Just arrived at BarCamp - taking place on Granville Island instead of Workspace for the first time. I cycled along the seawall and it was lovely - cool and fishy and seaweedy smelling.

I popped in late to Joe Bowser’s session, on the new Vancouver Hacker Space. This is a really exciting project and I’m glad it’s getting off the ground. I saw Joe at Last H.O.P.E. in NYC this summer and it seems he was as inspired by the different hacker groups there as I was.

I went to Dave Ng’s session, From the Information Highway to Information Literacy, next. Dave runs the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at UBC, which has a “bifocal mandate to train scientists (university students and faculty)…and to inform the public at large on the societal, cultural, corporate, political, economic, and ethical nuances of the general sciences, and life sciences in particular.”

Dave  has spearheaded a number of very cool web projects (for a scientist - no offense), like his google bombing exercise This is the Truth (by you the reader) - still on the first page of a google search for “truth”. His literary science website,  Science Creative Quarterly was one of the first to publish the  flying spaghetti monster cartoon  And then, of course, there’s the science scouts badges.

Dave is interested in assessing the public’s knowledge of science, and to figure out how to increase scientific literacy through viral campaigns. “What is it in the web that makes certain things fly, that engages people?” A question that parallels my own research. Acknowledging  the web as a powerful tool for mobilizing people to think and create, Dave wants to figure out how to channel that power into projects for social change. His latest project is an effort to increase scientific literacy in kids using the Pokémon model - instead of getting kids to memorize useless facts about those cute little cartoon characters, why not have them learning about local flora and fauna, and developing a knowledge of the ecosystem that surrounds and sustains them? The basic idea, Dave explains, is that “Once you’re informed, you can take that knowledge and actually do something good with it.”

I also went to Luke Closs’ session, Elections and the Internets, which was a brainstorming session to see what can be done to help educate and mobilize people to make informed, progressive votes in the upcoming Canadian federal elections. The general takeaway is that there’s a lot of info out there on the web, but it’s time consuming to find/access and if you don’t know how to access the info, or don’t even know it’s there, then that wealth of information is useless. So some sort of collaborative, wiki-like site would be needed to aggregate all info and allow people to connect their website or project into a central hub in order to build a comprehensive resource. J Karen Parker talked about an interesting web project she’s working on around informing Vancouver voters for the next municipal election, something she envisions could hook into or provide a base for a national website covering the three levels of politics.

Finally, Karen Quinn Fung’s session - BarCamps for non-techies - was quite interesting. Karen is an SFU grad whom I met at Web of Change - a real smart cookie and go-getter who got involved in community organizing at  Toronto Transit Camp. Public transit is Karen’s passion, and since returning from the tdot, she’s gotten all up in Translink’s grill. She’s now on their payroll, running an independent blog and liaising with their public engagement team. Karen’s also organizing a Skytrain unconference (under the auspices of Translink) for Oct. 4 at SFU Surrey. There was a pretty lively discussion around that - the political use of barcamps and the co-optation of a community organizing tool as corporate focus-group/PR tactic. But, as Karen pointed out, “even though translink’s putting on party, the projects can be executed by anybody.” One incongruity: the Bus Riders Union is not involved yet - but should be, as Tara Robertson pointed out. This is more the case if the unconference really wants to bring together all parts of the transit community, and also have cred with the transit activists, who have been doing good, hard work for a long time.

That was about it for me and BarCamp. I liked the Granville Island setting but not how far apart the three locations were. It was good to see all the usual suspects, and meet a few new peeps. I always forget how much fun it is… Check out Miss604 for deets on WordCamp and other BarCamp nuggets.

I feel like this is what I do a little bit everyday.

Anyhow, I’m giving at talk tonight at the Vancouver Linux Users Group monthly meeting, titled: Open source and the knowledge factory hack. It’s a mildly revised version of the talk I gave at Open Web last April. I’ve incorporated some new reading, specifically McKenzie Wark’s definition and concept of hacking. Wark has generalized the term to include the production or application of ideas (he says abstractions) to knowledge - not just the writing or rewriting of computer code. He writes:

“Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things”

I can dig that. I also like Wark’s acknowledgment of the paradox of the hacker as both the creator but not owner of this new world, these new things. Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto is a deliberate politicization of a specific group that has, historically, been loathe to become politically engaged: the hacker class. It’s a neat book, and  yes, it’s a riff on Marx’s Manifesto: “There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction.” Wark continues: “The time is past due when hackers must come together with all of the producing classes of the world - to liberate productive and inventive resources from the myth of scarcity.”

