Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

Media140 comp: and the winner is…

Last week, I offered one reader a two-day pass to Media140, a Sydney conference that’s part of an international collaboration seeking to answer the question: “What is the future of journalism in the social media age?”

In return, I asked you guys what you thought the best journalistic use of social media you’d seen was, and why. There were some great responses, but the one that came out on top was from Jacinta Isaacs. Jacinta wrote:

Burma’s Saffron Revolution: In August and September 2007 tens of thousands of monks led what became the biggest protest in Burma’s history since the country’s 1988 popular uprising. It was journalists’ use of Burmese bloggers’ contacts, leads, and eyewitness accounts that ensured that much of the brutality that took place during those days made it into our television or newspaper reports, despite the junta’s shutting down of the country’s nationalised ISPs. It was through these bloggers’ accounts that we saw the now iconic bloated body of a monk floating face down in a muddy pond and heard rumors of the junta’s secret mass cremations. It became clear that, far from being usurped by citizen journalists, mainstream journalists and bloggers needed each other, and even more so in a repressive media environment.

Media140 founder Ande Gregson explains: “For me this embodies the power of ‘social’ media. A repressive regime can be exposed through the simple means of a network of individuals using a community to relate information about a given event to a global audience in real time without any censorship or control, fundamentally undermining the very foundations on which certain political regimes are founded and built.”

Big congrats to Jacinta. And for everyone else, you can still buy tickets here.

via littlem:heuteund: ABC News Online

7:10am Wake up via text message. Skim read.
7:11am Check email on phone.
7:12am Hang on, why is my bedroom tinted orange?
7:13am Open blinds. Holy shit, the whole world’s turned orange!
7:14am Bomb? Chemical attack? Climate change?
7:15am Jump online and go to newspaper website. Ah, dust storm.
7:16am Re-open blinds, take photo (not the one above - I don’t live near Sydney Harbour) and MMS to boyfriend.
7:18am Leave bedroom and marvel to flatmates.
7:20am Jump on Twitter.
7:25am Jump on Facebook.
7:30am Post to Tumblr.

Sydneysiders woke up this morning to a Fanta-tinged city. Seriously the trippiest thing I have ever seen in my life.

“The most powerful protest we can make is love” - celebrant at the same-sex marriage rally in Sydney, yesterday.

Last year, when Californians voted to remove the right of same-sex couples to marry on the same day that Obama won the presidency of the United States, some of the Americans on Tumblr suggested that the generational divide in the electoral results meant that, in the end, California’s - and the many other US states that have voted likewise - actions would be in vain. “The future belongs to us,” I remember one writing.

I have little doubt that they are right, or that the same applies here in Australia, where a couple of thousand Sydneysiders marched for gay marriage yesterday. In time, and possibly a few changes of government, someone - probably the Labor party - will legalise gay marriage. They’ll do it incrementally - first rights, then civil unions - but they’ll get there eventually.

But is eventually good enough for such a fundamental civil right? The rally cry “gay, straight, black, white” is a good one, because it draws a parallel with a prejudice most people have now moved on from.

As for the ceremony itself? It was beautiful, with vows for both the demonstrators and the 80+ couples involved, and an explicit recognition of what a massive and at times difficult commitment marriage is. Marriage is as much about community recognition and support as it is about the couples involved, and the ceremony brought this to life. Speaking of how indigenous people were also once excluded from the instition on the grounds of their being too “infantile”, it was, said the celebrant, a mark of Sydney’s LGBT community “growing up” (although I don’t personally believe that marriage and maturity are one and the same).

In true blogger style, my friend Monica and I were pretty snap happy. Here are some of the people and placards we saw. More photos on Flickr.