Tag Archives ⇒ friends journal

NYTimes video remembers the 1965 Selma James Reeb attack

March 6, 2015
· Martin Kelley

One of the white min­is­ters with James Reeb in the 1965 attack that helped pro­pel the Vot­ing Rights Act remem­bers the night.

He also reflects on the val­ue of white lives vs. black lives for nation­al atten­tion in the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. While the actu­al Sel­ma march was protest­ing the killing of black civ­il rights activist Jim­mie Lee Jack­son by a state troop­er, nation­al out­rage focused on the vis­it­ing white minister.

In 1967, Dr. King not­ed, “The fail­ure to men­tion Jim­my [sic] Jack­son only rein­forced the impres­sion that to white Amer­i­cans the life of a Negro is insignif­i­cant and meaningless.”

Don’t miss Gail Whif­f­en Coyle’s overview of con­tem­po­rary Friends Jour­nal cov­er­age of Sel­ma on our website.

Preaching our lives over the interwebs

June 4, 2014
· Martin Kelley

Hel­lo Jon, A.J. and Wess,

So we’ve been asked to write a “syn­chroblog” orga­nized by Quak­er Vol­un­tary Ser­vice. It is a week­day and there are work dead­lines loom­ing for me (there are always dead­lines loom­ing) so my par­tic­i­pa­tion may be spot­ty but I’ll give it a shot.

The top­ic of this par­tic­u­lar syn­chroblog is Friends and social media and in the invite we were asked to riff on com­par­isons with ear­ly Friend­s’s pam­phle­teer­ing and the web as the new print­ing press. I’m spot­ty on the details of the var­i­ous pam­phlet wars of ear­ly Friends but the web-as-printing-press is a famil­iar theme.

I first man­gled the metaphors of web as print­ing press nine­teen years ago. That sum­mer I start­ed my first new media project to get paci­fist writ­ings online. The metaphors I used seem as fun­ny now as they were awk­ward then, but give me a break: Mark Zucker­berg was a fifth grad­er hack­ing Ataris and even the word “weblog” was a cou­ple of years away. I described my project as “web type­set­ting for the move­ment by the move­ment” and one of my sell­ing points is that I had done the same work in the print world.

Frac­tured as my metaphors were, online media was more like pub­lish­ing then that it is now. Putting an essay online required tech­ni­cal skills and com­par­a­tive­ly high equip­ment costs. The con­sis­tent arc of con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy has been to make post­ing ever eas­i­er and cheap­er and that has moved the bar of qual­i­ty (raised or low­ered depend­ing on how you see it)

Back in the mid-1990s I remem­ber jok­ing snark­i­ly with friends that we’d all some­day have blogs devot­ed to pic­tures of our cats and kids – the humor in our barbs came from the ridicu­lous­ness that some­one would go to the time and expense to build a site so ephemer­al and non-serious. You’d have to take a pic­ture, devel­op the film, dig­i­tal­ly scan it in, touch it up with a pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive image soft­ware, use an FTP pro­gram to upload it to a web serv­er and then write raw HTML to make a web page of it. But the joke was on us. In 2014, if my 2yo daugh­ter puts some­thing goofy on her head, I pull out the always-with-me phone, snap a pic­ture, add a fun­ny cap­tion and fil­ter, tag it, and send it to a page which is effec­tive­ly a pho­to­blog of her life.

The ease of post­ing has spawned an inter­net cul­ture that’s cre­ative­ly bizarre and won­der­ful. With the changes the print­ing press metaphor has become less use­ful, or at least more con­strained. There are Friends who’s inten­tion­al­i­ty and effort make them inter­net pub­lish­ers (I myself work for Friends Jour­nal). But most of our online activ­i­ty is more like water cool­er chitchat.

So the ques­tion I have is this: are there ways Friends should behave online. If we are to “let our lives preach,” as the much-quoted George Fox snip­pet says, what’s our online style? Do we have any­thing to learn from ear­li­er times of pam­phle­teer­ing? And what about the media we’re using, espe­cial­ly as we learn more about elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance and its wide­spread use both here at home and in total­i­tar­i­an regimes?

Peace on Earth from 1939

December 26, 2013
· Martin Kelley

An anti-war car­toon from MGM, with the grand­fa­ther voiced by Mel Blanc. It was nom­i­nat­ed for an Acad­e­my Award for Short Sub­jects (Car­toons). More on its Wikipedia page.

Via Fredy Cham­pagne, of the VFP Gold­en Rule Project, which Friends Jour­nal pro­filed in August 2013.

My panel discussion on Quaker leadership at @esrquaker

August 21, 2013
· Martin Kelley

“Mind­ing the Mes­sage” was the sec­ond speak­ers pan­el at the Quak­er lead­er­ship con­fer­ence host­ed by Earl­ham School of Reli­gion this weekend.

My_panel_discussion_on_Quaker_leadership_at__esrquaker_-__martin_kelley

Four of us were asked to talk about our work in mar­ket­ing our Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions. We rep­re­sent­ed a mix of orga­ni­za­tions. In addi­tion to myself rep­re­sent­ing Friends Jour­nal, there was: Chris Hardie, founder of a Sum­m­er­sault LLC, a tech­nol­o­gy and web host­ing busi­ness; Mar­garet Stark, direc­tor of mar­ket­ing and admis­sions at Kendal at Ober­lin, a con­tin­u­ing care retire­ment com­mu­ni­ty “in the Quak­er tra­di­tion”; and Tom Far­quhar, head of of Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

Oth­er record­ed talks include ple­nary talks from Ian Joyce and Thom Jeav­ons, and the first speak­ers pan­el that includ­ed Nor­val Reece, Bar­ry Cross­no, Bet­ty Ton­s­ing, and Christi­na Repoley.

