Tim:
Finally, did anyone have any thoughts about the heralding of digital
community journalism while reading this? In St. Paul and
Minneapolis during the RNC protests, there were narratives going
around about the importance of the citizen journalists taking video
with their phones and otherwise documenting the state of
repression happening on the ground. But reading this history, we
see very similar types of moves happening in these papers. How
important is the technology here? What is gained with the
internetz? Is anything lost? More to the point, can we dispose of
the pesky story that it’s somehow a total gamechanger for leveling
the journalism playing field?
Friday, April 1, 2011
15. Ben:
-After the Port Huron Statement in ’62, SDS tried to organize
around some issues of the Cuban Missile Crisis and there small
demonstrations were pelted with eggs. By 1965, after using the
communication technologies available, they organized the first
major national protest against the Vietnam War, leading 20,000
people to demonstrate in the capital. What all was involved in this
development? A new, direct, activist style of writing? The availability
of cheap printing? The “unimaginable” consequences of the Vietnam
war first facing a large population? And what would it take for a
movement in the United States right now to develop through new
communication technologies?
Friday, April 1, 2011