And so on… it’s a cool text and it’s published online (as well as in print), so you can give it a read if you’re so inclined.

Last night I attended a free workshop at Free Geek called “How I stopped worrying and learned to love the command line.” Who wouldn’t want to go, with a title like that?

I love FreeGeek. I’ll just say that upfront. Everything about it invokes the New Society that I dream of, but picture only vaguely in my mind’s eye. It’s a community shop that provides ethical computer recycling for those who realize the injustice - not too mention environmental blight - that accompanies computer disposal. But FreeGeek is more than that. It’s a space that forms and nurtures community, where volunteers from all walks of life can come in, tear apart a computer, sort its guts and learn how to rebuild a working machine. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the need for hardware hackers, about the power and importance of their skills. To be able to build a communication machine from a pile of parts - hell, to even know what those parts are for - is something I think is not just a neat trick, but will one day be essential. It’s true, I’ve been feeling an end-of-days foreboding - prolly ever since I returned from Last H.O.P.E. It’s hard not to feel that way around a rag-tag bunch of hackers who seem to personify the D.I.Y. ethic (never mind the hacker ethic, which, of course, they don’t universally practice) and teach you how to pick locks… just in case.

Well. I want to learn how a computer works - its hardware and its software. For whatever reason (actually, my apocalyptic premonition). I don’t think it’s enough just to read and write about computers, to theorize them and to design their place in a utopic future. No doubt, computers are a revolutionary communication tool (the printing press notwithstanding yada yada wocka wocka etc. etc.) that sparked a massive and global (though not universal) shift in the way ordinary people talk, gather, exchange and make change. The “powers that be” (status quo conservators, ruling elite, whatever) have made no secret of their desire to reign in and lock down these newfound communictive freedoms. China, naturally. Now France. The U.S., with its draconian DMCA and Canada, following in eager, drooling pursuit. When digital locks are finally abandoned, the hardware itself will be locked. Richard Stallman wrote about this more than a decade ago in his dystopic fantasy, The Right to Read. What seemed crazy then (and peeps always like to think of Stallman as crazy - this is a classic way of dismissing radical ideas) is happening how - has happened with technology like DMR and threatens to continue with insidious concepts like trusted computing. The perfect storm of a domineering corporate agenda, state acquiesence and manufacturer compliance could manifest a new era of computing that is restrictive, unfree - and thus useless as a communication medium.

See what I mean? End of days. At any rate, my idea is to shift from the level of analysis to the level of praxis. Theorize and do. And if the day comes when the internet is a broadcast medium funneling messages from the corporate-state nexus, which in turn monitors us through our computers, I’ll know a few tricks. And maybe be of some use. In the meantime, I’ll keep hanging out at FreeGeek. It’s been on my mind to start volunteering there - you get a free computer after you log 24 hours. I don’t have any specific skills, but I can sort things. And I’ll keep going to workshops till I figure out Linux and can actually use it, rather than just “study” it.

Apologies for my unannounced (and unplanned) summer hiatus…

Last night I attended my first Net Tuesday, at Workspace in Gastown. Let me first say that Workspace is a cool place. I first visited it for the inaugural Vancouver BarCamp in 2006. The place was new and the idea underlying it fresh: a gathering space and workplace for all those independent professionals toiling away in isolation, at home, or in some crowded café (though at the time, wireless wasn’t as widespread in the coffee house circuit as it is today). It remains a vision of white, with a commitment to minimalism, and its philosophy of open manifest architecturally. And its little (inexpensive) espresso bar at the entrance is prolly Workspace’s most brilliant move.

Anyhoo, a good crowd turned out for the event, the title of which drew me there: How Drupal can help you save the world. Phillip Djwa of Agentic, Scott Nelson and Karianne Blank of Fearless City, and Boris Mann presented their various interpretations on the theme. All the usual suspects were there, with loads of familiar faces from the various tech events around town; as usual Rebecca Bollwitt was liveblogging (goddessblessher) and Roland Tanglao was front and centre with his (phone?)camera photo documenting for posterity (or Flickr).

I’m not going to duplicate Rebecca’s fine work, so I’ll just note some of the highlights.

Boris did a little open source evangelizing, though he was not as hardcore as I’m sure he can go. His case for Drupal as world changer came down to the fact that it is open source; that a community of thousands works collaboratively and in a distributed fashion, on the project;  that if it doesn’t have the feature you want, you are free to write it (given the technical expertise, granted. As a tool (rather than a project), Drupal’s power for progressive social change lies in the fact that it is a community builder.

