Cassandra Morath's List: Digital Citizenship

• Online revolutionary;
  A gripping account by the 'digital guerrilla' who organised last year's Egyptian uprising through a Facebook group
  
  BYLINE: MATTHEW CAMPBELL
• by the 'digital guerrilla' who organised last year's Egyptian uprising through a Facebook group
  
  BYLINE: MATTHEW CAMPBELL
  
  
• A gripping account

• REVOLUTION 2.0: A Memoir from the Heart of the Arab Spring by WAEL GHONIM, Fourth Estate £14.99/ebook £14.39 pp320

  As tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Cairo's central square a year ago to call for the resignation of Egypt's dictator, an American chat-show host asked Henry Kissinger what he thought about the "revolution on the Nile".
• Stand up, Wael Ghonim. He is the face behind an internet page that became a digital battering ram against the regime, channelling public fury over social injustice into vast protests that ended up claiming the most important scalp to date of the Arab spring.
• "digital tsunami".

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• ow Facebook Enhanced Coverage LinkingFacebook  -Search using:Company ProfileNews, Most Recent 60 DaysCompany Dossierpostings and tweets prevailed over guns and bullets is an extraordinary tale that has turned Ghonim, a diminutive, bespectacled figure, into an international celebrity garlanded with awards and bombarded by literary agents, the media and talent scouts offering speaking engagements.
• He unleashed the "digital tsunami", as he calls it, by creating a Facebook Enhanced Coverage LinkingFacebook  -Search using:Company ProfileNews, Most Recent 60 DaysCompany Dossierpage in summer 2010 as he sat behind a laptop in Dubai, where he had been posted by Google as regional marketing director. The site was called "We are all Khaled Said", after a young man who had been beaten to death by police in the city of Alexandria.

• 
  The Observer (England)
• December 11, 2011
  SOCIAL UPHEAVAL: Twitter rules, BlackBerry crumbles and Eliot is reborn: In his weekly Networker column, John Naughton traces the innovations and changing fortunes of the technology business, and its effect on the way we live. Here he looks back on 2011, a year when the internet was held responsible for nothing less than changing the world - and not always for the better
  
  BYLINE: John Naughton
• There was delight in the west when the Tunisian regime failed to grasp the significance of Facebook and Twitter, and concern when the Mubarak regime did. There was gleeful exhilaration when some hackers rigged up a "phone to tweet" system that enabled Egyptians to dial an international phone number and record a message that was then broadcast as a tweet. Mubarak shut down Egypt's internet access for several days, which caused some disquiet. But then the Egyptian generals, who run a lot of businesses, discovered that they were losing millions of dollars in revenue every disconnected day, so the country hastily rejoined the networked world.

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• Egypt's 'Facebook Enhanced Coverage LinkingFacebook  -Search using:Company ProfileNews, Most Recent 60 DaysCompany DossierGirl' eagerly awaits possible Nobel Peace Prize;
  If Egyptian organizer Esraa Abdel Fattah wins the Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow, it could reinvigorate Egypt's flagging activists. But some say it could overstate social media's role in Egypt's revolution.
• So it was only fitting that it was on Facebook Enhanced Coverage LinkingFacebook  -Search using:Company ProfileNews, Most Recent 60 DaysCompany Dossierthat she saw the news last week that she had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, along with April 6 Youth, an organization that grew out of the 2008 strike, for the roles they played in the mass mobilization of Egyptians that led to the revolution.
• with some Egyptians complaining it de-emphasizes the grassroots nature of the uprising and overplays the role of social media.

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• After a Tunisian youth died protesting corruption, a global torrent of messages saw dictators topple
  
  SECTION: INTERNATIONAL NEWS; FOLIO: #2011 / THE YEAR OF SOCIAL MEDIA; Pg. A8
  
• People witnessing the fiery act of defiance and the street demonstrations that followed capture the scenes and post them on YouTube.
• After Mr. Amamou posts the video, it goes viral in the Arab World. Al-Jazeera broadcasts it, fuelling copycat demonstrations around the country.
• Once again, Tunisian activists rely on social media to spread their message.
• Mr. Amamou uses his cell phone to live-stream video of the massive turnout. Others capture and post video of protesters being shot dead on the streets.
• For years, they had been organizing underground and on two popular Facebook pages: "We are all Khaled Said," dedicated to the 28-year-old computer programmer who was beaten to death by police after exposing their corruption online, and "The April 6th Movement," which pressed for workers' rights. To date, "We are all Khlaed Said" has been "liked" by more than 160,000 people. The activists select as their day of protest Jan. 25: National Police Day.

