Lidia Naskova

Lidia Naskova — 2 Comments
27
Oct 15

Online environmental activism– does it work or not?

By Lidia Naskova

“You can send a press release, and it’s maybe not something media outlets will pursue as a story. But when six million people have seen it, they’ll cover it”

(Travis Nichols, Arctic communications manager at Greenpeace in The Columbia Journalism Review, November, 2014).

The benefits of using media activism online are many nowadays and I found two very interesting examples of where smart online media strategies may help social movement organizations to get messages rapidly out to the public, alter the public opinion about a matter or raise awareness, and consequently changing decisions with the help from the pressure from consumers.

In 2014, the environmental organization Greenpeace launched a YouTube video that was part of a campaign set out to pressure the company Lego to dissociate them from a partnership with the oil-company Shell that had been going on since the 1960s. Greenpeace targeted Lego as a part of a viral protest against Shell’s plans to drill after oil in the Arctic, and in the video, Lego characters were demonstratively placed in a Lego-built Arctic getting slowly covered with oil, along with the slogan that “Lego: everything is NOT awesome”. Continue reading →

Lidia Naskova — Comments Off on Anonymous video blogging as a tool for freedom of speech on the Internet – what role can participatory media projects play today and in the future?
26
Oct 15

Anonymous video blogging as a tool for freedom of speech on the Internet – what role can participatory media projects play today and in the future?

By Lidia Naskova

Communicating through blogs is a relatively new phenomenon; however, today many people are becoming more and more accustomed to read and comment on various blogs on a daily basis. Being an academic blogger since 2000, Walker Rettberg (2008) discuss the essence of blogging, of how people most commonly blog today, of how media relations looked like before blogging became a common practice as today, and how possible developments of communicating through blogs in the future may look like, among other things. According to Walker Rettberg (ibid):

“[b]logs are part of a fundamental shift in how we communicate. Just a few decades ago, our media culture was dominated by a small number of media producers who distributed their publication and broadcast to large, relatively passive audiences. Today, newspapers and television stations have to adapt to a new reality, where ordinary people create media and share their creations online. We have moved from a culture domination by mass media, using one-to-many communication, to one where participatory media, using many-to-many communication, is becoming the norm” (31). Continue reading →

Lidia Naskova — Comments Off on New media activism within the context of war
26
Oct 15

New media activism within the context of war

By Lidia Naskova

After my first blog post about participatory journalism and new media that are used to increase societal discussions within countries that has a restricted and rather controlled media climate such as Angola, new questions were raised about how new types of medias are used, and for what purposes they are used under even more restricted conditions, such as, for example; during war.

How does new media activism look like during contemporary war in the information age and is war reporting different in the new media landscape from when countries are in peace? As well, does the use of new media provide further civil participation for certain groups in societies, or do they solely challenge mainstream media outputs? This blog post will attempt to put some light on these issues. Continue reading →

Lidia Naskova — 2 Comments
20
Sep 15

Can new media activism promote social change?

By Lidia Naskova

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During the last decades, we have seen how new technologies have altered as well as eased the ways of how we can communicate with each other around the world. This blog, for example, is a perfect sign of what new types of media really enables us to do. We are four people, situated in four different places around the world and we are still able to communicate our thoughts to each other regarding new media, activism and development and we may choose who to share this information with. Continue reading →