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"January 12 marked the anniversary of the devastating earthquake that shook Haiti last year, killing more than 230,000 people and leaving several million inhabitants of the small island nation homeless. Though natural disasters are common, the humanitarian response this time was different: New media and communications technologies were used in unprecedented ways to aid the recovery effort. A report recently released by Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities, with support from Internews and funding from the Knight Foundation, takes a critical look at the role of communications in the crisis and recommends ways to improve the effectiveness of utilizing media in future disaster relief efforts. (The Knight Foundation is a major funder for MediaShift and its sister site MediaShift Idea Lab.)"

In the vanguard of the Marines, the press corps had already stormed Somailia. Now we will see more of the famailiar pictures of grotesque human degradation, with foreign angels of mercy ministering to starving children, juxtaposed with images of trigger-happy teen-age looters. Such pictures prompted President Bush's military adventure-now they will justify it. The camera can't lie, we are told. But anyone who has watched a Western film crew in an African famine will know just how much effort it takes to compose the "right" image. Photogenic starving children are hard to find, even in Somalia. Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the conduct of film crews in hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers, dashing to film the agony before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When the Italian actress Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film her feeding a little girl-three times. This is disaster pornography.

The Challenge Posted January 16th, 2008 by admin "It's a familiar scene. Following the onset of a major disease outbreak or natural disaster, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and the local community must join forces and act quickly to alleviate suffering. You, your colleagues and groups that don't normally work together now need to communicate, assemble teams, share information, make plans and coordinate a response. Yet despite everyone's best intentions, a wealth of resources, deep expertise and tremendous effort, you still face challenges in trying to work together. The response once again proves confused, inefficient and far less effective than it should have been. As a population waits for help, delays mount up, resources are wasted and too little arrives too late. Will the cost, once again, be measured in human lives?"

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add

"humanitarian agencies are almost never held to account for doing wrong, even as they do not hesitate to take credit when they do good. What's more, I wrote, the humanitarian claim of political neutrality is a fiction: humanitarian action always has a political consequence, and one cannot deny responsibility for it. My focus was on humanitarian responses to armed conflict (rather than, say, natural disasters, or peace-time economic development) and on how, time and again, aid serves to cater conflicts, or to transform a crisis into the status quo. "

The Panoramic Photograph Collection contains approximately four thousand images featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits. These panoramas offer an overview of the nation, its enterprises and its interests, with a focus on the start of the twentieth century when the panoramic photo format was at the height of its popularity. Subject strengths include: agricultural life; beauty contests; disasters; engineering work such as bridges, canals and dams; fairs and expositions; military and naval activities, especially during World War I; the oil industry; schools and college campuses, sports, and transportation. The images date from 1851 to 1991 and depict scenes in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. More than twenty foreign countries and a few U.S. territories are also represented. These panoramas average between twenty-eight inches and six feet in length, with an average width of ten inches.

We live in a world where we can watch disasters and suffering unfold around the world. New technologies mean that every war, every famine, every hurricane can be covered live and direct. But do we actually notice what is happening to those involved? Polis Summer School student Andrea Abril has been thinking through the moral dilemmas. This is her report: Hannah Arendt, the German political theorist, wrote about the "Politics of Pity". Firstly , she made the distinction between those who suffer and those who do not. She also wrote that 'seeing' and 'looking' are considered as different concepts because sufferer and observer are physically distant - despite the closeness that modern media brings. This creates the "spectacle of suffering", unfortunate people are observed by those who do not share their suffering, who do not experience it directly and who, as such, may be regarded as fortunate people. This theory can be applied to sufferings representation in media. Audiences are observers of the misery of the unfortunate but within a distance, which is not just geographical, but also emotional.

