Saturday, August 7, 2010

Indymedia movement

I love the quirkiness of life, those unusual odd things, coincidences, parallels, deliberate attempts to avoid following a path to often travelled by too many, only to find yourself arriving at the same destination, standing in the same queue, realizing that there may have been tremendous value in watching and learning from the patterns of those before you, rather than trying so hard to be defiantly different. Of course that’s just my opinion for the day. Tomorrow I might change my mind.



What tweaked my quirk radar today was the reference to the Participatory/Citizen journalism emergence in Seattle by Leaver (2010) in the lecture notes for Blogging.

Leaver refers to it as the indymedia movement. It got me thinking about a recent documentary I watched about the emergence of grunge rock in Seattle in 1980’s. (Would have been on SBS or ABC about a two months ago)

My first memory of Seattle was it being the hometown of Jimmy Hendrix, I later found out it was also the hometown of Bill Gates and Ray Charles and Bruce and Brendon Lee. Then the grunge rock doco and now the birthplace (in a way) of blogging

So what is it about Seattle that promotes such progressive independent radical free thinking, great music, unique artists and people.

Could be the 100,000 people who annually attend the Seattle hemp fest or is it the reputation for heavy coffee consumption.

Six of the top Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in Seattle one of them being Amazon.com.

Seattle has the greatest concentration of multiracial Americans and 53.8% of the population over the age of 25 hold a bachelor degree, now that’s a recipe for a hotbed of something – surely?

And so the indyemedia movement seems to follow in the same line as other pioneers native to Seattle. They tout themselves as an outlet “ for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity”.

I for one just appreciate their efforts and the consequential evolution of the blog which allows me to be here right now passing on these thoughts to you.

SEATTLE - YOU ROCK!! (sorry, that’s a bit corny but I always wanted to use the ‘you rock’ reference somewhere somehow.

http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.html

http://seattle.indymedia.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle

Leaver, T (2010). Blogging lecture http://www.lms.curtin.edu.au/courses/1/305033-Vice-Chancell-1118175685/content/_1253746_1/dir_Web101.zip/Web101/2.1.html

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