Bart Cammaerts brings to our attention that the world not only is, but is made, and that activism is about agency and makeability of society. Activism can be direct or indirect, collaborative or confrontative, violent or peaceful, offline, online or both. Regardless of what, it is evident that media and communication play a crucial role in activist strategies and processes of social change. According to Cammaerts, media can be understood both as a medium to communicate, propagate and interact, as well as an arena for negotiating meaning. He stresses however that activism to be successful cannot be confined to the media-realm, but has to be an interaction between offline and online strategies for mobilising, organising and debating resistance.
From Reclaiming the Media (2007), Cammaerts, B. Activism and Media, pages 217-221.
Tagged as:
activism,
new media,
offline,
online
Hemlis aims to provide a private secure channel for interpersonal communication in the wake of the on-going revelations by Edward Snowden of NSA spying and wiretapping. Meaning ‘secret’, the forthcoming alternative instant messaging application is being built by Peter Sunde, Leif Högberg and Linus Olsson, three well known individuals within the Swedish and international hacking scenes and individually affiliated to prior projects including The Pirate Bay and Flattr.
This is an interesting project in relation to the idea of New Media Activism in that it is at the cross roads of a political project of sorts and commercial activity.
We’re building a message app where no one can listen in, not even us. We would rather close down the service before letting anyone in. Secrets are only secrets if they are secret.
Though the aim of this app is to offer a privacy enhancing alternative to existing services, they are not doing this as a charitable exercise. They intend to make the app profitable via the use of in app purchases. It also exists at the boundary of the open source software in that while the team involved are committed to the idea of and participate in open source projects they make it clear on the Hemlis site that open source is not in and of itself the answer.
We have all intentions of opening up the source as much as possible for scrutiny and help! What we really want people to understand however, is that Open Source in itself does not guarantee any privacy or safety. It sure helps with transparency, but technology by itself is not enough. The fundamental benefits of Heml.is will be the app together with our infrastructure, which is what really makes the system interesting and secure.
I find it interesting to see this project as a response to collective issues of privacy and surveillance, done so not in the terms of activism or as part of a civil society project but organised in the spirit of business with a focus on commercial sustainability rather than as an act of political expression as such. Does this then qualify as activism?
Tagged as:
activism,
civil rights,
digital,
new media,
privacy,
surveillance