akaKenSmith.com

Sadly, Posterous no longer exists so the links below are dead.

For those who might still want to listen in on the 4/6 Lundquist lecture about social media, literacy, and democracy, four segments of the talk are available as streaming audio with annotations giving clues to what each portion of the talk addresses.

Part 1 — Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman give a few clues about the nature of literacy in the public sphere.

Part 2 — Otto and Elise Hampel use postcards to protest against the Nazi government in Berlin in the early 1940s.

Part 3 — Twitter alters the balance of power in a case of corporate secrecy.

Part 4 — Some thoughts about the ways social media allow citizens to make their messages in the public sphere matter.