"Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet" is a book by Graham Meikle that has completly changed the way I am thinking about this research project. When I set out to do this study, my original aim was to examine the local media (activism) landscape in Boston and focus on how local organizations, individuals, collaborations, etc. were using new digital technologies in innovative ways for social change. While this is still very much part of my focus, Meikle's book inspired me to think backwards, in a sense. What I kept stumbling over was the fact that I, for the most part, already knew the answers to the questions I was asking. Not only that, but I can't possibly complete–with the time and resources currently available to me–a comprehensive study of all of the local projects relating to this topic. Attempting to do so would almost cause me to make political, biased, or uneducated decisions about who I did and did not include in my research.

But there was a specific passage in "Future Active" that made me stop and think about how I should focus my research, and has caused me to read other related texts differently. The passage addressed the concept of the "in-built politics of technologies". He used an example relating to film saying,

"film scholar Richard Dyer described how photographic media and cinematic lighting have been developed to favour the filming of white people–on the assumption that this was where the money was–to the extent that within the film industry 'photographing non-white people is typically construed as a problem.' Dyer traces how photographic innovation has customarily used the filming of the human face as its benchmark, and taken white faces as the standard. He describes how experiments with lighting, aperture size, development times, and the chemistry of film stock 'all proceeded on the assumption that what had to be got right was the look of the white face.' Technologies of photography, then, come with in-built politics."

Meikle desribes this in terms that recalls Marshall McLuhan: "Not just those messages that we think of as content, but those that are embodied within the form of the medium itself."

The digital technologies that I am interested in for this study–open source software, Wiki, Blogging, digital distribution platforms, virtual communites, electronic civil disobidience, etc.–may not have in-built politics that are as clearly defined as the example above, however, by using the same thinking and applying them to the concepts of the Internet as an "open system" that fosters creativity, sharing, conversation and democratic media versus a "closed system" that is profit-driven and one-to-many communicative and using local efforts as a case for the larger theoretical subject, I think I can write a much more interesting paper.

I have also often thought about the parallels between the radio and the internet, how each was established and what ultimatley became (is becoming) of each both in terms of use and of the interests that they serve. With the infrastructure for both radio and the internet being developed and funded by the government, each was initially touted as a revolutionary tool for communication, education, public service, etc. Now we see the Internet being commercialized in the same was that radio was. Yet both technologies have been extremely successful tools for organizing, activism and social change as well. I'm interested in exploring this connection further and thinking about it in terms of in-built politics…not from a perspective of technological determinism, but rather what it says about medium itself as new uses are developed that transcend the use for which it was originally conceived.

More on this text later…there is so much good stuff here.

Currently reading: "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People For the People" by Dan Gillmor
If anyone out there happens to read this, I welcome all your comments and suggestions.