Computers, Society, and Nature

Here’s a great site from Japan for kids that doesn’t talk down to them. It’s Kids “Create Your Future”, a site that both explains environmental problems and offers concrete ways for kids to positively impact the environment.

The following example onHow to have a car without owning it offers a very sophisticated way of framing the problem and embedding the solution, which could be public transportation:

We buy cars because we want to have the freedom to travel conveniently whenever we like. In other words, we want the service provided by the car, not the product itself. It’s important to understand the difference between the service of a product versus the product itself.

Umm, maybe we should try these arguments out on adults.

Parents in Pennsylvania are seeking to block the teaching of intelligent design in their children’s schools.

The [Dover township, Pennsylvania] school board, represented by the Thomas More Law Center, a religious-based nonprofit firm, took the position that this was about freedom of speech.

“Intelligent Design theory is really science in its purest form,” said Pat Gillen, a lawyer for the board. “It promotes the search for knowledge that embodies the essence of a liberal education.”

This argument is part of repackaging ID. Not only do proponents seek to distance themselves from the Christian god. They seek to change the actual definition of science, from hypothesis testing using empirical evidence of the natural world to a more general search for knowledge. This, of course, includes everything that is researched and taught at universities and schools. I guess we no longer need separate arts or humanities faculties. Everything is science.

Music has always provided a fertile medium for expressing protest. One thinks of the American folk singers of the 1960s, like Bob Dylan and his song, “Blowin’ in the Wind”. But it goes back much farther:

In the 18th century, songwriters responded to current events by writing new lyrics to existing melodies. “Benjamin Franklin used to write broadside ballads every time a disaster struck,” said Elijah Wald, a music historian, and sell the printed lyrics in the street that afternoon.

This quote comes from a NYTimes article on music and protest in an Internet age. The Internet allows many issues, from the plight of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico to the actions of the International Whaling Commission, to reach a world-wide audience. This can also be done to music, the most recent events in New Orleans being a case in point. Kayne West, an American rapper, made a comment on a nation-wide telethon to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. West said that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” The idea for an online music video was born.

Mr. Randle and his partner, Micah Nickerson, wrote a rap based on the stories of the people they were helping. On Sept. 6, Mr. Nickerson sent Mr. Randle an instant message containing a music file and one verse, recorded on his home computer. Mr. Randle recorded an additional verse and sent it back, and 15 minutes later it was up on their Web site: www.k-otix.com.

“Within the first 24 hours, it was downloaded 10,000 times,” Mr. Randle said. “It crashed our server.” Since then at least five sites have posted the song, with downloads of 100,000 each, he said.

In New Brunswick, N.J., Marquise Lee, a freelance video producer, heard the song and thought it called for a video. He downloaded scenes of African-Americans in New Orleans, intercutting them with images of President Bush and unrelated scenes from a Kanye West video. “It was a first-person account of the struggle – ‘Come down and help me,’ ” said Mr. Lee, 25.

The video remix is here. A cool side note is that the video samples another “only on the Internet” flash movie, which protested the Iraq War.

Thanks to Garry Peterson for the tip.

While conducting some background research on virtual and physical activism this weekend, I found a very creative form of activism which I have already met (you probably did too), but which I did not know by name until now. It is called culture jamming and I find (after a short research) that activists, on the net and off, have been using it very effectively.

Culture jamming aims at turning company logos into a social and/or environmental critique against the corporations they represent by transforming them slightly, giving them some new meaning.

During their 2000 campaign against Coca-Cola, aiming to make a point against the company’s practice of using refrigerating units containing HFCs, Greenpeace turned the Coca-Cola logo and slogan into a climate change message.

In its effort to spread the message (the image), Greenpeace used various tactics to alert activists worldwide. They released a report that exposed the company’s practices, which they sent out by mail and in electronic version distributed by email. In collaboration with Adbusters Media Foundation, they put up a website (www.cokespotlight.org) which featured the climate change bears advertisement.

Coca-Cola Co. moved swiftly to introduce more sustainable practices.

With the use of the Internet to spread the message, culture jamming has become a powerful activist tool. One reason mentioned in the article is that NGOs (even small ones) are able to make use of the Internet, as well as ‘having an increasing capacity to compete with multinational corporations on the brand-name level’.

I think, that the success lies in the image itself. It is self-explanatory: everyone knows Coca-Cola and almost everyone has heard of climate change. It is easy to make the connection. The nature of the message (easy to understand and creative) and the fact that this image can be sent anywhere in the world in the matter of seconds must make CEOs think hard about the consequences a similar campaign is likely to have on their company’s image.