Mobile Story Telling and other Nebulous Academic Projects
October 18th, 2009
I am watching a video from http://bb2009.uscannenberg.org/ that cuts off early and has no scrubber, so take my frustration into account as you read this.
Mobile Voices Part 1
A case study in new media beyond broadcast, the Mobile Voices project empowers first generation immigrants in Los Angeles to publish multimedia stories about their lives and communities directly from mobile phones. This panel will explore questions of media production through demonstrations of the Mobile Voices project by some of its participants.
Nothing wrong with the projects goals, but the net affect of these kinds of schemes is to ride on the wave of mobile technology seeming to create a new practical application for it, but in reality, they are simply using the public interest in mobile technology to draw attention to their cause. The way they are doing this simply does not scale. If they wanted it to scale, they would contact us and use our Field reporter toolset and create an audio community on the spot that could be pointed to, listened to, added to, etc.
Looks like there was some grant money that simply needed to be spent. Go USC!
In all seriousness, there is a real need to bridge the gap between capability and acceptance of mobile storytelling, and I can certainly report on how it has gone for us in enabling event-based cell phone citizen journalism. Currently, the lifecycle of these kinds of deals is very short. When we quickly put ours together for the Obama inauguration and the April 15th Tea Parties, there was tremendous interest but little follow-through. The practical tools for enabling citizen journalists to contribute is all there on our website, but without practical application of the technology from social organizers, the whole situation feels like an awkward junior high dance where we really want to dance and don’t mind saying so, but those who can use the service already have a well funded entourage in tow that has keeping appearances at the top of their priorities. Show me the platform! Where are the stories?
Now, I would still love to dance with USC and other organizations, but at this point of seeing way too much posturing in the various industries we have tried to work with, simply calling them out like this appears to be the next best approach. I could be wrong and we were simply not findable amidst a sea of choices or the desire for video and pictures nullifies our otherwise highly elegant, easy to use, audio only solution. But it certainly seems to me that dialoging with a young, hungry and community minded startup like CelleCast is a highly effective way to move forward in mainstreaming audio social media. everyone has a story, and we want to continue to empower people to tell it right over thier phones, have it publish immediately on a branded project program page, as well as spread via Twitter. All the parts are there.
Always open to feedback,
Andrew Deal
October 20th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Hi Andrew, thanks (I think) for your post but I have to respectfully disagree with your assessment
>in reality, they are simply using the public interest in mobile technology to draw attention to their cause. The way they are doing this simply does not scale.
Actually, we’re customizing Free/Open Source Software content management system Drupal for mobile publishing from low-end cell phones via MMS. Everything we do is being released back to the Drupal community. Since lots of news sites, including community news, use Drupal, what we’re doing is very consciously and intentionally designed to scale. The resources we put into designing code around the needs of our community correspondents don’t just benefit vozmob.net, they benefit everyone who’d like to use drupal for mobile journalism.
>If they wanted it to scale, they would contact us and use our Field reporter toolset and create an audio community on the spot that could be pointed to, listened to, added to, etc.
Actually, people can already post audio to vozmob.net either by simply calling a phone number (that we set up using gizmo, although eventually we’d like to do that ourselves using free PBX Asterisk) or by attaching audio to MMS.
>The practical tools for enabling citizen journalists to contribute is all there on our website, but without practical application of the technology from social organizers, the whole situation feels like an awkward junior high dance
This part I can certainly agree with. There are plenty of projects out there that focus on platforms and tools, but too few that focus on the quite difficult, on the ground work of training and capacity building for disadvantaged communities to enter into community journalism. That’s why the vast majority of vozmob resources are spent on face to face workshops with immigrant workers, where they develop journalism and digital storytelling skills. We do this every week for over a year, and IDEPSCA (http://idepsca.org) has a long, long history of doing this, although in the past they focused on creating print newspaper and some radio and video projects.
I’m guessing you didn’t look that closely at what we’re actually doing with the vozmob project before you wrote this post. Please check out http://vozmob.net as well as our wiki (http://wiki.vozmob.net) and our code (http://code.vozmob.net); you can also see our development process (http://dev.vozmob.net). If you’d like to use any of our code, of course feel free, but note that it’s GPL so if you make improvements you’ll have to release them back to the community as well.
peace
Sasha Costanza-Chock
VozMob.net
October 27th, 2009 at 10:59 am
I just saw your comment back and highly appreciate it.
I was not aware of vozmob, but my point, admittedly as an advocate of our approach, is still that even with the tools presented and readily available, the desire to reinvent the wheel instead of working with us is a product of something other than pure promotion of citizen journalism. We have been at the top of searches on this subject for a while, so why no phone calls or inquiries? Are we doing something wrong?