Reframing the Story: Media Tactics and Interventions, Digital Dissent and Satire
Date Recorded: Nov 14th, 2008
Recorded At: Parkland Institute’s 2008 Fall Conference, Edmonton, Alberta
Recorded By: Conference Organizers
Duration: 56:30
Topic Background
In this lecture, Ms Boler ponders questions surrounding evolving media’s impact on culture. Today, she contends, the “social web” – epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube – creates new pathways for truth to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. She asks: In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? What is the appeal of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and “fake news”? How is digital media changing social activist practices?
For background information on the content of her talk, please see http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/depts/tps/Boler/Links.htm
Speaker Biography
Megan Boler is an Associate Professor, in the Department of Theory & Policy Studies, at OISE, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, and the editor of a number of books including most recently, Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (2008). She is also a poet, a writer of fiction, and is currently finishing a children’s story. She co-authored the Web-Based Teaching Guide to accompany The Corporation, a documentary directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, in 2003. Her research focuses on people’s creativity within digital media and is centrally focused on progressive politics, social movements, and social justice issues through the lens of digital political media. She is currently completing a three-year funded research project, “Rethinking Media, Citizenship and Democracy: Digital Dissent after 9/11,” through interviews and surveys she examines the motivations of producers of “digital dissent”–practices of digital media to counter mainstream media. She teaches philosophy, cultural studies, feminist theory, media studies, and social equity courses in the Teacher Education program, and media studies at the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.
PowerPoint Presentation: Download Here
For more information about Megan Boler visit www.meganboler.net