Online Powers the Picket Line: The First Wired WGA Strike

My kids sometimes ask me in non-narcissistic lapses how it was different when I was a kid. Inevitably, the conversation hits the shock value moment where they say incredulously, "U really didn't have email? Seriously, like what did u do?" I explain that 'seriously, like' we didn't even have the Internet. And then comes the follow-up, almost pitying look when they find out we didn't have IM either...or webisodes, cell phones, or even the concept of mobile narratives or any of the developing content venues that the WGA strike is being currently fought about.

But seriously, what did we do in lieu of being wired or wireless online? I know, being wired in other ways... also reading, listening to music, and yes, writing but in old media ways, books, television, film; plus watching TV and going to theater and movies more than most of us do now. LBI Life Before Internet was way different than LAI Life After Internet. That difference is also apparent in WGA strikes before & after internet.

Our current strike is not just about new technology, it's also our first one being waged and fueled by new media. Just as the Internet changed the landscape of political campaigning, so it is now hugely impacting our strike operations and hopefully outcome. For starters, the organizing piece seems much more together than in the past. Writers have been kept up to the nano-second rather than up to date since pre-strike negotiations through Guild emails, Variety trade magazine e-bulletins, from phone and text messages on our cells. We have more thoroughly trained WGA team captains and team-mates serially sharing digital photos on computers and blackberries. We can look at a vast array of YouTube videos created by pedigreed striking talent. We can snap digital photos of ourselves and others on the daily picket lines and zip them to our favorite online websites or blogs. We can write online, at least, about how the strike feels to us and comment instantaneously on others' sentiments.

So new technology has facilitated increased organizing which has in turn produced larger picketing numerical turn-out. So what? So we feel part of a bigger, more powerful group, positive reinforcement (along with the addictive junk food) for showing up more. Since news is now virally global because of new technology, we see ourselves digitally all over the world...and the world sees us A LOT, whether our cause merits this online 24/7 facetime or not. I recently attended a Salzburg Global Seminar on the Arts, and have been getting wonderfully supportive emails and Facebook comments from Malaysian to Nigerian Seminar Fellows who are following the strike coverage. Well, the entertainment industry is the number two economic export of the United States. And it is glitzy watching Alicia Keys perform for the entertainment, teamsters, farmworkers, nurses, longshoremen, and other unions on Hollywood Boulevard or seeing actors Ray Romano and Patricia Heaton nurturingly deliver mini-cartons of orange juice and apples to picketing writers on the Paramount Studios asphalt while Jessie Jackson pumps up the volume and energy of scribes doing four-hour daily walking shifts.

There are many questionable things about the invasion of new technology, but it does have a democratizing element. The writers I've spoken to online and on the line feel more equal with one another these days. A writer who has sold her or his first mobile narrative can and does walk & talk with an Academy Award winning hyphenate writer/director/producer. Other unions can and do show their support more easily because the Internet is allowing quicker and wider ability to organize events and rallies. Anyone and everyone can and pretty much, it seems, does blog.

I do wonder who's currently making money from the new digital content cropping up on the web. Not the talent, not the signatory companies being struck. Possibly the websites on which the new content lives will gain financially. If so, writers online and on the picket line need to figure out a way to also be compensated for this internet-birthed burgeoning creativity. That's for this strike and future contract battles to hammer out.

And one day, maybe not so far into the future, perhaps on a galaxy light years away, our kids' kids may be striking for a piece of the intergalactic financial pie of whatever outerspace.media has evolved into.