Calling America is an internet-based oral histories project that explores the possibilities of popular communications technologies in the practice of participatory journalism, documentary and the preservation of people's histories. Calling America programs make use of cellular telephones and related technologies in conjunction with blogging platforms in the process of producing blog-based documentaries - or blogumentaries - concerning various sites of activist and grass-roots led organizational practices in the United States.

Calling America programs attempt to reinterpret the intended function of the common telephone - a communications technology created for use in private speech - and explore ways in which these tools can be used to facilitate and document public and collective speech. The ubiquity of cellular telephones, the general public’s comfort with them, and their role in facilitating intimate private communications (even in the most public of areas) makes them interesting and challenging tools to incorporate into documentary practice where intimate speech concerning public issues is broadcasted to a public audience.

As a publishing platform, Calling America uses a series of linked standard weblogs. Like journals and diaries long before them, blogs are known for content that is personal, confessional, subjective, as well as political, professional and objective, often blending and shifting between these conventions of thought and writing in a single post. Blogs have potential in displaying the arbitrariness of the terms that suppose the personal as separate from the political as well as private from public. Their structure as chronological timelines accommodate a narrative structure shared by both the conventions of traditional oral storytelling, diary and journalistic writing and formal historical texts. These conventions of content and structure make blogs ideal for documentary explorations seeking to amplify and preserve the oral histories of people’s movements as told by individuals immersed in them.