Social Media for Social Change

SMSC Refresh

Posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 5:07 pm by Jeremy in process | No Comments

After a longer hiatus than anticipated following the abrupt halt of our previous iteration, I’m pleased to announce that the SMSC project has finally been reconfigured and restarted. The students — Ona, Hunter, Alie — and I are collaborating with my dear friends and colleagues at the Action Mill, Jethro and Nick, who bring tons of experience and successes (and failures, no doubt) as tactical media strategists, activists, and organizers to bear on the core focus of our work. The brief statement of the project is this: we will investigate how networked technologies and social media may be utilized to create hybrid public spaces where civic discourse and meaningful participation are facilitated, organized, and nurtured at a grass-roots level. Check the About page for a lengthier description and rationale.

I encourage all interested parties to follow along by subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed. We’ll be documenting our research, design process, and media experiments throughout the course of the project in anticipation of bringing this iteration to a close in May 2009 with some concrete prototypes for how better to use social media to foster more meaningful debate in the public sphere. We also welcome constructive comments — observations, questions, criticism — on the blog, or via email: jbeaudry at uarts.edu. Much more to come.