Mark Phillips: The American Question
2/24/03: The Web changes everything.
Jerry Lembcke's interesting study
The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam,
contains a survey of newspapers, newsletters and leaflets published by
in-service GI activists opposing the Vietnam War. Quoting a work by Waterhouse and Wizard,
he notes,
Production of any newspaper takes a lot of work, and the GI press is certainly no exception.
GIs who work all day on the base devote their evenings and weekends to this task. They
solicit stories from GIs who visit the coffeehouses or whom they meet on base, write these
and other stories they have covered, reprint stories from other GI and movement papers,
and analyze news stories of national importance. Layout must be done properly, and a
printer must be found who is willing to print a "dangerous" publication
(sympathetic printers have faced much the same harassment as the coffee houses themselves)
for a reasonable price. Money must be raised to pay the printing costs, and safe
transportation must be arranged to and from the printers; otherwise the paper may be
"lost" or destroyed en route.
The Web changes everything. Printing costs are no longer an issue. Neither is the search for
sympathetic printers willing to brave official harassment. Neither is confiscation, nor
destruction of printed material, nor transportation and distribution. Activists working in
the Web medium can reach potentially global audiences at virtually no cost with almost no
lag time. Halle-freakin'-lujah!
Trouble Tickets exists in part to help activists make best use of the new resource. The
materials collected by our
Web
project are written by Web professionals specifically for activists with limited budgets.
We hope to contribute real-world, that is, business world experience to the
milieux of our activist work.
It's likely the Web will turn out to be the single most important resource in the history
of activist practice, combining the attributes of the printing press, the telephone, the post
office, television, radio, the committee meeting, the townhall meeting, the homestead and the
ballot box with new ones which hadn't yet been possible. Activists can use it to reorganize and
improve nearly everything we do, from the ways in which we communicate our ideas to the ways in
which we structure our organizations and internal decision-making processes.
Halle-freakin'-lujah!
Back to 2003 menu
Back to Mark's Blogspace main page
More Information
- "All roads lead to Tehran", Phillips
- "Complexity", Phillips
- "weblogs: a history and perspective", blood
- "You've got blog", Mead
- EatonWeb Portal
- BlogHop
- Blogger
- Blogroots
- The Pepys Project
|
