Phillips Seminar Papers
From digmovements
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[edit] Seminar Papers
More will be added as I find them.
[edit] Paper 1
Bob Ostertag's People's Movements, People's Press seamlessly blends the telling of
social movements and the media that covered and distributed the news of the movement to
those involved.
I was particularly interested in the section where Ostertag covered the Gay Liberation.
It was interesting to know the challenges and fallout that the Queer community faced as far
back as the early 1920's because the only information I've been exposed to in regards to
Homosexual movements in what is going on currently. I never new that the history went that
far back. The most I've ever heard from my grandmother was, “We didn't have that sort of
thing when I was growing up.”
I was really impressed with the way that Ostertag displayed information. Instead of
continuously quoting information and disrupting his own voice, he integrating facts and quotes
Like there were his own, and thusly made the text entirely more readable. Less like a report
(which is ironic considering that is what it started out as) and more like a work of fiction. This
has been the only non-fiction text I have been compelled to continuously read. It was
refreshing to not have to struggle with a book for class.
People's Movements, People's Press was an engrossing read. I was dully enveloped in
the text, and how it almost effortlessly delivered information to me in a way that made me
want to keep going.
[edit] Paper 2
T.V. Reed's book “The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to
the Streets of Seattle” tries to explain different social movements through the arts that inspire, are
inspired by, and change through out the movement.
When I first read this, I was skeptical that the metaphor of arts as social movement would be
clear and useful. How could one show the struggle of the civil rights movement through the songs that
were sang. How can you capture feminist movements by looking at poetry. It didn't seem possible.
As I began to read though, I found myself more and more enthralled with the text. Not wanting
to read it because I didn't think it would do what Reed wanted it to do, but at the same time, I was
interested because it The Art of Protest was introducing concepts and facts about movements that I had
never encountered before. I had always seem Martin Luther King Jr as a leader of the civil rights
movements, not a reporter of them. I continued reading just to see what else I hadn't learned yet.
I found through reading that, perhaps Reed should have left his metaphor behind while writing,
and moved onto just the facts. Much more interested in reading about the history and learning more
than I ever had in school, I was only a bit put off with the arts sections of the text, and found myself
wishing that they weren't there at all.
The Art of Protest was an informing text, and I am looking forward to finishing it. However, I'm
not sure how much of it I'll be reading, and how much I'll be scanning through to pick up what is
interesting and useful to me.
[edit] Paper 3
The more that I read of Cyberactivism, the less and less I'm enjoying it. I find it difficult to read
essays written so long (in computer time) ago. I understand that many of the ideologies of
cyberactivism are still standing, but the Internet is different today than it was 10 years ago, 5 years ago
or yesterday. It's really impossible, I think, to merely look at the Internet and discuss whether or not
it is a community. I think you have to delve in and, not only read the bulletins, and study the people
that create them, but get in up to your elbows and see the dirty, nitty gritty politics of the Internet.
People have become more than just the words that they type on message boards. People have
become videos and songs and pieces of art. And attempting to judge whether or not the Internet is the
right outlet for all of this can't be done from 2003. It has to be done from this very instance, this
moment, this nuance in time. Because it will never be the same again.
When I read this book. I don't see it. I don't see people delving into Internet culture to find out
what it really is. Instead I see a clinical cold exposition on what the Internet might be. But I guess thats
what I get for growing up on the Internet, and not coming from a time when there was no online world
to watch.
This isn't really an examination of what I read, I guess, but it's the reaction I'm having every
time I open this book. It's like listening to someone talk about me, and knowing they're getting
everything wrong, but being unable to speak up and tell them that they are.
[edit] Paper 4
I found the speculatory half of The Art of Protest to be much more interesting and readable then
the first. It was interesting reading about the WTO riots in Seattle. I had lived to see them, but I never
actually knew what they were about. And the writing style of T.V. Reed made things easier for me to
understand. Again, I actually found myself enjoying reading, like I was reading a fiction novel rather
than a report, study, or some sort of informative text.
I never had a concept of grassroots anything before. I've always figured that the protesting I've
seen on television or read about in the newspaper was a group of angry or uninformed people that had
taken arms against something did not like.
But with the realization of the Internet, I began to explore things like blogging and grassroots
journalism. Though, this book, along with People's Movements, Peoples Press, have greatly informed
me on what it actually takes to begin, maintain and bring to the publics eyes. I have a much more
informed, educated, and respectful view on those that put themselves on the front lines for their cause.
I'm grateful I've read this book, and it shall forever remain on my bookshelves, and be
integrated into my own curriculum when I begin to teach at my own educational facility.
