Dispatches of Digital Dissent

Unlike many communication and media studies subjects at UOW, DIGC210 includes no requirement to produce public media (blog posts, tweets, etc) for assessment. Nonetheless, I asked the students to take up this practice and I was pleased this morning to see a couple of posts floating around:

Tom is writing here on Medium, and I’ve added his work to our class publication. Following a collaborative mind-mapping exercise from our first class, Tom writes:

What really stuck with me about the exercise, was not just how connected everything was, but how people in the class would link something as simple as “lifestyle”, immediately to “addiction” and further “controversy”. Why did we immediately jump to negative attributes of Digital Dissent so quickly? […] Everything may be connected, by why is this the case?

Here’s what the students created in their very first exploration of Digital Dissent:

Meanwhile, over at her Wordpress blog, Xara followed up on a pre-print reading generously provided by Jean Burgess and Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández to observe:

everyone [on the net] has the freedom to interpret and react to issues and link them together with such immense diversity that it becomes difficult to see it in its entirety

Having outlined the concepts involved, I’d like students and readers of this blog to consider whether the following videos are examples of digital dissent, or not. If so, why? If not, what are they? Respond below.