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A Multimedia Tour of Mobile Voices
Mobile Voices is an academic-community partnership between the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA) to design an open-source platform for low-wage immigrants in Los Angeles to publish stories directly from their mobile phones.
Amanda Garces (right) and a member of the IDEPSCA/vozmob team
With the support of a Large Collaborative Grant from the SSRC, Mobile Voices (vozmob) has taken important first steps towards its goal of establishing a citywide, mobile, multi-ethnic, immigrant communication network, which enables low-wage immigrants who lack computer access to participate in the digital public sphere and strengthen the communication capacities of their communities. The platform was developed through a process of technology appropriation and participatory design between community members, USC Annenberg, and IDEPSCA.
The Popular Communication Team, a group of volunteer day laborers and household workers devoted to using popular communication for social change, has been involved in conceptualizing and piloting the platform, and now produces a continuous stream of multimedia content. Recently, the team has started teaching others how to use this technology, building the local storytelling and information sharing network. In parallel, the vozmob team is studying and documenting the outcomes of using participatory approaches to build and deploy new media, and investigating how emerging media tools can best be leveraged to promote digital inclusion.
Vozmob has built on seed funding from the SSRC and the Annenberg Program on Online Communities to secure support from MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Competition and the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto. They were awarded third place in NetSquared's N2Y4 Mobile Challenge for innovative mobile applications for social good.
Sasha Costanza-Chock & Francois Bar at the SSRC NK09 grantee workshop, USC Annenberg
IDEPSCA deploys the system at day labor centers through popular communication workshops. Vozmob continues to share its tools and platforms through a growing network of scholars, community organizers, and media practitioners, including two new local partners: the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN) and the Southern California Library.