Boris pointed to the obvious relationship between open source and non-profits, suggesting that the mission of open source can be tightly coupled to that of non-profits: to create change through sharing information, through knowledge exchange, through engaging communities and mobilizing them to action. Boris ended by summarizing Drupal’s most attractive features: its multilinguality, “infinite scalability” and functionality (from sending SMS to creating a wiki page on the fly).

Scott Nelson and Karianne Blank were up next, offering a synopsis of the Drupal website just launched for FearlessCity. Based in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, the project is “trying to be voice of community, to bring people in and engage people who feel a digital divide, who feel excluded from technology, our core user group,” explained Karianne. Fearless City’s goal is to interface mobile technology with a Drupal backend. Karianne echoed Boris when she praised the way Drupal facilitates community building. “It’s a platform for people to come together and make a community on their own terms. It’s not about us dictating what the community will be but consulting with community to see what they need.”

Philip Djwa walked us through a project his company, Agentic, had recently completed for the genocide prevention organization, Stand Now. Agentic largely serves social mission organizations, fueled by the belief that “technology has potential to affect social change.” With that in mind, Agentic helps non-profits harmonize their online needs with their social change goals, which are mostly to engage and expand their audience, educate them and mobilize them to action as well as organize volunteers.

Philip pointed out the difference between a social movement and a campaign:  campaigns - tactical, targeted series of actions - hopefully lead to change, and contribute to the emergence or sustenance of a movement. The movement - or the desire for a movement - is impetus for campaigns like those Agentic helps coordinate.

And Drupal has a nifty toolkit tailor made for such campaigns, according to Philip: newsletters, ecards, donations, petitions, conference support, memberhsip database; Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and so on.

After the presentations, I asked Boris how he thought Drupal compares to other CMSs like Plone, Joomla or TikiWiki. He had a one word answer: features. All I know is that Drupal is hot here in Van, and that various Indymedias have been using it for their sites (instead of their own custom open publishing softwares like Mir or SF-Active), plus writing their own Drupal mods. So there’s gotta be something to it. Plus I like Drupal’s tagline: “Community plumbing”. Cool.

My first panel of the day was entitled The Intersection of Culture Jamming, Hacking and Hactivism. On this, the last day of the conference, attendance had reached capacity. Literally thousands (I heard estimates of 2,000 and 3,000) of every nerd imaginable: The stereotypical anti-social, disempowered, tech freak expressing his barely concealed rage and marginality through military garb or tattoos. The pale, pimply, scraggly haired stuffed-in-the-locker high school loser/gamer. Then the lanky, non-descript, wire-rimmed glasses and ironic t-shirt wearing computer programmer with a critical eye to all things exploitive and domineering. Or the hands-on, engineering types who build, remix and hack a variety of technologies not because they just hate authority but because they see how authority can wreak havoc on freedom, democracy and all those other hippie values. I realized quite quickly that H.O.P.E. – as cool as it is – attracts a cross-section of the technologically inclined. It’s not a tech unconference or tech camp, where the culture is inclusive and educational, and the community fairly universal in their welcoming attitude. H.O.P.E. was not a place for the timid.

The packed, all-star panel led off with Mark Hosler, of Negativland to a standing room only crowd. I remember Negativland back from the ROOM Magazine days, when I’m sure someone sent us their book, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. At that time, I knew nothing about the ideology or philosophy behind practices like sampling, remixing and culture jamming, though it would only be a few years until I realized the power of free information and copylefted my Master’s thesis. Hosler gave a great talk. He’s one of these guys who – at 46 – retains an infectious joy and wonder at the infinite possibility in the world. He reminded me of Peter Burton, of the now-defunct band Luxury Christ: unpretentious, interested, kind. He took the audience through a little history of Negativland and their early escapades in collage and culture jamming. He traced the origins of the term “culture jamming” to the old ham radio jammers, and its coining on their weekly radio show, Over the Edge.

“I thought collage great way to talk about systems of power and pop culture…We were using the media to talk about the media.”

Hosler recounted the story behind the early ‘80s song, “Christianity is Stupid”, which featured the sage words of some Commie-fearing southern minister layered over an original track composed by the band. “The more Negativland started appropriating media, the more we thought about it means.” Which led of course to the infamous press release linking the band’s song to a quadruple murder of an ultra-religious family. The band breathed new life into the fiasco when they released “The Mashin’ of the Christ” in 2004, a classic rock video they did for “Christianity is Stupid”, a mashup featuring every Jesus movie Negativland could rent. The video got 160, 000 downloads as a torrent – pre-YouTube, you remember. Fucking brilliant.

