Activism without Borders

RE: ACTIVISM: RE-DRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF ACTIVISM IN A NEW MEDIA ENVIRONMENT BUDAPEST, HUNGARY OCTOBER 14-15, 2005 The two-day, international conference RE: activism: Re-drawing the Boundaries of Activism in a New Media Environment was organized by the Centre for Media and Communication Studies at the Central European University (CEU), the Centre for Media Research and Education at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Open Society Institute. The conference organizers set out to understand how the boundaries of activism are redrawn in the age of new media. Those in attendance, despite having never met prior to gathering in Budapest, seemed to share a common ground, an understanding that the new, networked, mobile, and digital media and communications infrastructure does indeed create new forms of social organizing as well as grassroots alliances among people who were formerly divided along territorial, institutional, or disciplinary lines. This sense of immediate connection was nothing out of the ordinary, considering that many had already been in touch via e-mail or were aware of each other's activities through blogs, mailing lists, or Web sites. The night before the conference's official commencement, an audience of academic researchers, journalists, artists, and cultural and political activists gathered for a screening of Yes Men (2004) by Chris Smith, a film that documents the media pranks of the globalization-critical activist group of the same name. The opening and keynote speeches on Friday suggested a shift of potentially historic proportions with regard to how power is distributed, exercised, or opposed within our societies. The speakers, Yehuda Elkana, rector and president of CEU; Michael Delli Carpini, the dean of Annenberg; and Saskia Sassen, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, all stressed the responsibility of properly understanding the nature of this change in order to employ new media technologies in ways that best serve the needs of those who are far from centers of wealth and power--creating more open, equal, and sustainable societies. In contrast to this hopeful general introduction to the changing mediascape of cultural, political, and artistic activism, the paper presentations and panel debates carried the discussion to a more concrete level, focusing on specific cases, issues, and approaches in four different fields: the new media use of locally-based civic movements, Internet-based activism as the potential foundation of an emerging global civil society, the effects of these communications technologies on the structure and functioning of public sphere in democratic systems, and the ways in which mobile and Wi-Fi networks and locative technologies change the way we use and experience the urban fabric. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Yochai Benkler, a professor at Yale Law School, set the stage for the second day of the conference with his keynote speech presenting very clear examples of how nonprofit, grassroots, self-organizing models of knowledge and culture production proved far more effective than centralized and organized projects with similar aims and a strong profit interest. Benkler raised the issue of the need to renegotiate the social contract that governs the rights and benefits of consumers. The panels continued where Benkler left off, investigating the political economy of peer-production networks; the significance and boundaries of the culture jamming phenomenon as a strategy for dissent; the possibilities and copyright issues of digital archiving; and the tasks, challenges, and possibilities of state intervention in the age of global, digital networks. Particularly inspiring were presentations by Paula le Dieu, who persuaded the British Broadcasting Corporation to open its archives for creative reuse; Samuel J. …