Here is what Chicago YouthLAB wrote together on Thursday (draft to be approved by group):) We will shoot and edit on Friday August 3rd using chroma key in homage to Gil Scott Heron’s revolutionary music video.,

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED
BY YOUTHLAB CHICAGO

The Revolution Will Be Televised
It will be brought to you by me and
Brought to me by you
It will show pictures of what needs to be seen and
Some things that don’t.
It will be broadcast without distortion.
It will be broadcast through the cables of consciousness and brought to you by the Camcorder of the Commons
It will be brought to you by TBS: Thoroughly Broken Silence

The Revolution Will Be Televised
You will be able to create your own news
You will be able to carry it in your pocket and
View it with out commercial interruption
You will be able to download it without being subpoenaed by the R I A A
You will be able to capture brutality on a cell phone and set it free on YouTube

The Revolution Will Be Televised
But it will not give pop culture a new home
It will not give Anna Nicole paternity tests
It will not give you seizures from pocket monsters
It will not result in nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach or diarrhea
The revolution will contain a solution but not in the purchase of 409
The revolution will not be censored
It will not give into the man
It will deliver a boot into the crotch of oppression
It will not be anorexic
The revolution will be fat and happy

The Revolution Will Be Televised
It will put a microscope on Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzalez and Scooter Libby.
The revolution will not plead the fifth
The revolution will be televised by hackers broadcasting from their mom’s basements
The revolution will not be controlled by septuagenarians
The Revolution Will Be Televised
The Revolution Will Be Televised
The Revolution Will Be You-Tube-sized
The Revolution Will Be Televised …..by Me

Moral Panic is a term often used by media educators such as Kathleen Tyner to describe over reactionary fears by adults to the media practices of youth. Moral panic is not a partisan issues - progressives and conservatives often come together over this issues.

Social networking sites, certain elements of HipHop culture such as gangsta rap, violent and sexually explicit movies and TV programming, the YouTube culture and gaming are the most sited catalysts for moral panic.

Consider these quotes:

“Hedonistic values and narcissistic identities produce emotionally stunted young people unable to grown up and unwilling to be responsible democratic citizens.

This sense of emptiness of the soul holds for wealthy kids in the vanilla suburbs and poor kids in the chocolate cities. ”

This author goes on to blame theis “spiritual malnutrition” o:

“high use of drugs like cocaine and Ecstasy; the growing poularity of performing sex acts at incredibly young ages; and the way in which so many kids have become addicted to going online and instant messaging or creating Weblogs in which they assume an alternate personality.”

This evidently leads to, “a disgraceful numbing of the senses, dulling of the minds, and confining of life to an eternal present - with a lack of connection to the past and no vision for a different future - an insidious form of soul murder.”

Who do you think wrote this? You may be surprised to know it is Cornell West, often regarded as a progressive democratic thinker and writer and one of the shining stars in the African-American academic community.

Whitney Young, the civil rights leader, is mentioned in the Gill Scott Heron poem, The Revolution Will Be Televised (see video texts).

Here are some of his quotes. It seems that the first one could be the motto of YouthLAB. What do you think?

“Every man is our brother, and every man’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reins, all are unequal.”

“I am not anxious to be the loudest voice or the most popular. But I would like to think that at a crucial moment, I was an effective voice of the voiceless, an effective hope of the hopeless.”

“You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course. There must be strategies, the researchers, the professionals to carry out the program. That’s our role.”

“Black Power simply means: Look at me, I’m here. I have dignity. I have pride. I have roots. I insist, I demand that I participate in those decisions that affect my life and the lives of my children. It means that I am somebody.”

Another quote that could be YouthLAB’s slogan comes from Milan Kundera.

“The struggle of humanity against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Seemi made this video for Collective Intelligence day to explain her involvement with IMAN (Inner City Muslim Action Network)

According to Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and the concept’s leading proponent (though not its originator), social capital “refers to the collective value of all ‘social networks‘ and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other”. According to Putnam and his followers, social capital is a key component to building and maintaining democracy. Putnam says that social capital is declining in the United States. This is seen in lower levels of trust in government and lower levels of civic participation. Putnam also says that television and urban sprawl have had a significant role in making America far less connected.

Some educations theorists believe that social capital is also a key component to the success of young people in school and the workplace. Studies show that social capital plays as much as a role as actual classroom performance in attaining entrance into colleges and careers of choice.

Related to the moral panic model is the lament that young people are uninvolved in political life, apathetic and civically disengaged. “They don”t vote, they don’t care about politics.”

According to a study funded by Pew Charitable Trusts, many young adults disagree with these criticism, citing a statistical increase in volunteerism and voting. They also link a disdain for politics to corruption and lack of accountability to young people’s needs and concerns.They argue that their definitions for what constitutes engagement in civic life - is different than adult stereotypes.

For example,  how youth choose to spend their money can attest to their sense of social responsibility in the realm of consumerism. Youth often use social networking sites to build connections around issues and ideas. The largest student walk out in the country protesting unfair immigration policies was organized by youth on MySpace.

Several social scientists are finding evidence that the interactivity of certain video games and other online activities actually increases the sense of agency and decision-making ability of youth.

How do you define civic engagement? How do you use your digital native culture to engage in political life? Can you use youth culture to build connections, debate ideas, and mobilize each other to take actions of social benefit?

How

A quick broken down explanation of social networking - a way for youth to increase their social and cultural capital.

This is a video about the Creative Commons, how it works and why it is a powerful part of participatory culture.

Awesome video explaining the evolution and power of web2.0

Here are a few quotes and photos to consider. All YouthLAB participants should add material to our Reference site. What short quotes or photos do you feel are important? What responses do you have to any of these?

If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States, —that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of conditions.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1840)

Although slavery is a universal phenomenon, three factors made the transatlantic slave trade unique: its duration – almost four centuries, the racial identify of its victims – black African men, women and children, and its intellectual legitimization; the cultural denigration of Africa and Blacks, in short, the construction of the ideology of anti-Black racism, and its legal organization embodied in the “Codes Noirs” (Black Codes) Doudou Diene UNESCO

The fundamental paradox of American democracy in particular is that it gallantly emerged as a fragile democratic experiment over and against an oppressive British empire – and aided by the French and Dutch empires – even while harboring its own imperial visions of westward expansion, with more than 20 percent of its population consisting of enslaved Africans. In short, we are a democracy of rebels who nonetheless re-created in our own new nation many of the oppressions we had rebelled against.
The Declaration of Independence, principally written by the thirty-three year-old revolutionary Thomas Jefferson – who embodied this paradox, being both a courageous freedom fighter against British imperialism and a cowardly aristocratic slaveholder of hundreds of Africans in his beloved Virginia – offers telling testament to this complex and contradictory character of the American democratic experiment.

The reference in the Declaration to indigenous peoples as “Savages” worth of American expansionist domination for an “empire of liberty” further reveals this contradiction.
Cornell West - Democracy Matters