Video Lecture: Paying Attention

On Thursday, March 19th, I drove over to present as part of the Social Justice and Coalition Building Speaker Series at the Institute for Citizenship and Social Responsibility at Western Kentucky University. Thanks to Judy Rohrer and Tiara Na'puti for inviting and hosting! This lecture, "Paying attention, digital media, and community-based critical GIS", has recently been published in cultural geographies. You can access the press version here or the preprint version here. The video follows the abstract below.

Abstract:
Alongside the emergence of neogeography and volunteered geographic information, the GISciences are increasingly subject to shifts in web-based media. These media-centric shifts toward the online and the interactive have proved enabling for both profit-driven and nonprofit organizations to capture the attention of potential customers and constituents through online social and spatial media. In research on the everyday information- and data-practices of community-based organizations, websites and their appendaged mobile applications such as Facebook and Twitter are examined as the emerging media toolset to build sustained connections to funders, constituents, and others involved in sustained community-based practice. Conceptualized as practices of exteriorization, these technologies and these new pressures around the utilization of social and spatial media have made the daily work of nonprofits more complex. Indeed, as the landscapes of digital information technologies continually shift their interfaces, protocols, and membership settings (including privacy configurations), I suggest that this new normal -- of persistent change in online digital media -- presents challenges for collective memory and the attention-work of community-based organizations. Taking up and responding to concerns around the implications of digital information technologies on memory and culture, this presentation outlines efforts to integrate these diverse media as part of a broader agenda of attentional design for community-based critical GIS practice.