Unfortunately, the panel time slot was too short, the speakers too many and Hosler’s narrative too big to be contained in the time allotted. Some of the other panelists did speak briefly. Ricardo Domingez gave an amazing, if too short, talk about the Zapatistas netwar revolution and the founding of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre. And TradeMark G, of the Evolution Control Committee even treated us to a Thimbletron performance of the ECC’s video, Rocked by rape, a mashup of Dan Rather telling the news. All of the speakers illustrated the subversive power of creative thinking and action. Pretty awesome stuff.

Prolly the neatest part of Day 3 was hanging out with the entire hactivist crew for lunch. After the panel, I decided to see if I could get an interview with Hosler for an academic book chapter I’m writing on, among other things, copyright and digital activism. He graciously obliged, and then invited me out to eat with the gang. We went to Koreatown, around the corner from the Penn Hotel and I had the absolute pleasure of hanging out with some truly inspiring and fascinating people, who hack their way into our cultural and political assumptions and force us to think different. It turns out one of the guys is a DJ with ties to Detroit and Richie Hawtin. Another, Ben Attias, is a prof in the Department of Communication at CSU Northridge (and a Foucaudian, it seems). I love these unexpected and serendipitous connections and convergences. It’s either a small world or a big network. Or both.

On Sunday I attended the final day of Last H.O.P.E. It was pretty much the coolest conference I’ve ever attended. The Hackerspace Village was awesome. Welcoming you as you ascended the escalator was the multi-coloured LED dildo sculpture; I turned away instinctively, burning with that ingrained Catholic shame, and only near the end of the con could I pause directly in front of it to study it properly. Then there were all manner of hacker groups set up, like NYCResistor, The Hacktory, Telephreaks and a new Canadian group, HackToronto. There were various workshop spaces set up, so if you wanted to practice circuit bending, learn how to pick a lock (I did), make a free long distance call on an old public pay phone, or work on a collaborative Lego project, well, you could. There were also vendors: Free Software Foundation was there, Make magazine, and a bunch of other nerdy entrepreneurs hocking their wares. It totally kicked it.

The conference closed with a 2-hour fiery diatribe by Jello Biafra, former frontman for the Dead Kennedys. This was the first time I’d ever seen the guy. In 2001 he was supposedly performing somewhere in Quebec City as part of the massive demo against the FTAA. We bumped in to some friends from Windsor and spent the whole day roaming the city looking for Jello. We saw a lot of things, including a drum circle of thousands, the fence coming down and the usual police abuse of dissenting citizens, but we did not see Jello. Anyhoo. He’s an engaging and, not surprisingly entertaining, speaker. It’s more performance art than public speaking, and he was dressed for the occasion: an American flag shirt, star belt buckle and the pope hat JPII made iconic. He spent about an hour giving a sort of State of the Nation address, recounting in a rapid fire rant all that is wrong with the world – specifically the U.S. – today. It was/is brutal. It’s the little things that get you; you know, shit like the utterly corrupt American political system; corporate inspired and produced environmental suicide, the distraction and outright deceit of the corporate McNews, the senseless war on drugs, the assault against a woman’s right to control her own body… and on and on. It was a bloody endless inventory of all the ills plaguing and preventing a progressive, humane America.

Jello spent the rest of his talk debunking the Obama myth and unloading a pile of steaming invective on bloggers. Seems a disgruntled ex-girlfriend and ex-bandmate conducted, separately, a viral smear campaign against him. This part of his talk, which was otherwise pretty right on, seemed more like a personal rant disguised as media critique.

“What do we now? I know, start a blog: Vent vent vent vent vent. Send. Mission accomplished. I don’t want to put down the idea of blogs….the blog explosion has happened in part because more and more people completely distrust the joke of corporate McNews: ‘Presstitutes.’”

Jello advocated the practice and teaching of media literacy, invoking blogs as a new sort of media bogeyman. “Bloggers are not journalists,” he almost sneered. “The blogosphere is limited to an echo chamber where all agree with all.”

But Jello ended on an upbeat (and raucous) note. “When you look at big picture, it’s pretty damn depressing but doesn’t stop people from winning small local battles.” He urged political engagement, and shamed the audience when, after asking a series of “Are you sick of…” questions, he asked how many were registered voters. Only about half.

