I am adding a new link, real wealth of information, about grassroots media productions, often bordering with media activism. It is not by chance that many of these productions or actions involve the use of different media, employ cross media storytelling or cross media distribution strategies.Their name is Produzioni Dal Basso (bottom-up productions), unfortunately only in Italian, I will try and translate all their posts regarding cross media productions.

Technorati Tags: media activism

This is no news at all, as it happened on April 4, but it is still interesting: the organization Adventure Ecology decided to flood several parts of Second Life for a few hours, to show the (not-so-future) effects of global warming.
Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, and the entire Mediterranean island of Ibiza went under,

although the in-world people would quickly get organized with boats, swimming suits and swimming scripts, watch video on YouTube.
Interesting enough, I am hearing from one of the organizers that the event affected mostly press, while Second Life inhabitants didn’t pay that much attention. I wonder how many other media-activist actions are being performed on Second Life; there is a lot of activism around there indeed, but mostly related to First Life politicians ( Democrat John Edwards’s campaign, and the Front National, french extreme right party (what are THEY doing in SL?!), below you can see some reactions)
) I wonder if this lack of activism from “engaged” members is because of the in-world demographics (not so many engaged members, maybe?) , or simply because I don’t know more about it.

After discovering the attempt made by Sky Vivo to produce participatory television in Italy, I kept thinking that was nothing new, and I remembered reading a post by Robin Good, one of my favorite blogs, in 2005 about Nessuno TV, wonderful italian experiment of participatory channel, dating back to 2002, 4 year earlier than Al Gore’s Current TV.
In this post, Robin Good describes a “virtual talk show” presented by Nessuno TV, with real guests in the studio and other guests on screens inside the studio interacting via webcam. The program was broadcasted in streaming and on satellite TV at the same time.
What I am trying to point out is how grassroots production most of the time leads the way for mainstream communication, and, like in Maurizio Costanzo’s case, how can we preserve the potential of the new communication methods so that they promote better communication, better understanding, a more democratic approach to media, and avoid cross media to be used just as a gimmick to add a novelty flavor to an otherwise very conventional approach to television.