Went to see Winter Miller's play In Darfur at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park with some of my coworkers tonight. It was very striking and raised uncomfortable, morally troubling questions about journalists' role in calling attention to the genocide. To run on page 1 with a name, breaking your promise to your source and condemning her to vicious militia reprisals from which she'd be lucky to escape with her life? Or not to run at all, losing the opportunity to bring Darfur front and center into the spotlight of the Western press so that someone might actually care enough to do something about it? Nick Kristof spoke as part of a panel after the play concluded and said that depiction was basically accurate, that he'd been part of frustrating calls back to the editor's desk in the New York office but had had the good sense to start swearing after hanging up the phone, not before. Samantha Power spoke very eloquently about the situation in Darfur. I'm going to borrow her book, A Problem from Hell, from the library.
One of my many favorite coworkers mentioned Change.org in passing the other day as we were driving to an organizers' training retreat in New Jersey. Maybe it was having just come home from seeing In Darfur that made me want to check that out: networking and activism for social justice. So I'm fiddling around with it now, setting up a profile and learning how it works. Perhaps this will be a social networking site I will actually use. I could get behind it more than others because it actually has a purpose. Of course, I already work for a nonprofit that does amazing things to address the issues I care deeply about so I'm not exactly bereft of opportunities to make a difference every day when I walk into the office either. That's pretty rad.
Side note about the social networking thing, though. This is yet another site I'm registered on and I would really dig it if there were some type of social networking aggregator out there. Let me see if I can remember all the social-networking-web-2.0-esque places I'm on: Change.org, Del.icio.us, Friendster, GoodReads, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Mixi, MySpace, Technorati, Twitter... are there any others?
Friendster and MySpace I hardly ever visit because I've already got a blog and those places really aren't my style. LinkedIn I actually find fairly useful. GoodReads I enjoy quite a bit too. Mixi is where I used to do some blogging and social networking in Japanese but I haven't kept up with it the way I'd like to. Twitter, aka microblogging, is fun and mobile -- I actually like it more than I thought I would and someone calls the Red Sox games on there so that's a bonus. But all in all, as another favorite coworker opined to me the other day, looking at me with that look that only she gets, "What does it mean to be LinkedIn?" I smiled and said I'd get back to her when I had the answer on that one. Not sure what meaning is being created by all this networking, all this content generation. One's mileage may well vary.
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