Media Influence & Digital Zapatista Reach

A couple of questions I had while reading this week's pieces...

1. Media Influence: Through reading Leo Chavez's excerpts on the Minuteman Project and the role media spectacle plays in society, I began to wonder whether people's stances on immigration largely come organically (through self reflection and examination of the issues at hand) or from the media's poking and prodding, seeming to insist every person have a strong view, one way or the other. I think perhaps groups and people like the Minuteman Project activists and supporters probably develop their beliefs, feed them to the media (the stage for performance), then sit back and watch as the rest of society joins the spectacle as a player on either side, provoked by activists' strong urgings (however diluted by the mode of communication). The video "Frijolero" we watched prior to last week's class is one such example of media spectacle creating heightened drama around the border.

2. Digital Zapatista Reach: I wondered, toward the end of reading Jill Lane's "Digital Zapatistas," about the performative reach of such electronic disturbances software like FloodNet creates. I understand that in the NYU example, the disturbance would have caused NYU's entire website to go down. But what about when FloodNet requested nonexistent pages from the Mexican government's website and got back "404 error-reply" time and time again, saying things like "justice not found on this site"? Perhaps I don't fully understand what function this performs in terms of website function, etc., but I wonder who exactly is their audience for this? Just the site's digital memory? If the only audience is a website's memory, is it performance for the sake of the performers? Or is there another audience I don't understand is there?

Another thing I noted that isn't really a question is that in the Caminata Nocturna tourist border-crossing adventure, the "border" performs for tourists in the way Dana suggested last class it performs for immigrants (rather than immigrants necessarily performing, as Nield suggests). The crossers are the audience, and the border and its inhabitants are the players, creating a new experience for each audience.

One more thing...I wonder when the term "illegal" began to carry such a negative connotation. In terms of definition, it is the opposite of being legal. But the same word can describe running through a stop sign AND smuggling drugs into a foreign country. I just wonder when the word sort of tip-toed over to the negative end of the spectrum and became a noun used to describe a group widely despised by those who use the word "illegal" in such a way.