WebWork
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Tech Tips & Tools For Change
Katie Arnup at Unifor is the first Canadian unionist I’ve seen, to date (besides me), to use a badge on Facebook: a small logo or other graphic in the corner of a user’s photo. It’s an inexpensive way for union members to show their allegiance to, and play a small but collectively important part in, campaigns such as ... Keep reading…
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Meeting Members’ Needs
I suspect I was being baited, as a LabourStart emailer when, out for dinner with some union friends recently, I was treated to an “email is dead” screed. The argument was that email has become so ubiquitous and routine that it gets no real attention. And because so much of what we receive is junk, unless the message is coming from someone we trust, we delete it without even opening it.There’s some truth to that, particularly regarding trusting the sender. To which my response is: get t… Keep reading…
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The Digital Divide Where We Live
I need a list of things that I should be reminded of regularly. Age, or perhaps resilient enthusiasms that fly in the face of reality, are the culprits behind my forgetting. Top of the list is that the digital divide isn’t a Global South vs. Global North thing. It’s a “my neighbourhood” thing.As I was writing this column, my attention was drawn to comments made by some pretty active (online and in meatspace) trade unionists about Canada Post and probable service cuts. Asked to support ... Keep reading…
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Take Back The Net
I often make references here to “digital utopians,” the folks of the ‘90s who kept telling us the internet would set our minds and news media free from the constraints and censorship imposed by corporate ownership. We could all be our own newspaper, TV and radio outlets. Always implicit, and sometimes embarrassingly explicit, in the online utopian screeds of that decade was the hope or assumption that nastiness like racism and sexism were ideological impositions on workers and that, on… Keep reading…
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Educating For Equity Now, And Always
This past winter I was asked to speak at the Ontario Public Service Employees Union’s human rights conference. With the name “Social Change Through Social Media,” its focus was on how to use social media in organizing for equity. The only such conference that I’m aware of, it was a great idea, well-executed. (If there have been others, let me know.)One old question was given a new spin: Why do some social media campaigns ... Keep reading…
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A New Year Round-up
As my deadline for this column approached (okay, as it receded in the rearview mirror, much to Our Times’ editor’s chagrin) two announcements generated another tidal wave of how-to articles on using social media in organizing: 1) Facebook now has more than 1 billion users, a number rising almost as fast as FB’s share price is dropping, and 2) during the coverage of the American elections, polling seemed to have fallen out of favour and been replaced with Twitter-follower and FB “friend… Keep reading…
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Labour Wikipedia Initiative?
I have been listening to Corey Doctorow’s Craphound podcast for a long while and his closing Creative Commons licensing notice (which quotes Woody Guthrie) finally made me think it was time to say a few words about Creative Commons (CC).CREATIVE COMMONSCC is just a way of claiming control over intellectual property, much as cop… Keep reading…
