3x Problem Statement (What Now? / Why Now?)  (Due week 9)  (Group)

•  What is the historically specific event at the intersection of digital media and social justice that your social action project will respond to? Introduce historical, political, cultural, social and/or economic explanations related to the broader topic accounting for this specific event. (250 words)
• Ethan
• Catie

•  Explain the ethical and/or political goal(s) of your social action project. Explain its ethical and/or political significance as your collaborative considers what it hopes to achieve. (250 words)
• Joel
• Ashley

•  Please include in your proposal answers to the practical questions of your proposed social action project including: who, what, where, when and how. (250 words)
• Matt
• Jason

3x Literature Review  (Due week 9) 

Conceptually, situate your social action project AND the event(s) that it responds to at the intersection of digital media and social justice. Accomplish this in two steps by surveying the literature about:

A. (Individual) The historically specific event including the varying issues, perspectives and debates within and/or forming its conceptual boundaries; (250 words) 

B. (Group) The form of the social action project that you have selected and how to produce and stage such a project (500 words)

• Joel

Introduction part 1

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -Ben Franklin. In the society we live in today everyone has a voice because of the interconnected devices such as phones and computers. Recently, everyone found out that it's now more a double sword than anything with NSA collecting all of our information. As quoted by the one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, Ben Franklin refers to the whole reason we seceded from Great Britain, to have freedom. The present state of the America is not what I would call "free" anymore. Obama claims that our country cannot have 100% freedom and 100% security. Well, apparently the NSA is catching terrorists left and right? Maybe we are and the government isn't telling us, but what about Sandy Hook or even more importantly the Boston Bombers? The so-called full proof system should have set off some alerts for 2 suspicious guys going to Chechnya and buying all the ingredients to make pressure cooker bombs. We sacrifice a lot for a system that doesn't even work. With all the big protests we were able to create like occupy wall street, why is America just rolling over and accepting defeat in this case. We have voices why stop now? The government, the establishment built to protect our civil liberties, is violating the exact thing it vowed to protect. This isn't right for the government to have all of our personal information, it isn't freedom, it isn't America.

Introduction part 2

"We the People is a section of the whitehouse.gov website, launched September 22, 2011, for petitioning the current administration's policy experts. Petitions that meet a certain threshold of signatures will be reviewed by officials in the Administration and an official response will be issued.On August 23, 2012, the White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips released the source code for the platform.The source code is available on GitHub, and lists both public domain status as a work of the U.S. federal government and licensing under the GPL v2." As described above "We the people" is a government created site that makes it possible for anyone to make a petition that could be sent to congress. The petition that you make needs to reach 25,000 digital signatures with 30 days or the petition is killed. Now even after the petition gets 25,000 votes the government reviews it and obviously can reject the petition, but the point is sending a message more than anything. 25,000 people supporting a single cause definitely sends a message and lets the government know the people's opinions. I think this is a very appropriate approach in trying and get some change or even some noticeable attention from the government for this majorly opposed privacy issue. This social action is simple and applies to the audience who is opposed to the NSA spying. Anyone who has access to the internet can share this idea via social media and have it go "viral". I think anyone who uses social media is opposed to the NSA spying because it affects them most of all. I also think this social action is great because it's easy, private (among peers), and can be done on your own time. 

Viral Videos and Social Action

            I chose to blog about how much change can come out of video supporting a cause that goes "viral". Viral is a term used on the internet to describe some sort of media that gets insanely popular in a short amount of time, most of the time this "media" is a video. One example of this was "Kony 2012", which was a video depicting an ongoing issue in Uganda consisting of a militia overlord that recruits kids into his army by terrible means. The video then goes on to tell you how you can make a difference by contacting govt. officials about the issue and donating money. The video correctly used pathos, logos, ethos which is one of the many reasons the video got so popular. The main reason it got so popular was because it evoked emotion, at first in a sad way but then towards the end the viewer feels empowered and obligated to do something. This video alone got 98.5 million views, raked in millions of donations, was on just about everyone's Facebook, and ultimately pressured the international govt. to get involved. The campaign took a turn for the worse when the spokesperson of the video was arrested for "masturbating in public", but that's besides the point. This campaign did so much from a social action standpoint by just posting a 30 minute video. That's all it takes in this day and age to get millions informed and to act on an issue. The internet is pretty crazy.