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Twitter vs. Tyrants: Remarks by Evgeny Morozov « iRevolution
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- [N]ew media will power all political forces, not just the forces we like. Many of the recent Western funding and media development efforts have been aimed at creating what’s known as, new digital public spaces, on the assumption that these new digital spaces would enable the nascent actors or civil society to flourish on blogs, Twitter and social networks.
- So in a sense, promoting this new digital spaces entails similar risks to promoting free elections. It’s quite possible we may not like the guys who win.
- One of his examples to this is Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood bloggers. He of course does not know the details and the real size of the MB blogs, or what the MB generally is going through recently, or how the MB bloggers have been playing catchup with the Kifaya/lefty blogsphere from the very beginning. - on 2009-10-29
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Add Sticky NoteWe have to realize that authoritarian governments themselves have developed extremely sophisticated strategies to control cyberspace and often those go beyond censorship. It’s a mistake to believe that these governments wouldn’t be able to manipulate these new public spaces with their own propaganda or use them to their own advantage.
- Which is the entire idea of mass movements. By the same rationale, we should ban elections because it can bring fascists to power - on 2009-10-29
Arab Media & Society - The end of the beginning: The failure of April 6th and the future of electronic activism in Egypt
Page 6, a bit on the way forward. Still no hint of improvements to the tools themselves.
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It doesn’t seem that the Egyptian regime intends to shut down networks altogether (though that of course remains an ever present possibility, particularly during short-term crises). Rather, its aim seems to be creating uncertainty and hardship for activists engaging with technological tools at the same time that are persecuted in much more straightforward and old-fashioned ways.[33]
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Add Sticky NoteIt will take a much savvier opposition, with much clearer goals and a much stronger presence on the ground, to seriously threaten the state.
- ie, 30 Feb. - on 2009-10-28
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Arab Media & Society - The end of the beginning: The failure of April 6th and the future of electronic activism in Egypt
Page 5, a few good notes on mobiles
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A focus on Facebook also appears to have missed the apparent shift of online dissent from blogs to Twitter. As Hossam El-Hamalawy puts it, “the migration is not happening to Facebook, it’s happening to the microblogs.”[25] He adds, “Facebook is one of the outlets I have, but the heavyweights are not using Facebook.” The heavyweight bloggers El-Hamalawy refers to were skeptical of the April 6th movement and its potential, even before the first strike. As blogger Demagh MAK puts it, “The thing is that it’s just easier to use Twitter than a blog. You are in the middle of a demonstration and someone is killed or arrested -- you can’t leave the demonstration and write a blog. One is killed two arrested; you can just send it by Twitter and everybody now knows.”[26] And in fact, it was Twitter that served as the most important clearinghouse for information regarding the events of April 6, 2009.
- This is temporary and linked to mobile updates. Mobile status updates are only a part of a general-purpose social network that can make any real effect - on 2009-10-28
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Add Sticky NoteFor starters, a sophisticated registration-and-tracing system is now in place for mobile phones, allowing the government to track users, interfere with their signals, and shut down large-scale attempts to text message. The Egyptian government successfully blocked the routes of activists’ text messages during the 2009 strike.
- Any sources for this? - on 2009-10-28
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Arab Media & Society - The end of the beginning: The failure of April 6th and the future of electronic activism in Egypt
A few quotes on why Internet activists and observers think 6 April failed. At page 4 and hardly any point related to tools design
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Ahmed Maher himself is alleged to have sought cash from Freedom House, an organization believed to have ties to the US foreign security apparatus. Rumors of CIA involvement in the April 6th movement crippled the activists’ credibility at a critical juncture and turned the group’s Facebook page into a battleground. Group leaders denied they had worked with Freedom House and reaffirmed their commitment to barring foreign involvement in the movement, but the damage appeared to have already been done.[18] One activist told me that while opposition forces are happy to accept technical assistance from foreign promoters of democracy, the acceptance of cash from organizations with known agendas can be deadly for the public credibility of organizers.[19]
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State to award social networking grants in Middle East, Africa - Nextgov
Music to my ears
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The State Department recently unveiled a pilot program that will award up to $5 million in grants to expand the use of social networking technologies in the Middle East with the goal of increasing citizen engagement and civic participation.
In an announcement released on Sept. 25, the department said it will award five organizations between $500,000 and $2.5 million to expand the availability of social networking and new media capabilities in the Middle East and North Africa. The program is sponsored by the Middle East Partnership Initiative, part of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department.
Twitter / Evgeny Morozov: I found unlikely allies am ...
Evgeny is in good company
onScale solutions
"Scalaris is a transactional data store for online services based on the peer-to-peer principle. It provides self-management and scalability by replicating services among peers. Without system interruption it scales from a few PCs to thousands of servers. Servers can be added or removed on the fly without any service downtime. "
Boston Review — Evgeny Morozov: Texting Toward Utopia
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Regime change by text messaging may seem realistic in cyberspace, but no dictators have been toppled via Second Life, and no real elections have been won there either; otherwise, Ron Paul would be president.
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Cyber–utopians’ biggest conceptual mistake is treating cyberspace as some kind of anarchist zone, which the authorities dare not enter except to shut things down. Media reports encourage this view of authoritarian governments as technophobic Internet censors.
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Twitter / Mona Eltahawy: High tech crime dept have ...
traced death threat to IP address in Giza, Egypt. They're also looking at Masrawy.com for threats against me there
Digital Music Can Save the Planet
The study found that buying digital music results in a 40 to 80 percent reduction in energy use and carbon emissions compared to distributing CDs, and that factors in the energy used to download the files over the Internet. The study compared four different ways of obtaining and listening to music, listed from most energy intensive to the least: buying a CD in-person at a record store, buying a CD online, downloading an album and then burning it to a CD (both with and without a jewel case) and downloading an album and listening to it digitally.
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Add Sticky NoteAlso, if the album size is 260 MB (compared to the standard 60 to 100 MB) or more, then that would equal the energy and emissions of buying a CD online because of the extra energy needed to download it.
- Hmmm. I udownload FLAC, which is usually more than 260 MB an album. - on 2009-08-27
Skype As We Know It May Not Exist Much Longer, eBay Says
The only real Web 2.0 success story. Interesting. Great opportunity for free SIP alternatives
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Joseph Galante at Bloomberg News cites Jayanth Angl, an analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, who argues that replacing the technology will not be easy.
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Skype is one of the shiniest stars in eBay's portfolio of companies and is aimed to spin out as an independent company that can sell its own stock in an IPO sometime soon. That's unlikely to happen until this most important of several lawsuits the company faces is somehow resolved.
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