MediaCommons News

To the MediaCommons community,

MediaCommons and its constituent projects (In Media Res, The New Everyday, #Alt-Academy, and MediaCommons Press) have decided to join Wikipedia and other major internet publishers in a 24-hour blackout, to begin at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18, in protest against legislation currently before Congress that we believe would cause grave harm to free and open communication online, and particularly to critical media studies projects such as ours.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was recently shelved by the U.S. House of Representatives, but the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) is still active in the U.S. Senate. Both pieces of legislation pose a threat to the ability of networks like MediaCommons to explore new modes of media reuse and remix in scholarly communication. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent summary of SOPA/PIPA’s potential effects on free speech and innovation.)

We hope that you will join us in making the voices of scholars heard: contact your elected representatives, join the protest, and spread the word.

All best,
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, for the MediaCommons editorial board:
Avi Santo
Richard Edwards
Kari Kraus
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Jason Mittell
Bethany Nowviskie
Alisa Perren
  

PS: To learn more about SOPA/PIPA and other threats to open communication online, see Save the Internet. For more information on the SOPA/PIPA blackout, see sopastrike.com. Leave links to other useful sites by commenting below!

At some point on New Year’s Eve, round about the moment that Patti Smith was adapting The Who to “Occupy My Generation,” I got an idea. I would undertake a durational writing project that would reflect and engage with Occupy every day in 2012. The New Everyday becomes what’s new every day. So I have a new blog called Occupy 2012. It’s a way of saying among other things:

• it’s so not over
• we’re here to stay
• we’re winning

So this is where I’m writing and posting. For the Right to Look, which reflected on the amazing events of 2011 from the perspective of my now finally published book, will live on as a Scalar project that will try and pull together the various threads into a more coherent whole. For example: the anti-nuclear activism in Japan that followed the Fukushima disaster was instrumental in creating Occupy Tokyo. The day-by-day format of the blog makes it hard to follow such connections, while the non-linear possibilities of Scalar open up new insights.

So this is just an invite to the MC community to pop over to Occupy 2012 from time and time and I’d really love to hear your thoughts on the project.