• Activists use Facebook and Twitter to spread false information tricking the security forces into believing they would converge elsewhere.
• Recognizing the crucial role social media is playing in the protests, Mr. Mubarak's government begins to crack down on communication. Mobile phone lines, Twitter and Facebook are all blocked
• The Egyptian government further tightens its clampdown on communications, severing land lines and satellite Internet connections
• Over the next few days all Internet service providers in Egypt are shut down. In the end, the regime's attempts to cut off communication further angers Egyptians who are anxious for information, sending them onto the streets and into Tahrir Square.
• Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who helped organize the protests, is released from 10 days in detention. In a tearful television interview, he speaks of the role social media played in the revolution. "
• Virtually every news event in 2011 had a social media aspect to it.

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• "I certainly do not think he would have left office at this point if it wasn't for social networking tools," said Brad Shimmin, principal analyst with Current Analysis. "I think they wanted all eyes to be turned away from the uprising, but the crackdowns on Internet access failed.
• Three years ago, an activist started the April 6 Movement page on Facebook to support striking workers.
• Activists also started a page on Facebook dedicated to Khaled Said, an activist blogger allegedly beaten to death by police last year.
• They used social networking sites to engage people -- to motivate them into action, not just online but in the real world.

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• The rush and tumult of events makes it hard, sometimes, to draw the most important general conclusions from their significance. This said, the revolutionary tidal wave, which began in Tunisia and Algeria, reached its crest in Egypt and is currently sweeping other countries such as Libya and Bahrain, offers a unique opportunity to watch how people can reshape history as they reconstruct their fates and futures.
• What matters in this context, however, is that globalisation brought three concurrent revolutions: the unstoppable and irrepressible revolution in information technology, as exemplified by electronic communications and social networking media such as the Internet, Facebook, blogging sites and Twitter; the communications revolution as powered by mobile phones and similar devices, of which billions are bought every year; and the media revolution in which satellite television channels are spearheading forward bound mass media, just as radio broadcasting had in the mid-20th century and the press had in the late 19th century.

• hat ingredient is, of course, communication.Revolutions are often described by those with a pedestrian approach towards description as an 'uprising of the masses'. But 'the masses' never become that unless they have a method of communication that binds them together, showing each of them a common cause and uniting them under a common ideology and intent.Without effective communication, 'the masses' remain a collection of individuals.
• therefore, is an effective means of communication.

• A day later, "the Egyptian government tries to stop the protesters by shutting down the Internet and cell phones," reported CBS News correspondent Russ Mitchell, -- the same technology that provided a match for the tinderbox.
• "It's not enough. It's not enough. He has to get out now," shouted protesters on Feb. 1.

• After massive protests, Hosni Mubarak Enhanced Coverage LinkingHosni Mubarak  -Search using:Biographies Plus NewsNews, Most Recent 60 Dayswas forced from power after 30 years on February 11.

  Two IT experts from Tunisia and Egypt were in Hong Kong last week for the World Summit Awards, and took time out to speak to the press.

• Zaghbib said 64 per cent of local Facebook Enhanced Coverage LinkingFacebook  -Search using:Company ProfileNews, Most Recent 60 DaysCompany Dossierusers had participated in online debates and the number of mobile phone text messages had doubled.

  "It took just 23 days to get rid of a dictatorship that had lasted for 23 years," Zaghbib said.

• "There has been a dramatic change in the use of social networks," she said. "Every household has become politicised - even poor farmers and labourers."

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• The Obama administration Enhanced Coverage LinkingObama administration  -Search using:Biographies Plus NewsNews, Most Recent 60 Daysis leading a global effort to deploy ''shadow'' Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
• The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation in a fifth-floor shop in Washington where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype ''Internet in a suitcase.''
• The U.S. initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

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• The International Herald Tribune
  June 13, 2011 Monday
  U.S. gives Web tools to dissidents;
  Internet detour provides ways to evade censors in repressive countries
  
  BYLINE: BY JAMES GLANZ AND JOHN MARKOFF

• The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Internet in Egypt in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country's Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

  The U.S. initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

• Birds of a feather flock together, they say. -- tahrir (or in English, liberation). Mubarak's regime realised the important role social media and the Internet in general could play in mobilising people for the revolution, and so decided on the night of 28th January to cut off Internet access and disconnect a whole country from the online map.Now, as Egypt lives a tough transition, many "tweeps" - people with a mutual following on Twitter - are using this huge network to raise awareness and spread the spirit of Tahrir through different initiatives. Alaa Abd el-Fattah, for example, recently launched #tweetnadwa for public debates and discussions that gather tweeps in a specific place.
• he economy and social justice, and the decade-long roots of the revolution are just some examples of topics discussed in Tweet-up Nadwas (or Tweet symposiums)