connecting*the*dots

I’m on the North side of Greensboro, watching Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War with 15 other engaged citizens. House parties like this were set up all across the nation by Free Press.

How simple was it? I received an email from my brother after he was made aware of the showing through their local action alert email newsletter.

In any event, it’s great to see so many concerned and engaged citizens — mostly strangers before tonight — coming together to ask tough questions. Actually, it’s much more hemming and hawing at the incompetence of our Fourth Estate than dialog between each other, but I’m sure that’ll come in a few minutes.

I’m furious watching this broadcast, but it’s nothing new in terms of knowledge. I’ve been blogging about this fucking mess before we invaded, while we invaded and throughout the occupation and opined about most of the concepts and players covered in this brilliant narrative by Moyers.

If you saw this documentary — or plan to catch it in the future — don’t waste your time getting mad with politicians making decisions based on self-interest and power plays. Instead, think about your personal relationship with the media, journalism and reporting and how it shapes your world view.

Kent Bye has been working on a project since the run up to war called, The Echo Chamber Project. Paraphrasing his thesis: he’s attempting to present a large number of perspectives about both the media coverage in the run up to war and interviews with professionals from a large variety of industries in a manner that can be contextualized, remixed and redistributed to the live web by world citizens.

Why is that important?

Because the current journalistic methodology of reporting and “coverage” from centralized business domains is responsible for pimping this war into fruition.

Maybe if we all have the ability to participate in a methodology that allows for easily stitching together unbundled clips of perspective, reporting, coverage, etc. and contextualize it with our own knowledge and narrative, we can make a real dent in the mainstream business as usual.

Maybe we can even replace TV as we know it today.

Kent and I rapped about a bunch of the possibilities last year. If you have some time, check out the interview.

Andy is going to post an audio file of the conversation we just had post-viewing (which was really interesting). I’ll link to it as soon as he posts it himself.

UPDATE: Andy just posted the post-viewing conversation.