Connecting After Chaos by Stephen F. Ostertag;

Author:Stephen F. Ostertag;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press

The Rising Tide Conference, 2006–2016

Perhaps the most impressive, organized, and lasting example of these bloggers’ cultural work is the Rising Tide conference. The Rising Tide conference was an annual social media event held in New Orleans, and it is an impressive example of cultural work among blog users in the settling city.1 It started in 2006, one year after the hurricane, with around fifty people in attendance, mostly the participants on panels and organizers. It ballooned into well over two hundred attendees only a few years later. It was a daylong convention that consisted of a series of panels and speakers, workshops, and a keynote speaker. Keynote speakers were often associated with media in some way. Sometimes this was another blogger, and other times it was someone in legacy media, either local and national (Mac McClelland, Chris Rose, David Simon). The conference included a number of panels that lasted about an hour and a half each. Their focus was on issues of civil and political society, including public safety, environmental sustainability and the Gulf Coast, journalism, crime and criminal justice, education, academics, neighborhood associations, and the like. Panelists included a number of representatives from these institutions, such as neighborhood leaders, local journalists, education reformers, and the police chief. Further, the conference included workshops specifically geared toward social media users. Examples include “Advanced WordPress Techniques for Bloggers” and “Know Your Intellectual Property Rights for Online Content,” which were designed to protect bloggers and other users of social media from copyright infringement, libel suits, and other issues that might arise through their more politically oriented blogging. The name of the conference came from a book by the author John M. Barry (1998) on the history of attempting to control the Mississippi River and the engineering and politics that led to the 1927 Mississippi River flood in Greenville, Mississippi. The convention celebrated and included all users of digital social media, but blog users started it and were the most involved in running it.

The first convention took place in August 2006, as close to the hurricane’s anniversary as possible. It was organized in about a month. Held on Lake Pontchartrain, it drew about fifty people, many of whom were organizers or panelists. While the numbers might not seem large (many people had not yet returned to the city, and the blog network was in its infancy), these blog users nonetheless found an offline outlet for their emerging collective discourse, and the conference grew in the subsequent years. A lot had to happen for this to be possible, but over time, several blog users put together an annual, organized event of speakers and panelists on the city’s “progress and regress.” Rising Tide stated its mission this way: “For everyone who loves New Orleans and is working to bring a better future to all its residents. Leveraging the power of bloggers and new media, the conference is a launch pad for organization and action. Our day-long program of speakers and presentations is tailored to inform, entertain, enrage and inspire.

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