Week 2: Mike Plett response to viewings

WITNESS was a bit of a revelation for me, because its mission is strikingly similar to an initiative I have been trying to advance in my role as communications specialist for a public-sector union. Like WITNESS, this initiative is about transforming personal stories into “tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.” My organization […]

Week 2: Kevin Gaboury

Unanticipated advances in technology over the past decade have been huge advantages to non-profit organizations like Witness and Engage Media. In 20 years, Witness has gone from the archaic Sony HandyCam to top-of-the line video and audio equipment and the unlimited potential of the Internet. For a laugh, check out this ad for the Sony […]

Week 2: Scott Anderson

One of the videos I watched on the EngageMedia site was a behind-the-scenes look at the 2013 Santri Film Festival. The gist of the video was that teens in Indonesian boarding schools made documentary films to not only bring people together, but to shore up some fallacies about their topic. One topic was about a […]

Week 2: Helen De Michiel – Permeability, Metadata & Danger

I would suggest that we are now beginning to venture beyond our comfort zones, and begin to see new emerging participatory media models from completely different perspectives that are outside our own western frames of reference.

The questions and critiques coming up around both these organizational sites (…as aggregators, archives, people’s histories, video evidence) are […]

Week 2: Natalie Henry Bennon, response to Engage/Witness viewings

This post focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of Engage Media and Witness’s websites/content, and how they both support democracy.

The Engage Media website’s strength is that it has a ton of content. However, I think the weakness is a lot of it appears disorganized and thus is hard to really delve in to. And […]

Week 2: Jamie Schaub – Human Rights and Engaged Media

This week’s online viewing assignment brought me back to a time in my life when I was a lot more ‘awake’ with things that were happening around the world. There was a time in my life when I participated in demonstrations to fight against blood for oil, apartheid, and police brutality (back in the early […]

Week 2: Lauren Marie Paterson – Witness, Engage Media, Digital Culture

After watching “Witness Your Environment,” by Kelly Matheson, exploring the WITNESS home page and YouTube Channel, and browsing the Engage Media site, it seems apparent that one of the major themes tying organizations such as these to similar projects like Scribe Video is the element of user-generated content.

According to dictionary.com, the definition of user-generated […]