“This is a contest, a war, and it’s not red against blue or left against right… It’s between the top and the bottom… A class war is being waged in this country against almost everybody who lives in this country.”

Part of the task of affecting change, he said, lies in convincing people that “life doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be so stupid. We don’t have to be so obedient. We need to illuminate what’s possible. Illuminating good ideas is what put them on track to slowly becoming reality.”

One of my Skype contacts had this URL as their  status. I know there’s been talk in the non-profit/social change tech sector about building an open source social networking site like Facebook. I’m not sure (because I haven’t really been following along) how sites like Change.org fit into the picture. So I can’t really say what Facebook’s move to open source means for progressive change-making communities.  Any thoughts?

One of the tech activists participating in my dissertation research just told me about a project being run by Riseup called Summer Freedom of Code. This is a totally inspiring endeavour, one that reaffirms my decision to stick with my research topic, and assures me that social justice organizing and activism are not dead - not even dormant - but alive and well and taking direct aim at the miserable status quo.

Freedom Summer of Code is both a cheeky riff on Google’s Summer of Code and nod to Freedom Summer, making explicit the project’s historical link to radical progressive activism. The aim of FSoC is to develop software that supports social justice organizations and movements, and contests inequality and injustice under global capitalism. Instead of technologies of reproduction, the goal is technologies of revolution. By appropriating software technology and deploying it for free and open uses, this project stands in stark opposition to proprietary visions of a corporatized and closed Internet, nested within the broader notion that social injustice is unfortunate collateral damage from a system that is natural, and thus inevitable. FSoC reminds us that another world (or for starters, another Internet) is possible.

I will be attending the International Communication Association conference, which takes place later this week in Montreal. I am participating in a pre-conference workshop entitled Bridging the Scholar/Activist Divide in the Field of Communication - exactly up my alley. I wrote the abstract last fall sometime, and haven’t really looked at it since then. My basic premise is that it is only the public intellectual who can bridge this stark divide. I suggest a three-prong approach: 1. Participation in civic life; public dissemination of research/ideas; 2. Critical pedagogy as process; 3. Commitment to norms-based research.

The public intellectual, to my mind, is one who not only engages in civic life, but is motivated by a sense of responsibility and a shared humanity to “be of service.” Or, as my dad would say, to be useful. For the public intellectual, this requires the free sharing of her intellect, research, thoughts and ideas, with the broader community - through public lectures, media interviews, popular and academic articles and participation in various community events - especially those organized by students.

But being a public intellectual requires more than making one’s research and public persona accessible. It requires a focus on - and revisioning of - teaching; that is teaching as an ongoing process, rather than a finite action that we take up over and over again. Students are another link academics have to the “real world”; they go back to it as soon as they leave us. Sometimes - if our lectures or classes are particularly dull, they remain in their “real life” though their bodies be sitting before us. The classroom, then, is really a portal on the world and a terrain for the change-making we want to provoke.

So I’ve been doing some reading, and I’ve been doing some thinking in advance of this workshop (I think I’m supposed to write a paper on this, but in fact it’ll prolly just be a chapter in my diss, or at least a section). Of course open access to scholarly work figures prominently in any discussion I’d have on the topic, so John Willinsky’s book, The Access Principle, will come in handy. I’m in the middle of Ken Bain’s book, What the Best College Teachers Do. But what’s really burning my brain right now is the 1969 book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. This is an awesome book, and it reminds me (yet again) that much of the social critique we pile upon contemporary society has already been written - in the ’60s, during the countercultural revolution, and the first half of the 20th century generally.

Postman and Weingartner’s radical assertion is that teaching should be useful; according to them, the most useful teaching is teaching for survival. The essential survival strategy in the nuclear space age (and not much has changed, except that it’s mostly gotten worse - pick your area) and thus the essential goal of teachers, is to cultivate “crap-detection.” The argument is strongly influenced by medium theory - Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the medium or container affects perspective, rather than the content transmitted by that medium. But a medium is not merely the technical form - a television, a newspaper, the Internet - but the symbolic environment of a communicative act.

Medium theory focuses on the medium characteristics itself (like in media richness theory) rather than on what it conveys or how information is received. In medium theory, a medium is not simply a newspaper, the Internet, a digital camera and so forth. Rather, it is the symbolic environment of any communicative act; it is a process. Media, apart from whatever content is transmitted, impact individuals and society. McLuhan’s thesis is that people adapt to their environment through a certain balance or ratio of the senses, and the primary medium of the age brings out a particular sense ratio, thereby affecting perception.

