Eagle-eared listeners of 2SER FM may have noticed me popping up on the radio the other day - Leeanne Torpey interviewed me for a segment on The Fourth Estate about the use of social networking in politics (following on from the successful use of social networking in galvanising support for Barack Obama and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Kevin Rudd). It’s come out quite well, and you can now access a podcast of the whole 30-minute show at the 2SER Website.
The key point I ended up on, and one very much worth exploring further, is what to do with a network like Obama’s now that the election is over. (Labor’s campaign managers have just answered [?] this by rebranding Kevin07 as KevinPM - we’ll see how that works out.) For the Obama machine, this will be interesting to follow - after all, what exactly is his my.barackobama.com network? Is it part of the Democrat campaigning system, part of Democrat party structures, or even an element of the incoming administration? Is it a quasi-party in its own right, a political movement, a non-profit lobby group, or even a commercial enterprise (it is a dot.com, after all)?
It’s good to get offline for a while now and then. Last night I went to the Belgian Beer Cafe in Brisbane with some colleagues and friends. The mussels were lovely (as was the beer), but as well as getting some nourishment and giving my eyes a rest I got to hear about an interesting local campaign: Save Our Kenmore!
The reason SOK is of interest here is that they’re using blogs and social networking to coordinate protest about a controversial freeway development in Brisbane’s west. Some background: the plan being protested is part of the (ahem) “Moggill Pocket Sub-Arterial”, known as the Kenmore bypass, but its most controversial element might be that it doesn’t actually “bypass” Kenmore. The road is a State Government initiative intended to speed car travel from the leafy western suburbs into the city. Admittedly, the traffic situation on the western arterials is horrendous, but many Kenmore folk are worried about the impact on their suburb, lifestyle and land values, especially since it isn’t clear how directly the road will advantage them. Some residents (including my informant) are being threatened with resumptions.
As SOK’s main site puts it:
This site represents the effort of a large community united to find a better alternative to the Moggill Pocket Sub Arterial (Stage One and Two), which includes the so-called Kenmore Bypass. This proposed major road would slice through the reserve corridor from Kenmore to North Tivoli and many suburbs in between. Stage One starts by dividing Kenmore, and this is where all the threatened communities must make their stand to stop Stage Two.
Kenmore is a pretty solidly middle-class suburb, and obviously there are more than a few web-literate folk who are opposed to this road. They not only have a blog (which seems well-patronised) but a Facebook group!
Kevin Rennie is one of the really valuable and interesting voices in the Australian blogosphere. Labor View from Broome has for more than a year given the rest of us a real insight into life in one of the most remote and underreported areas in Australia.
One of my abiding concerns about Australia’s blogosphere is the way that it seems to reproduce the MSM’s “metrocentricity”. At least as far as the “A-list” is concerned, most bloggers are concentrated in the State capitals, with Sydney and Melbourne claiming more than their fare share. There are a lot of reasons for this. Of course, Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure is poor outside the capitals, but beyond that is the fact that metropolitan voices and concerns can count on a larger audience, which builds bloggers’ visibilty through traffic, inlinks and resultant Pagerank.
Hi all - Club Bloggery is back with prognostications about the future of the Australian blogosphere - cross-posted here from our ABC column.
Club Bloggery: Which way in ‘08?
By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, Barry Saunders
The blogosphere and online independent media certainly proved themselves capable of offering an outstanding alternative narrative of last year’s federal election.In several pieces during the campaign, we pointed out how the bloggers had led the way in offering participatory election coverage, and how organs like Crikey and New Matilda had managed to present a refreshing range of opinion that differed from the usual suspects in the MSM.
Now that the hoopla and buzz of the big event has died down, though, where to from here? Can the momentum be sustained during the fallow period between elections, and where the end of the Howard Government means that there is suddenly a lot less at stake in politics for a largely left-leaning, opinion-driven media space? And can such outlets move beyond opinion and start generating something like original news?
Pip Starr was a Melbourne activist filmmaker. He made powerful, intense documentaries about injustice. His documentary, Through the Wire is a heartbreaking account of the Woomera protests and a powerful indictment of Australia’s policy of compulsory detention of asylum seekers.
This site is a group blog run by the three of us - Barry Saunders, Jason Wilson, and Axel Bruns. What we’re looking to do here is to track and analyse the further development of the phenomenon of citizen journalism, in Australia - where we’re all based - and elsewhere; in fact, the recent federal elections in Australia in late 2007, and in the U.S. in late 2008, produced plenty of interesting developments for us to observe and examine. In the Australian context, we were also part of the team behind an ARC Linkage research project into citizen journalism which operated a hyperlocal citizen journalism site for the 2007 election, at youdecide2007.org.
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