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April 21, 2006
Le CPE: France, 2006
The 'Death of Milosevic' story gave me the kind of charge that frequently reminds me that I love communicating. At the suggestion of the Open Source staff, I switched from looking for web content that relates to the radio shows we produce, and instead began to focus on breaking news stories from around the world.
The crescendo of images and rhetoric coming out of France-- from the barricades around the Sorbonne to the jostling between Chirac, Villepin, and Sarkozy-- were a clear prompt to investigate. Why were French youth, many of them from universities, shutting down cities, roads, and igniting cars, over a proposed labor law?
The bloggers and Flickr photographers I corresponded with wrote about universal opposition to the CPE, as the law was known, and about rising tension between both young and marginalized people and their government. They reflected on the November 2005 riots in the suburban immigrant communities, noting simmilarities and differences.
I came away from the story impressed by the journalistic practices, as well as the sophistocation of analysis, in the French (and especially Parisian) blogosphere. Bloggers were posting pictures and videos from the middle of the demostrations, from the sidelines, on quiet side streets, on abandoned university campuses, and in packed halls of students debating their future. And they were doing all of this reporting for readers to freely consume and pass on to others. I wonder, is there a relation between the (sometimes inspiring, sometimes frustrating) culture of activism in France and the volume and quality of its blogs? Do young Americans participate in and deliberate on their collective future in the same way?
Posted by Henry Shepherd at April 21, 2006 09:56 PM
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