Who bloggin' Cares?

Public Sphere can be defined as “the communicative institutions of a society, through which facts and opinions circulate, and by means of which a common stock of knowledge is built up as the basis for collective political action” (McNair, 1995)

McNair explains the development of the Public Sphere in the diagram below.

From this, we can see that the traditional role of citizens in the Public Sphere is as receivers of political information through the media, with limited feedback. However, due to the participatory nature of the Internet, individuals can produce and distribute their own political media. But to what extent have people been using this oppotunity to create something meaningful?

Amanda Koster explains that:
"Everybody seems to be rallying an audience with all this social media, so why not rally an audience, have that directed attention, but then tell stories that are actually going to make a difference in people's lives"



Campaign Project:

For this project, we were required to produce an alternative media campaign video (or a series of short videos) to raise awareness of a particular cause or issue. I based most of my research on the Battlefront website, which is an excellent example of the grassroots activism through social and digital media.

Rationale:

My group found it very difficult to decide on a cause or issue that we felt stongly enough to campaign about. Even to the point where we decided we just didn't care about anything. This revelation is the basis of our video: