Strategically Communicating

My pedagogy is converging with my collaboration in the emergence of a knowledge culture.

This week I learned, nearly three weeks after they’d started, of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Already interested media theory and social justice, I became more and more captivated with the movement as it sprang up here in Portland. I have several related searches open on my computer to monitor the message coalescing around it, observe the media’s treatment of the subject, and am at times engaging media and other interested parties in critical ways.

Meanwhile, my assigned reading this week included chapters on grassroots creativity meeting the mass media industry and the new relationship between politics and popular culture in Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture.

Jenkins practically predicts this kind of movement, even without discussing Facebook and Twitter (the book was first published the same year Facebook opened to the public) which have taken the convergence of grassroots creativity, folk culture and mass media to an epic and supremely personal level, for those who have access and choose to use them. That number may have increased recently when over 4 million iphone 4s sold in the first 24 hours after the product release. Smart phones and tablets have taken the convergence Jenkins writes about out of our living rooms and into our pockets.

Jenkins words on new media are hopeful, “If, as some have argued, the emergence of modern mass media spelled the doom for the vital folk culture traditions that thrived in nineteenth-century America, the current moment of media change is reaffirming the right of everyday people to actively contribute to their culture.”

Jenkins claims that knowledge based cultures “depend on the quality and diversity of information they can access.”

As Oregon’s public school strikes a deal with Google, what questions should we be asking about what students will have access to and what information will gain status and influence?

Do you know what your Klout score is?

Also, enjoy this cute little culture jam sent to me by a friend.