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News from the Future of Public Media
This week’s map: of cats and censorship
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Mar 13, 2008 at 3:26 PM
Each week between now and our Beyond Broadcast conference, I’m examining an online media map, searching for the role that public media plays within it. This week’s map is a project of Global Voices. Called Access Denied, it tracks online censorship and anti-censorship efforts of Web 2.0 content around the world. Like many of the new participatory maps, it uses Google maps as a platform.
What does this map tell us about public media? Well, if you believe as we do here at CSM that publics are central to creating and sharing public media, this map demonstrates the crucial role that both ISPs and governments can play in fostering or frustrating public media projects. Of course, not all censored content has a public role to play, but the ability to freely communicate is a baseline for both citizens and media-makers seeking to address shared problems.
Over at the O’Reilly Radar site, Where 2.0 conference chair Brady Forest reports on an interesting principle that Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices is proposing, called the “cute cat theory of activism.” Basically, the more people who use a platform to post content about their charming pets, the less likely it is to be shut down. So if you like public media, start snapping those LOLcats shots!
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