Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt
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I sat up watching the news last night and had a look at The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, which opened with O'Reilly bloviating about the evil of the "anti-American, anti-Semitic Al Jazeera" -- backing it up by attributing quotes from people quoted on Al Jazeera to the channel itself. It was unbelievable.
I switched from that complete abandonment of anything resembling a journalistic norm to Jackie Rowland on reporting on Al Jaz from a pro Mubarak rally beginning to boil over. She was apparently -- and justifiably -- fearing for her own life, but she kept talking. It was utterly arresting.
And, of course, the contrast could hardly have been more stark.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
Call me a journalist, but that seems less important to me right now than simply trying to get a grasp on the extraordinary reportage flowing out of Egypt, via all the means we've been discussing.
I am really not trying to pick a fight. To put my original comment (which wasn't aimed at you) in context: I had been following the events in Tunisia and Egypt for weeks - they're at Italy's doorstep, so the media there was predictably on to it, and I have several friends who help me keep up with these things, largely via social media - and wondering why the English-speaking outlets were keeping mum on Egypt in particular (where the rumblings started quite a while ago), then suddenly the New York Times and others jumped on it and it was all about fucking Twitter and, to a slightly lesser extent, Wikileaks. Which was actually quite dispiriting: it was like we had found a way to make it about us and so suddenly it was important, and there was nothing about all the other dimensions of the story, nor any sense of history or subtlety about the media phenomenon itself. It was wrong on very many levels, not least of all because, as you write
What role the technologies are playing in Egypt itself is, of course, much harder to know.
Slapping on Iran's protests the "Twitter revolution" label was deeply offensive, as it is to use the phrase Twitter generation to describe the Egyptian movement now. And while I don't subscribe to Gladwell's wholesale dismissal of the role of social media I think it's good that those crude characterisations get challenged - as they do here - in search of a more nuanced position. Because of course that extraordinary reportage flowing out of Egypt is worthy of commentary and analysis. There is no question about that.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Which was actually quite dispiriting: it was like we had found a way to make it about us and so suddenly it was important, and there was nothing about all the other dimensions of the story, nor any sense of history or subtlety about the media phenomenon itself.
Fair enough. I gave a couple of talks last year in which which I argued that the critics of the grand claims for social media’s role in Iran also made the mistake of thinking it was all about us. ie: it wasn’t about what you found if you searched for the #IranElection hashtag, which was, yes, a lot of hand-wringing western internet users (my slide read “#IranElection wasn’t about us”).
The story was more the small but significant role that Twitter played inside the country, and in communicating with the rest of the world – for the relatively mundane reason that the mullahs hadn’t worked out how to block it effectively. Which isn’t the same thing as a “Twitter revolution”.
Oops, I said it. Please shoot me if I use that phrase again …
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it was like we had found a way to make it about us and so suddenly it was important
This. Even TV3 trolling around Cairns looking for 'typical' kiwis affected by the impending cyclone, got tired very quickly.
Afghanistan = RWC.
Egypt = Petrol.
Yasi = NZ Holidays ruined.Just the important stuff.
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Dismal Soyanz, in reply to
Bill O'Reilly is the embodiment of the race to the bottom.
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This is one of the scary videos I was referring to earlier regarding Mubarak NDP thugs pulling people out of the crowd:
Apparently the man dragged off about 1 minute into the video may be Wael Ghonim (@Ghonim), Google’s director of marketing in the Middle East and North Africa.
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This is a pretty weird tweet;
http://twitter.com/JNSmall/status/32911161141764096
from a Washington based journo for Time.
Can only assume it's a joke, but still, what might work as private humour between people that know each other doesn't always translate:
Anderson Cooper: if your crew is getting beat up in riots in every country you go to-might that suggest UR the 1 doing something wrong?
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If you're interested in somewhere that technology *is* being used for effective direct action, see: http://sukey.org/.
What will be interesting is how quickly Apple ban the app.
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The Guardian has a live blogfeed starting from around 7.00 yesterday morning running up to 'now'.
Made my stomache churn reading it first thing this morning. Looks like the chances of an 'orderly transition' are fading fast.
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One of The Nation's bloggers addresses Gladwell's self-justifying blurt in the New Yorker and produces something much more insightful and interesting than the thing he's critiquing.
