I hope to be able to attend this:
Anna Everett, Professor
Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
3:30 to 5 p.m., UW Communications 126“Have We Become Post-Racial Yet?: Obama, Viral Media, and the Where U @ Generation”
Anna Everett investigates the phenomenal transformations occurring in American politics and grassroots activism led by youth with the advent of YouTube, the premiere video-sharing website, and such popular online social networks as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and Twitter, among others. What these powerful modes of interactive new media engagement share is the fact that they are driven by and promote a democratizing form of cultural production for the masses known as user-generated content (UGC).
This talk is interested in the ways that, for example, Howard Dean’s and Barack Obama’s political fortunes — and misfortunes alike — owe much to mobilized young people and the viral media juggernaut they inspired. More recently, how the “YouTube effect” and the “Twitter effect” have contributed to the Arab Spring with reverberations for the British Uprisings and the Preserve Labor and Occupy Wall Street movements. At issue here are social media’s revolutionary transformations of familiar geopolitical, socio-cultural processes, global political discourses, and youth cultures and activist practices.
Biography: Dr. Anna Everett is Professor of Film, Television and New Media Studies, and former Chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Published books and articles include Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949; Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, and her award-winning book Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. She is editor of Screening Noir: A Journal of Film, Video and New Media Culture.