global unrest
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Global unrest: how the revolution went viral Paul Mason guardian.co.uk , Tuesday 3 January 2012 ...Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. What's important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organized via Indymedia, but what they used these media for – and what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions. If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of 2009–11, it goes like this: Facebook is used to form groups, covert and overt – in order to establish those strong but flexible connections. Twitter is used for real-time organization and news dissemination, bypassing the cumbersome newsgathering operations of the mainstream media. YouTube and the Twitter-linked photographic sites – Yfrog, Flickr and Twitpic – are used to provide instant evidence of the claims being made. Link- shorteners such as bit.ly are used to disseminate key articles via Twitter. Underpinning [reinforcing] the social media [is cellphone use]: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cell-phones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and [lasting] image-capture to a global audience. And in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered a vital resource: somewhere to link to. Their impact can be measured by the fact that, in 2011, 7% of Middle Eastern bloggers surveyed reported they had been arrested by their respective security Egyptian bloggers work on their laptops in Tahrir Square, Cairo. A demonstrator from the hacker group Anonymous, San Francisco, August 2011
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global unrest
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Global unrest: how the revolution went viralPaul Mason guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 January 2012
...Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. What's important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organized via Indymedia, but what they used these media for – and what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions.
If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of 2009–11, it goes like this: Facebook is used to form groups, covert
and overt – in order to establish those strong but flexible connections. Twitter is used for real-time organization and news dissemination, bypassing the cumbersome newsgathering operations of the mainstream media. YouTube and the Twitter-linked photographic sites – Yfrog, Flickr and Twitpic – are used to provide instant evidence of the claims being made. Link-shorteners such as bit.ly are used to disseminate key articles via Twitter.
Underpinning [reinforcing] the social media [is cellphone use]: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cell-phones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and [lasting] image-capture to a global audience.
And in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered a vital resource: somewhere to link to. Their impact can be measured by the fact that, in 2011, 7% of Middle Eastern bloggers surveyed reported they had been arrested by their respective security forces. The ability to deploy, without expert knowledge, a whole suite of information tools has allowed protesters across the world to outwit the police [and] beam their message into the newsrooms of global media.... It has given today's protest movements a massive psychological advantage, one that no revolt has enjoyed since 1968…
Egyptian bloggers work on their laptops in Tahrir Square, Cairo.
A demonstrator from the hacker group Anonymous, San Francisco, August 2011
Egyptian protesters using cell phones to take photos/record video. British Rioters and police
