NEW MEDIA & PSAS (FROM MY VERY GOOD FRIEND, NICOLE CANNON)

Why We Care & How We Take Action

First Things First

Remember to Update Websites (Bloggers)!

Cool Things: Border 2010: Photographs by Alejandro Cartagena and David Rochkind

Approved by ProvostSelected photographs from award-winning photographers Alejandro Cartagena and David Rochkind will be exhibited in "Border 2010: Photographs by Alejandro Cartagena and David Rochkind". Photographs in Border 2010 have been selected from Cartagena’s People of Suburbia and Rochkind’s Heavy Hand, Sunken Spirit. All were created within the past few years and depict the people and places of Mexico, with a particular focus on its northern border. Cartagena reveals the mundane aspects of everyday life in a suburbia that is strangely still and empty, while Rochkind captures the anxiety and changes wrought by drugtrafficking and policing. These worlds exist in tandem in northern Mexico today. The exhibition runs through Saturday, December 11, 2010.

UTEP’s Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts is located off of Dawson Drive at the south end of the Sun Bowl Stadium.Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. For more information call (915) 747-6151, e-mail rubincenter@utep.edu or visit http://rubincenter.utep.edu or www.facebook.com/rubincenter.

Cool Things: Contra Flujo: Independence and Revolution

Approved by ProvostThe Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts presents Contra Flujo: Independence and Revolution.

An exhibition that features seven contemporary artists from Mexico City who use new media to explore the centennial of the Mexican Revolution and the bicentennial of Mexico’s independence. Contra Flujo means “against the flow”. The artists in this exhibition create pieces that directly engage and challenge the discourse of progress that is being commemorated in the wave of celebrations taking place across Mexico during the year 2010. They confront the viewer with nuanced representations of contemporary life in Mexico, including pieces that investigate historical dialogue of revolutionary ideals, the role of the media in creating the Mexican imaginary, and problems along the U.S. - Mexican border. The artists use a wide range of technology including sound, video, kinetic sculpture and web-based pieces to create site-specific works, including several cross-border art pieces commissioned specifically for this exhibition. Artists featured in Contra Flujo: Independence and Revolution include Marcela Armas, Ivan Abreu, Arcangel Constantini, Gilberto Esparza, Ivan Puig, Rogelio Sosa and Laura Valencia with Lola Sosa.

Visual Arguments

On a daily basis we encounter visual arguments–from "buy this product" to "believe this ideological position."

Why make visual arguments?

New Media

New media is a broad term that emerged in the later part of the 20th century to encompass the amalgamation of traditional media such as film, images, music, spoken and written word, with the interactive power of computer and communications technology, computer-enabled consumer devices and most importantly the Internet

New Media

What distinguishes New media from traditional media is not the digitizing of media content, but the dynamic life of the "new media" content and its interactive relationship with the media consumer

Another important promise of New Media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content.

New Media - Social Change

New Media has been used extensively by social movements to educate, organize, share cultural products of movements, communicate, coalition build, and more

Allows people to take advantage of the Internet to produce a grassroots globalization, one centered on people rather than the flow of capital

New Media – Social Change

Iran 2009-2010 Election Protests

Against the disputed victory of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and in support of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi occurred in major cities in Iran and around the world starting June 13, 2009.

New Media – Social Change

Twitter The U.S. State Department urged the company to

postpone a scheduled network upgrade that would have briefly put the service offline.

Twitter delayed the network upgrade from midnight American time/morning Iran time to afternoon American time/midnight Iran time "because events in Iran were tied directly to the growing significance of Twitter as an important communication and information network", but at the same time denied that the State Department had "access to our decision making process".

New Media – Social Change

Twitter – Iran

Aside from the use of social networking sites by protesters to gather and exchange information, individuals around the world used these sites to gain news and information on the events in Iran.

Due to strict foreign media censorship by the Iranian government, social networking sites became the primary source of information, videos, and testimonials of the protests. Major news outlets, such as CNN and BBC News, gained much of their information from using and sorting through tweets by Twitter users and videos uploaded to YouTube.

The use of social networking became central enough to the reports from Iran to make Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown state that the way the internet has democratised communication has forever changed the way foreign policy can be carried out.

New Media – Social Change

Flash Mobs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUaz

LI9k

Free Hugs http://www.freehugscampaign.org/

It Gets Better (Joel Burns) http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterpr

oject

Audience

Brainstorm who your audience is.

Who needs to hear it most?

Depending on your goals, you may want to target the audience most deeply involved in the issue, those with the least information about the topic or people with the most resources to devote to the cause.

So what?

Decide what you want your audience to do in response

The best visual arguments give the audience a call to action & provide a concrete step they can take.

Endings

Include contact and resource information in the last frame of your PSA or at the end of a brochure.

Include at least a website and also a contact person and phone number if appropriate.

The contact information helps your audience get more involved in the issue.