Instead of a lazy Saturday slurping down chai, my weekend kicked off with a panel on political blogging and social change at Vloggercon in San Francisco.
Kent Bye from the Echo Chamber Project spoke a bit about media, politics, and social change and shared some of his work. Ideally, collaborative media will bring a greater diversity of voices and perspectives into mainstream media. Bye also mentioned Essembly, a young startup that focuses on ideological matching as a way of bringing diversity to issues. The cool aspect to this: build a campaign with both red and blue constituents, if they happen to agree about your issue. I personally am a fan of the concept, since I only see disadvantages to America's current state of political polarization.
Independent filmmaker Brett Gaylor of Etherworks found that vlogging added substantial value to his documentary work. Gaylor's most recent project speaks to Canada's widening income gap, and he found himself cutting footage that revealed the individual face and personality of homelessness. So, the team took interview footage and created a site called Homeless Nation. If you click on a user's name, you can get his or her personal story.
The Homeless Nation videos show an evolution from documenting a community, to a community learning to document itself. The Canadian government provides some funding, and there are eight on full-time staff, but the outreach team is a bunch of video bloggers doing work on the ground. Individuals have learned that a video camera is a weapon, and that technology can empower while rallying the community to a cause.
Josh Wolfe thinks of his camera as weapon also - "the most powerful weapon known to man shoots 24 frames per second." Last July, Wolfe shot a protest at which a local police officer was injured. Six months after the fact, Wolfe was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. Now that he's exhausted his appeals, he expects to be held in contempt for not handing over his tape. Why is this being handled by a federal grand jury? The federal government claims that since it paid for part of the officer's police car, then it has jurisdiction. Should a videoblogger be left unprotected by shield laws? If this had happened with Fox News, would the demands be the same?
Gaylor commented that by enabling the homeless to represent themselves on the Internet, the project has given them a reason to go online. Seeing your own media get online, or discovering something that reflects yourself, is an important incentive for online participation.
What was interesting to me about this session was that neither the
panelists nor the attendees were soccer moms deciding that it would be
cool to video blog Jenny's game. Based on who was in the room (an
admittedly flawed mechanism for demographic-setting), video blogging is
empowering two core early adopters: indie film and video producers
seeking distribution, and nonprofits seeking affordable and effective
outreach. This is a good start, but social change will require a
larger, more diverse audience to become engaged.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys vloggercon video best practices vlogging nonprofit media technology
