Social Movements and YouTube
Well I’m finally done with the busiest semester of my life and have had time to catch up on the old blog roll. I continue to be fascinated by all things new media and intellectual property related so I’ve been trolling around various sites looking for the latest developments in the ongoing copyfight for copyright one of my favorite sites, Darknet, recently cited an article from in Computer World about a professor leading the fight in Canada against copyright restrictions.
I am fascinated as much with the cause (which I sympathize with) as with the means by which actors and organizations in the cause use media to capture frames and drum up support. One of the things I’m working on right now is looking at YouTube and how it is used by social movement organizations like those fighting for copyright to get their message out.
Traditional social movement theory has always positioned the media as a crucial institution/technology that can help movements push their agenda forward. The key has always been capturing the media…getting news and other outlets to talk about issues in a way that is favorable/resonant with society so that the movement’s ideas become the official ideas on a topic (by that environmental justice or copyright). So I wonder if YouTube is helping movements by creating a form of circumvention…a hacking of the old obstacle of media capture…or is the outlet limited…or are its consequences movement specific? At this point who knows but that’s the next research project in the works. Oh yeah and I’ve got another new project on the political economy of fans and video games too but I’ll talk about that one later 
