In Search of "Conversation"?
Last night, Charlie Rose aired an interview with Evan Williams and Biz Stone, founders of TWITTER. They spent a lot of time grappling with the concept of "conversation" on the WEB, and the ability or lack thereof, of accomplishing that on TWITTER. Evan spoke of "creating a bird" to achieve this.
THE OWL was created in April, 2011, to reach those citizens, mostly non-white, who are ignored, maligned, or otherwise poorly served by our national media. A bird that "sees" in the dark; the owl is a powerful tool to reach a new, rapidly expanding audience.
Born in Missouri in 1939, I remember a world in which people who were not white had their own media, and had no difficulty "communicating" among themselves. Most of that was destroyed in the 60's and 70's.
Thanks to Google, Facebook, and Twitter, my blog, THE OWL, has spread rapidly in this country, and throughout the world. But "conversation", which requires effective feedback, is not something that has resulted. Twitter, to me, is analogous to the headlines of newspapers in our past. My blog, heavily documented with references to expand my messages, can, at best, provide information for the reader to hold conversations with their friends. My readers go "deep"; well beyond the headline.
I worry that popular technologies, most of them developed by my co-workers during my days in the military, may fall short in any attempt to provide images for those masses of non-white persons that world media ignores (except for those images that prove beneficial for wealthy and white consumers).
Communication between parallel worlds is difficult at best, but almost impossible when massive forces work to prohibit it. Communication within non-white parallel worlds are also disrupted or destroyed by current technology applications. Perceptions proliferate that serve to convince non-white consumers of media that they don't NEED to be reflected at all; not simply more, and more positively. I know of no successful efforts to restore the effective communication that many of us had before the 1960's. Reports of efforts to stymie Al Jazeera's reach through purchase of Current TV have surfaced recently. Junot Diaz of MIT, told Bill Moyers of the emotional difficulty that young students have when they struggle to speak the language necessary to break the spell of the pervasive white images in media.
If "natural" non-white images are successfully erased from dominant world media, their "voice" will follow.
Stay Vigilant!
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