Posts tagged with 'Politics'
As I mentioned on Twitter, it’s just getting too hard for many of us to keep track of all the awesome conferences that happen every year. I’ve missed so many this fall, even ones happening in NYC, just because I hadn’t done any curation. Conferences can be a drag, but as a freelancer/consultant/author without a formal organizational structure, they’re often where I make the best connections and have the most fun with my colleagues.
So! An early New Year’s resolution: I’m gonna try to get on the ball for next year. Already thinking of SXSW, Allied Media Conference, US Social Forum, Personal Democracy Forum, Women Who Tech, America’s Future Now, NonProfit 2.0, NTEN and more; what do you recommend in the social tech, media, politics, activism, and social justice fields? Conferences & unconferences, big ‘n’ small. Leave ‘em in the comments (links to conferences would be helpful), and I’ll publish a big list in the next few days.
Domesday Books by electropod on Flickr
Some of you were around Friday evening when I put it out on Twitter and Facebook, but wanted to get a chance to share it with the rest of yous after a busy weekend. Hurray! The official title of my book is…
Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking
Many folks participated in the surveys that brought us to this point, and I just want to thank you again for all that. I’m super-psyched!
More about the book:
As you may have heard, I’ve signed a contract with Berrett-Koehler to write a book about social media this summer. But! I need a tremendous amount of support — monetary, moral and otherwise — to get it done in the super-fast timeframe that I’m working within. Can you help? Here’s the email that I sent out to all my friends and colleagues. Please use the ChipIn to the right, or click here to make a donation.
Update, 7/13/09: Two things. There’s a post on my progress and thoughts here, and also, to reflect the offline donations I’m getting, I’m now gradually lowering the goal of the ChipIn.
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Friends, colleagues, clients! Lend me your ears…
I’m writing you with some exciting news that makes me very happy. I just signed a contract from Berrett-Koehler publishers to write a book I’ve been imagining for a long time. But it’s going to take some very hard work on my part, and I hope you can help me succeed.
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There’s a ton of great material out there on the nuances of the Iranian election and protests, and I just want to quickly throw some thoughts into the ring.
First, from an American media perspective, here was another great moment for folks to demand what they wanted to see covered on national news media. What a moment of media dissonance: As protests erupted — and in some cases, turned violent — in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, major broadcast media in the US had little to no news on the events at all. By using the hashtag1 #CNNfail to collect all of the dissatisfaction on Twitter, Americans were able to shift the focus of the conversation and eventually influence CNN’s decision makers to start covering stories by Sunday.
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Many of you know that I have this great political relationship with my mom– she’s fun to talk to about politics because she’s one of the few people I know that doesn’t tow the line of any political ideology. She goes for what she thinks is right, and I have a huge amount of respect for that.
In the last couple of years, she’s become more involved in fact-finding missions, and likes to investigate different candidates’ and parties’ viewpoints to help her make up her mind. So, when she received an email from the GOP asking her to watch Governor Jindal’s response to the President’s speech to Congress last night, she told me she was a little annoyed by it. Intrigued, I asked her why. Her response:
Well maybe I’m misunderstanding, but this just hit me wrong:
“…the way to lead is not raising taxes and putting more money in the hands of Washington, D.C. politicians.”
and then -
“Please make a secure online contribution of $2,000, $1,000, $500, $100,$50 or $25 today to support the RNC’s party-building and candidate recruitment programs.”
I’ll hold further comments until I’ve had a chance to hear the speech.
Go Mom! tee hee hee…
UPDATE: Rachel asked me to record it in my operator/announcer voice:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
(download the MP3 for your own use or remixing pleasure:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
)
Via Beka:
Dear World:
The United States of America, your quality supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage.
The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located. Replacement components were ordered Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, and have begun arriving. Early tests of the new equipment indicate that it is functioning correctly and we expect it to be fully operational by the end of January.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage and we look forward to resuming full service — and hopefully even improving it in the years to come. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Very Truly Yours,
/The USA/
Through the brain of Christopher Gandin Le and the artistry of Matt Wuerker (whose art I have the pleasure of working with every month at the Hightower Lowdown!), I present to you our interpretation of what happened Saturday morning with the First To Know TXT. tee hee.
Ah yes, the trilogy is complete: my third launch in Launch Madness concludes the flurry (for the moment) of WordPress sites I’ve set up for various folks. This one is promoting AlterNet’s new book, Water Consciousness: How We All Have to Change to Protect Our Most Critical Resource. Edited by AlterNet’s own supremely awesome Tara Lohan, it’s an incredible set of articles, analysis, ideas… you name it, it’s here. Some of the artwork’s just stunning, too, and working with such a great piece makes it easy for designers like yours truly to implement a complementary website. Hurray!
For the last few years, I’ve been struggling with where I find myself on a political spectrum. Sure, I’m on the left. I call myself a progressive and feminist. I know that I’ve grown more than distasteful of electoral politics (which once interested me fairly significantly), and that Hurricane Katrina was the moment that I threw up my hands in complete frustration and rage at the general state of affairs. I’ve dabbled in arts activism, local community organizing, sociolinguistics education, feminist activism, tech empowerment, you name it. None of it seems to singly suit me anymore, and most of it angers me. I’ll say it: I have anger issues. Hello, my name is Deanna, I have anger issues. (That one was for my therapist, everyone wave at her– she’s back there in the corner, waving back at you all.)
More than anything, I’ve been a bridge-builder for most of my political career. I come from working class, conservative roots, and I have been fueled in the past by a passion to build understanding between worlds that don’t talk to each other. A lot of that has to do with the tight relationship that I have with my folks; I find myself wondering how they would react to things that I’m working on, or how a particular issue is framed. Far more than I do now I often used them as guinea pigs: Pop’s the hard-line conservative, Mom’s our swing voter.
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Thought I’d finally sit down while I have three seconds to breathe and jot dot a couple of things I wanted to let folks know about:
- I went to SWSXi, and was largely unimpressed. There wasn’t a the sense of forward-thinking that I expected, nor the ground-breaking innovations. The parties were so-so. I had the best time hanging out with grrls from the feminist blogosphere, and with my Hightower co-worker, Laura. Oh, and note to anyone organizing a conference for thousands of geeks: please make sure the wifi actually works at the convention.
- I’m speaking at two conferences coming up here in the near future: Facing Race, here in NYC on Friday; then Women Action Media up in Boston on March 31 & April 1. Guess what I’ll be talking about? That’s right, politics and technology, focusing on social media. YUM.
- Er, I feel like there was more than this. Hrm. I seem to have lost all eight trains of thought. More when I get them back…
