Empathy plays a crucial role in civic engagement.
Empathy is particularly difficult to have for the nation's incarcerated due to a number of reasons. One of them being the misconceptions, misrepresentations,
The implications these distortions and ignorances have on the lives of these men and women show that they are not just perversions of the truth, but impediments to a fair and just society.

However thanks to new media these hurdles towards compassion for the incarcerated fellow are being assuaged.


Of all the avenues for civic engagement, of all the problems in world fighting for our attention, why prisons?

Whorf - the way in which language shapes our view of the world.
Technology and progress and control.
"Infrastructure"
New media is in a sense a continuation of the written word.


What is new media mediating: technology breaching technology

What stands between you who are reading this and a person behind bars.
Stamping a node on your landscape of society, whether you like it or not.
This paper argues that the narrative of technology diverged and is cannibalizing itself.
What is convenience is no longer convenience. What is control is not longer control.




Image construction.
Self construction
The power of an image

Communications
New media in grassroots.
New media for non profits like sentencing project
Blogs - "bringing the individual back in".
prisontalk.com
prison penpals.