2005-04-10 - 3:03 p.m.
So I am sitting inside on one of the nicest days of the year so far with a hot water bottle on my mid-section due to crippling cramps. Lovely. It’s always my period that brings on a sort of existential crises (actually, I have one of those like every other day these days) and makes all the racing of my mind feel particularly intense.
I just spent a good portion of the weekend at the NYC Grassroots Media Conference (check out www.nycgrassrootsmedia.org), a really excellent event that is now in it’s second year. LJ and I presented a workshop on zine making, with a focus on using zines in community organizations, education and activist work (that is, expanding the idea of small, print media outside of the purview of the “zine world”). Our workshop went really well and it is always exciting to meet new people who are interested in zines, especially since I spend so much time thinking about their potential uses and also their limitations. The workshop reinforced for me how creative people can be with print media and just the fact that getting a bunch of people working in different, but related, fields together in a room to talk about their ideas and inspire and challenge each other is exciting and productive.
This morning I went to the “Meet the Funders” workshop and got to thinking how maybe a potential “career move” or a way to use the privilege I have to support community work is by working for a progressive foundation. Of course, this is incredibly, incredibly reformist, but I also know that change takes many forms and it was really cool to meet younger, dedicated organizers who have worked on “both sides” of the funding world (grant seeking and grant making) and thinking about how people who do grassroots organizing and are attuned to the needs and challenges of social justice work can push their agenda and educate the funding world to be more responsive to the needs of social justice organizations and thus (hopefully) get more resources and information into more activists and communities hands. I have mixed feelings about this, of course, but I also see it as a potential for someone like myself who inhabits a position of privilege and power in terms of race, education and class background and also knowledge and experience with social justice work to support all kinds of organizations. This also made me laugh that I am considering this as a potential way to position myself because it’s just what the amazing woman I have been interning for at P.O.V. would hope for me!
Also morning I went to a workshop entitled “Redefining Journalism” that was looking at the facade of “objectivity” in journalism and was exploring how ideas of “fairness” could guide activist journalists. However, it turned more into a celebration of the “blogosphere” by two of the panelists (who were very interesting, well spoken and smart, of course). Now I realize I am raising my critique of blogs on a freakin’ blog, so, take this with a grain of salt. However, I am also not saying that somehow by posting my barely edited thoughts and the in’s and out’s of my daily life processes I am somehow participating in a media democracy. (not that the panelists were making an argument as simple as this) My response to out and out celebration of technology is always to ask who has the tools to use and create (and read) content on the internet (and get their content read). Where does the power lie? It is still in the hands of the privileged and the educated. This does not mean that networking online is not a powerful, powerful thing, but I hold that it must always be connected to a real live constituency doing real organizing work, not just trading ideas in cyberspace. Because where does that get us in terms of actual change?
Yes, consciousness raising and education are important, very much so. I also worry about the extreme individualism of blogs. Where is the space for community and coalition building? For collaboration? And for collective action? Two of the panelists seemed to shudder at the mention of “collective” (as in, an editorial collective). Yet, in my own experience working with and being accountable to a collective has really helped me develop in my writing, presentation of ideas and political consciousness. I personally want to see blogs and internet magazines as one source of media among many, because really, there is no reason why blogs and other higher tech mediums should not work with the goals of more “traditional” activists, organizers and journalists to challenge a corporate stranglehold on information and increase media literacy and access throughout US society and the world. But maybe people are just more interested in solely amplifying their own voice? I wonder.
On an unrelated note, I am in my last 5 or 6 weeks of school. Though I have been fairly non-present in terms of social outings and communication, I want to warn everyone I will be disappearing into my own self-imposed Eleanor cave (after all this talk about community organizing, hah!) in order to finish my Senior Work paper (ironically, on zines and the politics of empowerment), silkscreening projects and a thousand loose ends. Thank you so much to my friends in Maine who have written me letters in response to this diaryland and those of you who read and write regularly, you will hear from me soon, I promise... until then I will be writing, editing and trying to keep eating healthy and not substituting coffee for meals.
