Rules For Radicals: Strategic Interventions vs. New Media

Inside and out

2008-09-08T20:19:04Z

[...] And what appeals to me about Barack Obama is that, his background notwithstanding, he has little of the temperament of an organizer: It's not in his character to radicalize people, to create or stage a confrontation, the way Palin types in the "movement" like to do. Haven't we had enough of politicians who are organizers? Organizers have their place, but not even the greatest ones, Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., much less Saul Alinsky, should have been (or even thought they should have been) holders of public office. Part of what public officials do is bind up the wounds that organizers (who serve causes great and squalid) necessarily create. [...]

That's from Thomas Geoghegan's Slate.com essay "Hey, Sarah - Organize This!"

An Eklectyk take on Obama

2008-09-02T19:44:00Z

"A lot of hip-hoppers are saying things that Obama can't exactly endorse. So we wanted to make sure the video reached beyond Black America and could be something everyone could appreciate."

That's Trevor Parham, quoted in "New Obama music video puts Oakland in the spotlight," last week's Kamika Dunlap story for the Oakland Tribune.

Aside: I had the good fortune to meet Trevor, who just came back to Oakland from visiting the Democratic National Convention in Denver, two years ago at BlogHer in San Jose.

"We've had a few bloggers support us in the past week or so and it has really done a lot to increase our YouTube views," he said in an e-mail to me. "We're hoping that this song becomes an anthem for all Barack supporters over the next 65 days."]]>

Business and pleasure

2008-08-29T07:29:13Z

[...] This Obama campaign, which I have probably cursed by saying this out loud, looks from the outside like a well-run, contemporary business: seemingly the right mix of enthusiasm and discipline, encouragement and focus. I view organisations like that as a sort of minor miracle, because the working environment has changed so radically in the last decade that I despair of anyone getting it right. You're safer using the old disciplines, but at a cost: that's what makes your company or image appear distant and inhuman compared to the bumbling, chaotic but adventurous alternatives. Bush's skill was appearing human despite that kind of frozen discipline, and you only had to see how badly Gore and Kerry were at imitating the same relaxation to see the challenge of covering up all that machinery.
I suspect that if Obama gets in, they'll be an awful lot of Fast Company-style books written about this campaign, and how to build your business the same way.

That's how Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka post "the business of barack" (via an instant message from Cecily) ends.

]]>

[...] When you absorb the visuals, it doesn't come off like a political convention; it comes off as a mass gathering of ordinary people.

Somewhere, Saul Alinsky is grinning.

And that's the end of Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish post "Watching the Crowd."

Rinku Sen on change in community-based journalism

2008-08-23T00:27:35Z

SAJAforum: What have been the most significant ways in which you have seen community-based journalism evolve and change over the course of your career?

As media, technology and politics merge, it's become possible for people with few resources to create their own media outlets and disseminate widely. Communities of color are still struggling to get themselves into the mix, but there's far more video, blogging, writing and reporting than there was ten years ago. Activists of color know we're getting killed on cable news and in the blogosphere, so there's an urgency that I didn't feel from the field ten years ago. Giving enough focus to the storytelling remains a challenge -- getting specific, proving every point with reporting, finding people to tell the story through, carving up our journalistic projects into digestible pieces in the age of youtube, and just making sure that our production is high-quality enough to attract the unconverted.

Go read the rest of Anil Kalhan's SAJAforum post "Five Questions for Rinku Sen, Author of 'The Accidental American'"

Removing the symbol

2008-08-20T17:39:56Z

Come Downstairs Now's "long things" by Frances

[...] i end by saying, yes, let us protest, yes let us wear skinny jeans, but do not let this be the symbol of our activism. let the symbol of our activism be our activism. in other words, REMOVE THE SYMBOL! especially when symbols rely on the beholder anyway. [...]

Also: G.M.R.'s Dynamic Street Art post "Today's Street Art: The Stencil as Means of Social Protest," Colby Sledge's "College kids in Tennessee help to spread the green gospel" for The Tennesseean, Nikolas Kozloff's "Danny Glover, Haiti, and the Politics of Revolutionary Cinema in Venezuela" for The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Justine's "Sneaker Activism Pays Off...Well Almost" for Brains On Fire Blog.

Whose panel is it, anyway? (iii)

2008-08-16T07:10:52Z

So we're back to the question in this post's title. My answer? It'd be nice if it were mine, but I can't labor under any illusions of ownership. After all, Alinsky thought of half the title already, didn't he?

The answer I'm going with, then, is "yours."

If you vote for our panel, you get to offer your best suggestions about what rules for radicals might look like, what ideals and precepts might best survive the meeting place, the neo-nexus, of (for starters) activism, media and technology.

In the meantime, this is as good a place as any to try out some wonderful new blogging software from the fine folks at Six Apart, and to welcome anyone who wants to pitch in and toss some ideas around along the way. Thanks for reading.

Whose panel is it, anyway? (ii)

2008-08-16T06:42:05Z

While talking with Samhita last month, I remembered reading Laura Miller's Salon.com article "Barack by the books" a couple of days before.

[...] In Chicago, Obama worked for the Developing Communities Project, a church-based group following the grass-roots organizing principles laid out by Saul Alinsky. Alinksy, a Chicago native, famously organized the impoverished Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s and trained several generations of organizers, including César Chávez, before publishing "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals" in 1971. (He died the following year.) [...]

So I said "Rules for Radicals, Moves for Media." Then I thought, no, maybe "vs. Media."

I remembered Brian Stelter's New York Times article "The Facebooker Who Befriended Obama."

"In March 2009, people are either going to be dealing with media, organizing and technology by figuring out how to help Obama or combat McCain," I said. "Or, and let's be real, keep Obama on his toes. So he doesn't just do another epic fail like today's vote on FISA."

So we started looking around at last year's panel ideas, I consulted last year's list of panels I thought would be good to check out and she brainstormed in between meetings and training sessions. And we both agreed that it would be an honor to be on a panel with the other.

Now we just have to figure out how to make it happen. That, dear reader, may just be where you come in.

Whose panel is it, anyway? (i)

2008-08-16T02:59:02Z

One night a little over five weeks ago, Samhita pops up on Google Talk. She asks if I've put in an idea for a panel for next March's South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

I said I hadn't brainstormed things I'd wanted to do yet. Then I asked her how much time was left before the early-submission deadline: two days, as it turned out.

I asked her if she'd want to talk about making the relationship between citizens and media more equitable, and not just one charged by disruption, disengagement and distancing. I mentioned my panel from last year, "Roll Over Gutenberg and Tell McLuhan The News."

"What's on my mind this time around," I said, "is organizing."

]]> Buy N Large

Samhita listened to me ramble about how cool it felt to stand out at the Oakland farmers market back in mid-May and tell people walking past about what was going on at the paper, how important what we were doing was and what it could mean for coverage, for thinking ahead, brainstorming and testing strategies for the strange terrain ahead: a post-paper, post-broadcast, post-traditional dynamic.

Then she was talking about her media-organizing gig and wondering "how do we capture this moment of using online technology for media accountability, and have media makers, bloggers and media activists" involved.

And she asked me if it was something I would want to be a part of. And I said yes.

She's the DJ, I'm the Rapper

Then the phrase "old media checkers, new media chess" fell out of my mouth and, to her credit, she didn't make me dig in my heels by saying it was trite. Instead, she started talking about the people we knew and could call on: fellow bloggers, media activists, credentialed and grass-roots journalists, academics researching the intersection of organizing and/or media consumption.

And then something else fell out of my mouth.