Friend and colleague Sasha Costanza-Chock leads off the morning at Sun Yat Sen University’s conference on Civic Media with a talk titled, “Transmedia Organizing: Social Media Practices in Occupy Wall Street and the Immigrant Rights Movement”. Sasha begins with his personal journey towards a scholar of activism. He started his story with his work as an electronic musician in Boston as a student at Harvard, working to create multiracial and multicultural spaces around electronic music as a way of addressing some of the long-term cultural divides in Boston. That work led him to work on film audio for the Independent Media Center and work with Indymedia, documenting

This work on filmmaking turned into an investigation of distribution methods, which led him to work with the Transmission Network, a group focused on bringing independent media from around the world, especially to Southeast Asia to global audiences. He moved on to UPenn Annenberg, where he focused on media policy and went on to work with Free Press, an international NGO focused on participatory interventions into media policy.

Pursuing his PhD at USC Annenberg, Sasha found himself working with the immigrant rights community, a key community in LA, which has a massive immigrant population. His work with immigrant groups led to the Mobile Voices project, which has gone on to become vojo.co. This platform, which allows people to share their stories via mobile phones, is an example of a tool for transmedia activism, activism that uses a variety of media tools to seek change.

Sasha suggests that a broad view of media ecology suggests we take the new affordances of digital media seriously. Social movements have always used new media to express their identity and articulate their issues. But we need to look beyond tools and platforms, and consider the political economy of media systems. What companies are involved with these new spaces, how are they regulated, who benefits from these new systems? What are the new affordances of these tools? Who has access to tools and skills in these new spaces?Read More »Sasha Costanza Chock at Sun Yat Sen University

Professor Jing Wang is the organizer of our international symposium at Sun Yat Sen University. She’s the founder of a project called NGO2.0, which teaches… Read More »Civic Media at Sun Yat Sen U: Jing Wang and NGO 2.0

Dean Ran Yang of Sun Yat Sen University’s new school of Mobile Information Engineering starts her talk by showing pictures of Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Seve… Read More »Civic Media at Sun Yat Sen U: Chinese social media innovation

Eric Klopfer is a professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and teaches in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department. His presentation at Sun… Read More »Civic Media at Sun Yat Sen U: Mobiles, ads and games