Hacktivism Intent – TannerM, SophiaC, & LorenH
The Change We Wish To See
Abstract: Our group is looking to utilize the ‘upstage the man’ strategy to produce a co-opt of a popular news magazine such as the New Yorker or the Economist. This replica will be filled with idealized, good news, as opposed to the often dismal news we are used to seeing these days. We will distribute it by leaving copies in public spaces and by putting up stickers featuring the url to a website showing the same news.
Concept: A newspaper or ‘zine that has headlines of hope and solutions to uplift the people who read it and get them to think about if the contents could really happen or not. We also are considering taking it online and making a website that looks very similar to a major newspaper or magazine, like Time, People, New York Times, and/or a more local publication like the Bangor Daily News.
Why is this important and who is it for? It is for the common civilian to try to stir their mind as to what really is and isn’t possible. Seeing a physical news headline (digital or print) of news we dream of hearing can make the possibility seem more tangible. This is important as political apathy is much too common as it’s easy to feel helpless against corporate and government kingpins.
New Media Strategy: This idea employs the “upstage the man” strategy, where we are impersonating something bigger than us to get our “smaller-person” message out there.
Audience and influence: The audience in mind is the everyday civilian who may feel powerless in our current social and economic state.We hope it will wake people up to the potential of these good things coming true through more community involvement, and we want to try to break through the understandable apathy.
Budget and materials:
| Line item | Cost | Time |
| Computer to make the site / design the print, InDesign, a code editor | n/a (already owned) | 6-10 hours |
| Our own domain to imitate a larger publishing company. | ~ $10-$15 | 20 minutes |
| printing costs for the ‘zines | 40¢/page | One day |
| ‘Zine distribution | Physical copies: n/a
Url stickers: $2.30/ sticker, an estimated 20 stickers, so $46 |
Shipping time, ~2 weeks. |
| Copywriting | n/a | Multiple weeks |
One thought on “Hacktivism Intent – TannerM, SophiaC, & LorenH”
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Great idea. Of course the YES MEN already did it for NYT: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwj_u8vh1rDZAhWn44MKHeB8CgcQtwIIJzAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F129322969&usg=AOvVaw0v2a5O1JQLzafydWWnWE46
But it could be really cool to do this for
1) Maine Campus….
2) Bangor Daily News….
You will need to source/gather lots of data/articles. You could use some ides from yesmagazine.org as it published “good news” as opposed to scandal and war.
An approach would have a mock up of a newspaper cover, plus a few sample articles in a specific newspaper…
Ambitious but could be really fun to do!!