Visual storytelling through animated gifs and Vine

June 27, 2013
· Martin Kelley

NPR’s Plan­et Mon­ey recent­ly ran an arti­cle on glass recy­cling, How A Used Bot­tle Becomes A New Bot­tle, In 6 Gifs. The Gif part is what intrigued me. A “gif” is a tightly-compressed image for­mat file that web design­ers leaned on a lot back in the days of low band­width. It’s espe­cial­ly good for designs with a few dis­creet col­ors, such as cor­po­rate logos or sim­ple car­toons. It also sup­ports a kind of prim­i­tive ani­ma­tion that was com­plete­ly overused in the late 90s to give web­pages fly­ing uni­corns and spin­ning globes.

Ani­mat­ed gifs have grown up. They make up half the posts on Tum­blr. They are often derived from fun­ny scenes in movies and come with humor­ous cap­tions. The Plan­et Mon­ey piece uses them for sto­ry­telling: text is illus­trat­ed by six gifs show­ing dif­fer­ent parts of the recy­cling process. The move­ment helps tell the sto­ry – indeed most of the shots would be visu­al­ly unin­ter­est­ing if they were static.

The short loops reminds me of Vine, the six-second video ser­vice from Twit­ter which I’ve used a lot for sil­ly kid antics. They can also tell a sim­ple sto­ry (they’re par­tic­u­lar­ly well suit­ed to repet­i­tive kid antics: up the steps, down the slide, up the steps, down the slide, up…).

In my work with Friends Jour­nal I’ve done some 7 – 12 minute video inter­views with off-site authors using Google Hang­outs, which essen­tial­ly just records the video con­ver­sa­tion. It’s fine for what we use it for, but the qual­i­ty depends a lot on the equip­ment on the oth­er end. If the band­width is low or the web­cam poor qual­i­ty, it will show, and there are few options for post-production edit­ing. But hon­est­ly, this is why I use Hang­outs: a short web-only inter­view won’t turn into a week­long project.

Pro­duc­ing high-quality video requires con­trol­ling all of the equip­ment, shoot­ing ten times more footage than you think you’ll need, and then hours of work con­dens­ing and edit­ing it down to a sto­ry. And after all this it’s pos­si­ble you’ll end up with some­thing that does­n’t get many views. Few Youtube users actu­al­ly watch videos all the way through to the end, drift­ing away to oth­er inter­net dis­trac­tions in the first few minutes.

I like the com­bi­na­tion of the sim­ple short video clips (whether Vine or ani­mat­ed gif) wed­ded to words. My last post here was the very light-weight sto­ry about a sum­mer after­noon project. Yes­ter­day, I tried again, shoot­ing a short ani­mat­ed gif of Tibetan monks vis­it­ing a local meet­ing­house. I don’t think it real­ly worked. They’re con­struct­ing a sand man­dala grain-by-grain. The small move­ments of their fun­nel sticks as sand drops is so small that a reg­u­lar sta­t­ic pho­to would suf­fice. But I’ll keep exper­i­ment­ing with the form.

Colorful Quakers

June 18, 2013
· Martin Kelley

Hold onto your broad­brim hat! After 58 years of black and white, COLOR is on the way to Friends Jour­nal start­ing in AUGUST 2013. To announce it, FJ’s first Vine video:

This was what we were work­ing on last week, when I tweet­ed out ask­ing how many Quak­ers does it take to shoot a seven-second video!

How many Quakes?
The impromp­tu FJ video team: yours tru­ly, Gabe, Gail, and Sara.

As you might all expect, I’m real­ly hap­py with the move. Col­or won’t add very much to the over­all bud­get just 1.5 per­cent!) but it should help us reach new read­ers. I’m also hop­ing it will give lapsed read­ers a rea­son to open the mag­a­zine again and see what we’ve been doing the last few years. Sub­scrip­tions start at a very rea­son­able $25. If you sign up before July 8, you’ll get August’s very first col­or issue!

Bits and pieces, remembering blogging

May 13, 2013
· Martin Kelley

I real­ly should blog here more. I real­ly should. I spend a lot of my time these days shar­ing oth­er peo­ple’s ideas. Most recent­ly, on Friends Jour­nal you can see my inter­view with Jon Watts (co-conducted with Megan Kietzman-Nicklin). The three of us talked on and on for quite some time; it was only an inflex­i­ble train sched­ule that end­ed my participation.

The favorite part of talk­ing with Jon is his enthu­si­asm and his tal­ent for keep­ing his sights set on the long pic­ture (my favorite ques­tion was ask­ing why he start­ed with a Quak­er fig­ure so obscure even I had to look him up). It’s easy to get caught up in the bus­tle of dead­lines and to-do lists and to start to for­get why we’re doing this work as pro­fes­sion­al Quak­ers. There is a real­i­ty behind the word counts. As Friends, we are shar­ing the good news of 350+ years of spir­i­tu­al adven­tur­ing: obser­va­tions, strug­gles, and imperfect-but-genuine attempts to fol­low Inward Light of the Gospels.

My nine year old son Theo is blog­ging as a class assign­ment. I think they’ve been sup­posed to be writ­ing there for awhile but he’s real­ly only got­ten the bug in the last few weeks. It’s a full-on Word­Press site, but with cer­tain restric­tions (most notably, posts only become pub­lic after the class­room teacher has had a chance to review and vet them). It’s cer­tain iron­ic to see one of my kids blog­ging more than me!

Enough blog­ging for today. Time to put the rest of the awake kids to bed. I’m going to try to have more reg­u­lar small posts so as to get back into the blog­ging habit. In the mean­time, I’m always active on my Tum­blr site (which shows up as the side­bar to the right). It’s the buck­et for my inter­net cura­tions – videos and links I find inter­est­ing, and my own pic­tures and miscellanea.