The BURN! Project and Primary Source Media

from http://burn.ucsd.edu/about.html

BURN! started as a student project in the communications department in the early 1990's as an experiment in a new type of media. Instead of publishing information written about various social protagonists, BURN! publishes information written by them. Primary source media eliminates the go-between because the best way to learn about what's going on is to hear it from the people who are actively involved. The information that we publish is used for research by academics and journalists throughout the world.

A lot of the information that we publish is unavailable elsewhere. In the interest of preserving academic freedom and availability of information, we publish information that is censored by various governments. Our information is also used by people who live in the countries where it is coming from, because of how difficult it is to get this information there.

The internet has huge possibilities for the dissemination of information. With the internet, there is much more freedom to distribute and to access information, making this new type of media possible. We no longer need to look to the television or newspapers to learn about current events and the people participating in them, because we can just look to these people directly and decide what we think on our own. BURN! facilitates this by publishing primary source information to allow people to bypass the traditional corporate media as sources for information.

We are working to build a society without hunger or fear, where people have real control over their own lives. Participating in this type of primary source media instead of passively accepting what we are told by the corporate media is part of our praxis. We provide access to information so that people can make up their own minds about it. As part of our efforts in effecting radical social change, we are making radical social media by publishing primary source materials, mostly from other groups working toward radical social change.

So why is the university trying to shut us down? One would think that UCSD, being one of the most prestigious public research universities in the country, would want primary source information like this to be accessible. The social role of the university is changing beneath us; moving quickly toward privatization and censorship and away from academic freedom.

This attack is a part of that move. Eroding academic freedom necessitates eliminating primary sources that can be used for research, especially those that present a point of view which deviates from that which is presented by the government and the corporate media. And we, of course, look like an easy target for this. We're students, not faculty. A lot of the information we publish has already been censored. And, with this country skipping merrily toward fascism, jumping on the "war against terrorism" bandwagon seems to be a stance UCSD thinks will be popular.

What does it mean to "provide material support to support terrrorists"? If access to information and academic freedom in a public research university constitue material support to terrorists, it should come as no suprise that civil liberties and free speech have been among the casualties of the war on terrorism. We're not giving money to the FARC (or anyone else). We're not training them or housing them or giving them weapons. The extent of our "support" for the FARC is a hyperlink. Nowhere does it say that we like or dislike the FARC. We simply provide a link to their page so that people can make up their own minds about them.

In a world where this is a crime, we all have a responsibility to be criminals.

In a world where academic freedom is under attack, the universities should be at the frontlines of the struggle to save it, instead of rushing to help destroy it.