Episode III - Enjoy Poverty is the second in a series of three films by Martens that raise issues regarding contemporary image production. For Episode III Martens travelled for two years with his video camera in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area marked by humanitarian disaster, questioning why the Western 'poverty' industry are benefactors rather than the people in the images. Working with Congolese photographers, he attempts to guide them in earning a living from poverty photography - a project doomed to failure. Episode III was screened at London's Wilkinson gallery for several weeks this winter, and during that time Martens also spent an evening discussing his work with ArtReview's J.J. Charlesworth. This is the second and final part of that

Dorothea Lange: The Photographer As Agricultural Sociologist By Linda Gordon To a startling degree, popular understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s derives from visual images, and among them, Dorothea Lange's are the most influential. Although many do not know her name, her photographs live in the subconscious of virtually anyone in the United States who has any concept of that economic disaster. Her pictures exerted great force in their own time, helping shape 1930s and 1940s Popular Front representational and artistic sensibility, because the Farm Security Administration (FSA), her employer, distributed the photographs aggressively through the mass media. If you watch the film The Grapes of Wrath with a collection of her photographs next to you, you will see the influence.1 Lange's commitment to making her photography speak to matters of injustice was hardly unique-thousands of artists, writers, dancers, and actors were trying to connect with the vibrant grass-roots social movements of the time. They formed a cultural wing of the Popular Front, a politics of liberal-Left unity in support of the New Deal.

Terrorist Bombings: From Stopped Time to Still Life Posted by Hariman in visualizing war Representation in any public art today has to include using old forms to capture what is distinctive about our time. Eventually new forms emerge, and we should ask what might become the artistic conventions of a "catastophile" society in which disaster and violence are fatal attractions and spectacular sources of energy. One image that might be on the cusp of old and new is this screen shot of a bombing in Sri Lanka:

This article was looks at the role of new media in Sri Lanka and mentions other places. It briefly looks at the politics and history of the conflict in SL and the problems (assassinations, kidnapping, threats and deportation by the government and police)  of conventional reporting from SL. Can Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) and new media help promote human rights and good governance?\n\nNew media and ICTs can be used by illiberal regimes as well as by civilians, but overall it can be used to strengthen democracy, record violence and holds those responsible up for public scrutiny. Mobile phones are redefining our idea of what a journalist is. online reports and bogs are unstoppable because they are decentralized. there are all ways more bloggers if a few are arrested and there are ways around the system even if some sites are blocked.\n\nSri Lanka has many mobile phones among low income groups. It also has low internet costs. But there need to be understanding of the potential of this media. people need to be motivated to participate in governance and policy beyond just at election time.\n\nInternet is 2 way communication making people feel more connected. everyone has a equal voice. Blogs can be used to show conflict and phones with cameras can add images. New media and citizen journalism is different to e-goverment initiative (where gov will open up info for public and present it online)\n\nNew Media and Citizen journo can play important role in info, relief and conflict management and in providing news pictures from disasters and conflicts. SL citizens found a ways to express concerns when mainstream media was cut off. Currently most material comes from english speakers in urban areas, but has the potential to give voice to all citizens. It is also very useful for collecting ststs such as deaths etc.\n\nRealtime video over highspeed internet offers more possibility of having many TV camera man rather than just 1 film crew.\n\nGroundviews.org

Photographic truth and manipulation February 23rd, 2009 We know photographs can be false yet we want them to be true. Indeed, the desire for photographic veracity has persisted, perhaps even intensified, even as knowledge about image manipulation becomes more widespread. Reflecting on the Oscar ceremonies, MediaGuardian has documented the widespread use of Photoshop to enhance celebrity photographs in fashion and gossip magazines. Every cover, says one media insider, has been altered to some degree, with some of these changes exposed in the "Photoshop Hall of Shame" and "Photoshop Disasters". So common is the practice that when an October 2008 Newsweek cover of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was not airbrushed, conservative anchors on Fox television complained that this amounted to liberal bias. (Fox knew about the political power of such changes because it had earlier manipulated the photos of two New York Times journalists it wanted to discredit).

Research paper from 2008 plotting the evolution of Flickr and examining it's emerging role as a community forum for disaster-related grassroots activity.

Episode III - Enjoy Poverty is the second in a series of three films by Martens that raise issues regarding contemporary image production. For Episode III Martens travelled for two years with his video camera in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area marked by humanitarian disaster, questioning why the Western 'poverty' industry are benefactors rather than the people in the images. Working with Congolese photographers, he attempts to guide them in earning a living from poverty photography - a project doomed to failure. Episode III was screened at London's Wilkinson gallery for several weeks this winter, and during that time Martens spent an evening discussing his work with ArtReview's J.J. Charlesworth. This is Part I of that discussion.

Blackboard Collaborate software solutions offer a social, interactive learning experience with virtual classrooms, online conferencing, instant messaging and more collaboration tools.