So it is the form of education, less than its content, that is problematic for Postman and Weingartner. It’s outcome: the “intellectual paraplegic.” They go on to tear down, plank by plank, the structure of modern education, in a very convincing demolition, calling upon the likes of McLuhan, Wiener, Dewey, and Huxley.

The renovation the authors propose is founded on the “inquiry method” whereby students direct their own learning, beginning from what they know, and working toward what they want or need to know to be independent, autonomous members of a community. The “new education” is therefore relevant - to students - and rests on the view of education as a process, not an end product or finite goal. By learning to ask questions, and learning to distinguish the important questions, students learn how to learn. And thus they are equipped not just to go out into this world, but to engage in it and - goddess forbid - change it.

Postman and Weingartner identify several concepts that derive from the old canons of education - canons originating from the ancient Greeks. These concepts include: absolute and fixed truth; certainty; isolated identity; fixed states and “things; simple causality; knowledge as “given”. Writing in the late 60s, the authors bemoan the fact that that these concepts were still being “taught”. It’s hard to say that things have changed much another 50 years later: “The schools stare fixedly into the past as we hurtle pell-mell into the future” (p. 216).

New concepts that need to be learned are those that shape technological change and derive from it: “they are characteristics of the spirit, mood, language and process of science. They are operative wherever evidence of social change…can be found” (217).

Intellectual strategies for survival in the nuclear space age are the polar opposite of what seems to comprise contemporary education: relativity, probability, contingency, uncertainty, function, structure as process, multiple causality, incongruity. I have learned, in my short time as a university instructor, that students don’t want - or like- any of these. They want to know what will be on the exam. But that is not a strategy for survival in the world; for creating what Mark Battersby calls a “competent layperson”. Given the precariousness of the future - I’m thinking here of growing environmental and geopolitical crises - it remains as important now as it was then to develop “a new kind of person, one who…is an actively inquiring, flexible, creative, innovative, tolerant, liberal personality who can face uncertainty and ambiguity without disorientation, who can formulate viable new meanings to meet changes in the environment which threaten individual and mutual survival” (218).

Our schools - from kindergarten to undergraduate - are not doing this. That the majority of educators (and likely all of the administrators) would disagree with this is hardly damning. Indeed, as the authors point out, the most subversive intellectual instrument is the anthropological perspective, which allows a critical distancing from one’s own culture. Such a perspective, they admit, is very difficult to acquire and demands great courage; in essence, it requires freedom from the intellectual and social constraints created by societal or cultural norms. And this, as I’ve long known, is very difficult to achieve.

I am the technology editor for this journal and also the blog book review editor… Check out the CFP and submit if you’ve got anything…

Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology is an open-access, peer-reviewed
graduate e-journal for students in communication studies and cognate fields
encompassing three over-overlapping ‘streams’ of concentration: culture,
politics, and technology. It is published by the Communication Graduate
Caucus at Simon Fraser University. Papers are blind reviewed by graduate
students, making Stream a unique contribution to the flourishing and
productive field of Communication in Canada. In employing open-source
software and Creative Commons licensing, Stream is exceptional in the field
of academic publishing and contributes to the public dissemination and
sharing of knowledge. We hope that this initiative will become a space for
graduate students to publish new work and expand upon new ideas,
contributing to a thriving intellectual culture.

Stream is currently accepting papers and book reviews. In addition, if you
would like to be a reviewer for the journal, please sign up at the website.

Submission Guidelines:
Papers
Papers must be submitted electronically at www.streamjournal.org. Authors
must sign up for a user name and password.

Papers should be 15-20 double-spaced pages in length and fit into one of
three broad areas of culture, technology or politics, but we invite
contributors to challenge their conceptions of these subjects with
innovative interpretations of these disciplinary boundaries. Papers
submitted prior to August 31, 2008 will be considered for the winter issue.

Papers must be copy edited and formatted according to author guidelines
found in the submission section of the website. Papers that have not been
thoroughly edited and properly formatted will not be sent out for review.

Book Reviews
Book reviews should be 750-1000 words in length, and should follow the style guide for paper submissions. Reviews should give an overview of the content of the book, state its strengths and weaknesses, and assess its significance and contribution to the field. Book reviews will not be peer-reviewed but will be assessed by the book review editor for their relevance, readability and contribution.