The overarching problem here is the false premise, frequently employed in these disputes. No one is arguing that this is the first protest in world history. Very few people think the Internet is an essential prerequisite to revolution. Instead, they're exploring whether the web and networked communications open up new and effective ways for citizens to converse and organize each other in repressive societies. (Access to mobile phones and text-messaging, for example, may have helped young people organize in Egypt and Tunisia in a different way than landlines or websites.) We can engage these issues without taking anything away from the French Revolution. Now, whether people "always" communicate grievances in authoritarian societies—a dubious claim—is less important to foreign policy than what comes of those communications.
And:
Which brings us to another presumption in Gladwell's post : the subjective and potentially indulgent judgment about what is "interesting." Here, I have a little sympathy with his annoyance. Some people are interested in what moves people: first principles and anger points and all that; others are interested in how political action works: collecting petition signatures, party committee elections; and others fixate on technology or media: how an iPhone works, why an article is the most e-mailed. Since the media have more control over public discourse than other groups, by definition, they can skew debates to disproportionately cover their favorite topics, which include itself. This tendency is partially checked by new media, which add criticism and alternative topics to the mix. If there's a blind spot here, however, it is in the areas of media and technology, which are overemphasized by both new and old media. (Pew has data on this trend.)
I can get behind this article.
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recordari, in reply to
I can get behind this article.
Seems pretty reasoned to me. Quite a learning experience this watching revolution unfold. Seems it has a long way to run yet though.
ETA: Reminds me of my Pol Sci lectures in 1988 where Barry Gustafson said about the joining of East and West Germany, and an end to the Cold War; 'not in my lifetime'.
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Social media can enable people to organise and perhaps if that method was not availble then exactly the same type of organisation would occur anyway by other means.
But there's another aspect to information which is not necssarily about the information itself but who knows the inormation and who knows who knows the information etc.
Take the Prisoners' Dilemma for example. What is critical is not knowing if the other person knows.
I haven't really thought this out but it's possible that social media can qualitatively change group dynamics by influencing what people understand of what other people know.
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That's an intriguing idea, Neil. Truly.
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Wired has a fascinating story on the geeks of Tahrir Square .
What these young people are doing seems important to me. I also find the "how" pretty interesting too.
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
Yes, that is a very interesting point Neil.
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Neil Morrison, in reply to
From that article:
“The role of the Internet was critical at the beginning,” Gharbeia says. “On the 25th, the movements of the protesting groups were arranged in real time through Twitter. Everyone knew were everyone else was walking and we could advise on the locations of blockades and skirmishes with police.
It's not just knowing where people were but the confidence of knowing that other people also knew. That wouldn't happen so easily with traditional media, if it happened at all.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
It’s not just knowing where people were but the confidence of knowing that other people also knew. That wouldn’t happen so easily with traditional media, if it happened at all.
I like I how linked to something that illustrated your idea so well without even actually meaning to.
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Neil Morrison, in reply to
the spooky magic of social networking
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Heart wrenching interview with Mona Seif in Tahrir Square:
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Sacha, in reply to
it's possible that social media can qualitatively change group dynamics by influencing what people understand of what other people know.
Good point. The new tools do seem to make the wisdom of crowds easier and faster to access - and in real time.
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Apparently this is the video that helped spark the uprising. Recorded by 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz on 18 January, uploaded to YouTube and shared on her Facebook page:
Original here:
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Sacha, in reply to
One of The Nation's bloggers addresses Gladwell's self-justifying blurt in the New Yorker
This is a core point for me and it's where I find Shirky more convincing:
But when Gladwell simply announces that how people communicate is "less interesting" than why, he's just stating his personal, editorial preference as accepted fact.
Yes, Gladwell seems to believe that the old editorial filtering function of his publishing industry career is the right and only way. But those days are coming to an end. Digital media encourages easily publishing many voices and viewpoints and then using social widom to filter them afterwards. Dethroning the 'editor' as it were. The courtiers may not like that much..
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Kracklite, in reply to
And in the Onionverse...
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A slight digression, but here's my friend Glen's account of the action just two days ago before the "announcement"...pretty frightening whichever way you look at it.
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
Dethroning the 'editor' as it were. The courtiers may not like that much..
Careful, we will be back in the copyright thread before we know it with revolutionary thoughts like that.
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