"Be the Change You Want to See,"
Mahatma Gandhi
This posting reflects on the Grassroots approach to creating a multimedia digital portfolio for "Our 2020-Vision Campaign," in a Mahara Journal Format.
The Topics discussed this week will include, but not limited to, social bookmarking, photo editing sites, and who's controlling who, us or the machine (computer)? I happen to see our government as the machine, and isn't our government "For the People," and not for itself?
The Purpose is to reflect on how these topics relate to formulating something real, out of something theoretical. (i.e. a government for the People, out of a government Of the People and By the People)
Let me first start out with discussing "The Machine is Us/ing Us," by Michael Wesch, Asst. Prof. of Cultural Anthropology, at Kansas State University, because this really relates to why I'm learning to do this and also my painful experiences in trying to learn this.The very first thing he discusses is what I have the most difficulty with, that being the flexible nature of digital text. The ability to add links to anything and everything is awesome, or should I say the ability to look at the links added by someone else is awesome. Having little or no experience with any computers, software or Internet because our State believes this is a way of correcting people and/or growing our economy, has left me completely inflexible. My current problem is that my banner is not being recognized by the server?? Who knows, but I did stretch out some of these atrophied muscles to produce several campaign banners with scenes of Camel's Hump and layered with encouraging "Vote 2020" images and text to point people in direction of my name and position of governor being sought. I incorporated all this flexibility that Mr. Wesch spoke about, by constantly inputting my perseverance into the photo editing sites of PHIXR, GIMP, Photoshop, Flickr and Pixlr. The output really is only as good as the one doing the input (lol), but the embedded photo of my son and I (above) was photo done in PHIXR. Eventually I learned how to get some free downloads and trial memberships from Adobe Photoshop to do what I really wanted to do which was to find some iconic Vermont pictures and layer them with text for "Our 2020-Vision Campaign." The bottom line is that the machine is still using me because I don't have enough knowledge yet to completely defend myself from the machine hiding my work and dreams. This is not unlike our government hiding the truth from the people because the average person is not versed in the language of the law, nor do they have the time and money to defend themselves against the one-percenters' input into our government. Flexibility with our machines and our government will only be fully realized when we all have equal input.
Social Bookmarking and the del.icio.us website sounds like a phenomenal idea. I am one that loves to gather information, and I have often complained that our public schools suffer greatly from teachers not sharing their coveted, prized lesson plans that they don't want to share because of the hard work they put into creating them, but this social bookmarking avenue begins to breakdown the time needed to research issues. When I was in prison, we did this by collecting templates of cases we had won, and redistributing them to all the others being abused, illegally imprisoned or otherwise having their civil rights knowingly violated by our State officials. I haven't had a chance to investigate this site yet, but it is definitely for me in distributing and gathering facts about our government operations that everyone should know about. I am not worried about the amateurness of the folksonomy on these types of sites because we should all be looking at things with a critical thinking. Most of our government news is like "His-story," but instead it is their story, not our story.
These "Plain English" tutorial sites are fantastic! If you are like me and know nothing about everything on the computer, Internet or social media sites, this guy is your guy to listen to. I went from Social Bookmarking, to RSS, Social Media, Blogs, Social Networking, Wikis, Google Docs and Google Reader. This is how someone has taught the machine, which in turn is teaching me, and I in will then use to teach people with "Our 2020-Vision Campaign." I am in CT right now running a campaign with managers in Newport, St. Albans, St. Johnsbury, Bennington, Brattleboro, Burlington, Johnson, Jericho, etc. etc. and it is all through these multimedia avenues that I have just learned in the last month of being released from the clutches of domestic terrorism at its best.
The RSS way of having the news come to me will be crucial, especially since I don't have the constant barrage of local Vermont news flowing at me in CT. Also, I just don't have the time to be hunting it down with having to learn, manage and apply all these other campaign necessities. I have for the first time had a Facebook account and really enjoy it, but at some point I will have to branch out again to experience Twitter and others.
Even though our machines and our governments use us to get the input they need to work for us, it is still our responsibility to find out what they are hiding from us and how to stop that from happening. I am so thankful for the guidance I am receiving from CCV, my constituents, and this wonderful digital multimedia world. Now, if I can only outsmart it one more time to present our new banner.
I did it with a little help from my niece at the University of Kansas, Thanks Courtenay!! We changed it to a jpg file instead of pdf. I still am not really sure what I am referring to, but it is here. Then I enlarged it to fit the page. The vision lives on. Please register to vote. Thanks, Doug
I still can't figure out how to add my banner, one of these days. I really like it though.
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