New Media Documentary: Technology for Social Inclusion

I recently discovered a very interesting lecture from Sharon Daniel on new media technology on Youtube. She is a professor of Film and Digital Media and Chair of the Digital Arts at the University of California. Her research is focused on the use and development of information and communications technologies for social inclusion. She is engaged in an effort to use technology for social inclusion through the production of new media documentaries in which new media and information technologies are deployed as a means of giving voice to the experience of socially, racially and economically marginalized people. She is commited to ‘’participatory culture’’ – in her scholarship she traces a thread through social theory that ties the potential for self-representation to social change. She sees herself as a ‘’context provider’’; she explains the role of a context provider as someone who does not speak for others, but induces others to speak for themselves by providing both the means or tools and the context, where they can speak and be heard. What connects all her projects is a desire to affect social change – first, by providing technologically disenfranchised communities with access to media tools and information spaces, and second, by facilitating collective self-representation across socio-economic boundaries. She sees the internet as a public space and her work as a public art. During the lecture, she talks about some projects that she helped start – Palabras, Public Secret and Blood sugar – and she thinks of them as works of art.
In 2005 a project named PALABRAS was started. It is a set of tools and interfaces, designed to facilitate collective self-representation and also an expanding network for ongoing collaborations with nonprofit organizations that serve marginalized communities that don’t have access to media and information technology. Palabras addresses communities of place and it focuses on collective authoring. So it is intended as a tool for workshops in which groups are formed and collaboration is encouraged – central is the process, not the product. Workshops are often held in sites where there is no internet connection, and then uploaded later to the project database.
Public Secret is an online audio archive of statements by incarcerated women that reveal the secret injustices of the Criminal Justice System, and other works in progress. The goal of the project is the flow of the content and consecutive the revelation of those secrets and injustices.
Blood sugar examines the social and political construction of poverty, alienation and addiction in America through the eyes of those who live it.
She says her work constitutes an intervention and refusal to except reality as it is, so by employing voices she challenges the audience to rethink the paradoxes of social exclusion. She hopes her work will fulfill the role she thinks new media documentary practices and information technologies should play (practices that involve empowering speech, changing perceptions, asking tough questions and making radical demands).
Although the lecture is not so short, I hope you will still see it, because it is interesting and it gives people something to think about. You can find the lecture on this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiHBxCDleus.

And if you are interested further in the described projects, you can find them on this links:

Palabras: http://palabras.ucsc.edu
Public secret: http://publicsecret.net
Blood sugar: http://bloodsugararchives.net/

It is amazing to see that new media technology can be used for such great causes.