Interactive Media graduate students active in world’s OneWebDay

Students in Elon’s new interactive media master’s program are producing content and taking a leadership role in the fourth annual OneWebDay observance on Sept. 22. Elon is hosting North Carolina’s events for the day, which has attracted a global network of partner organizations and individual activists committed to broadening the public’s awareness of Internet and Web issues while deepening a culture of participation in building a Web that works for everyone.

OneWebDay events will take place at Elon’s weekly College Coffee, where interactive media students will be posting Tweets on Twitter, taking surveys, doing spontaneous improvisation about the Web and talking with people about the importance of protecting this vital human communications network. They will also produce a video from the College Coffee event to post on OneWebDay’s Web site.

The students have also written essays and produced videos for OneWebDay, which are featured on the celebration’s Web site. See the Elon videos at: http://stories.onewebday.org/ and http://onewebday.org/read-our-blog/

The students’ work is for the interactive media’s “audience analysis in an interactive age” course, taught by Janna Quitney Anderson, associate professor of communications. She has written an opinion column on OneWebDay for the Burlington Times-News, which can be read at the link below:
http://www.thetimesnews.com/articles/web-28263-time-onewebday.html

OneWebDay was founded by Susan Crawford, cyberlaw scholar, former Board Member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and current technology policy advisor to President Obama. According to Crawford, “peoples’ lives now are as dependent on the Internet as they are on the basics like roads, energy supplies and running water. We can no longer take that for granted, and we must advocate for the Internet politically and support its vitality personally.”

OneWebDay leaders seek to create an annual event that makes the power of the Web and the threats it faces tangible to a wide audience.