Have chickens ever questioned why they cannot fly?

I love to sit and watch my chooks out in the garden.  They each have a different personality and their moods change like any woman’s.  They are overseen by Captain Ned, the gorgeous rooster, who is so kind to the girls, and occasionally gets lucky behind the elm tree.  The thing is, if I watch long enough, I begin to imagine them with arms, I  mean ,they don't use their wings to fly.  While they are fabulously capable creatures as they are, if they had arms, I think they would love it!  Toes and fingers in the ground scratching, arms pumping as they powerwalk from the henhouse to the hydrangeas.  Who knows what else they could achieve.



I shouldn’t have written that down.  It makes me sound crazy, and if some institution is keeping a file on me somewhere, what will that say about me?  I have done some things in my time that probably should have ended up on a file…  Do I now sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist? 

So should I worry that ‘they’ are keeping a file one me? 

No – I should be worried that they are keeping files from me.  Or more, I should be worried that I do not really think twice about it.  Thank goodness for Julian Assange.  I mean, whatever people think of how he looks or his personal baggage, someone who writes:  ‘The quality of our discourse is the limit of our civilization’, and simply asks people to find out about our world and challenge what people in power are telling us’ is thinking! (Assange, J,2012)

We have learned about the evolution of digital citizen journalism and Jenkins’ (2009) theory of the ‘collective intelligence’s’ ability to monitor government practices.  After checking out all the blogs that the online study group posted as the ones that they regularly visit, and blogs in general, the 'journalism' that we pay attention to is, let’s admit it, pretty fluffy.

We have discussed that digital activism acts as a great platform for informing the world about injustices that are happening around us, but that it can actually make it too easy for us to feel like we are participating because we clicked a ‘like’ or a ‘share’ button.  In reality, are we actually changing anything? I think most of us would answer with a resounding… aaah… no.

So here I want to champion respect for the independent role and professional status of journalists.  People who put themselves on the line to look for the truth, without which, people cannot really participate comfortably in the democratic process.

Digital platforms, such as wikileaks.org now give these professionals a whole new way to reach and inform citizens, outside of traditional media organisations.  We should be actively seeking them out and learning from them, and then questioning everything ourselves!  Not watching chooks - birds that cannot even fly!

Is there a responsibility, if we are to use digital platforms for activism and citizen journalism, to learn and internalise journalistic principles?  Let’s think about putting it in schools so that future generations will resist simply accepting and being controlled by institutions and self-serving individuals and know how to properly question and collaborate to create a just world to live in, instead of just uploading photos of themselves at a party.

Let’s hope that is not when pigs fly and chickens have arms.

 

Image Source: Elizabeth Rose Stanton, Henny's Arms, 2011, viewed 19 January 2013, http://penspaperstudio.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/some-chicken-scratch.html