The documentary, The 4th War, is powerful: an overview of the struggle against corporate domination that covers all of the major struggles over the last decade [link to doc]. Big Noise Collective Media produced the film out of New York City. Michael Frante and Suheir Hamad do the voiceover.

Some fave quotes from the doc, "We spoke with fire..."[about Zapatista creating change in MX]. The Zapatista March on March 10, 2001 brought out more Mexicans than ever in Mexico City. In 7 years, democracy was pushed into reality. The film weaves together footage from social movement networks challenging anti-corporate globalization movement. The doc. is basically propaganda, but powerful and from the APOC perspective, shows the power of the Open Source/Free Software "Hacker Ethos" where digital film collectives collaborate/create content world-wide not for the profit logic, but for a knowledge ecology. Pekka Himanen is the intellectual underpinning here and worth checking out (he's only 33 and prob. the top Euro intellectual).

The World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil is the most amazing example of this global effort to change the status-quo.

Here's a link to our class blog from Week 6.

In discussing Downing's Radical Media, we dealt into Habermas' notion of the public sphere. Nancy Frazier critiqued Habermas for ignore the massive inequities in power; there are actually counter-publics where different groups of people on political actions and would use these counter-publics to formulate their movement. Then, they would need to bring their counter-public to the larger world. This relates to the blogasphere as it easily becomes segregrated from the public good as one can just read blogs that reinforce your own views, then never move into the public sphere.