For those of you who could not attend the conference or would like to see again what was discussed in the conference, these are the videos that Teresa Sánchez and Estrella Sendra filmed during the various panels.

Congratulations again on the Conference Organising Committee.

Panel 1: Geopolitical Challenges to Political Change.

Panel 2: Gender and Sexuality in Revolutionary Politics

Panel 3: Justice, Intervention, and the Rule of Law in Transition

Panel 4: Transforming Societies? Social Change Across the Region

Panel 5: Keynote Panel

Omar Sirri, Amir Sadafi, Ellen Berry and Carolyn Barnett, all of them students of MSc in Middle East Politics in SOAS, organized a 1-day conference that gathered a variety of academics, journalists and activists last Saturday 25th February 2012 in Khalili Lecture Theatre. From 9.30 to 7 p.m., hundreds of students, professors, journalists and activists, among others, actively participated in a very interesting discussion on the so-called “Arab Spring”.

This is a video of one of the panelists, Professor Nadje Al-Ali (SOAS), during the panel “Gender and Sexuality in Revolutionary Politics”. I would call it, “Why does theory matter?”, associating it with What’s left of theory (Butler et al. 2000).

Congratulations on the whole Organising Committee.

So the joke goes that Mubarak dies and meets Nasser and Sadat in the afterlife. They ask him, “were you poisoned or shot?” Mubarak shrugs and answers “Facebook!”  Actually, an Egyptian family did recently name their newborn daughter Facebook.

There is no doubt that we’re witnessing a world-historical moment.  The insurrectionary wave that started in Tunis in December and is still unfolding across the Maghreb and Middle East has raised important questions about the role of new media technologies and platforms in contemporary political mobilizations. There has quite possibly never been such a dramatic set of political changes in contiguous or close state formations ever in history.  The revolutions of 1848 in Europe were supposed to be inspired by each other; how much more is that the case in a 24-hour transnational news environment and world-encircling Internet. As Lenin said,  “sometimes decades pass and nothing happens; and then sometimes weeks pass and decades happen.”

It is evident that both new and old media have played significant and fascinating roles in the recent insurrections to topple autocratic regimes from Tunis to Cairo and beyond. New media can no longer be considered the epiphenomena of political movements but are rather significant tools of political mobilization. This is NOT to repeat the fatuous claim that Tunisia was a ‘twitter revolution’, as had been claimed for the Green Movement in Iran after the June 2009 election, nor that such tools are indispensible for political change. Clearly people have made revolution without such tools. But in repressive regimes where face-to-face public politics is extremely curtailed, a platform such as Facebook provides a space where silence and fear are broken and trust can be built, where social networks can turn political, and where home and diaspora can come together. Whatever the intentions of their developers, social media are being used to provide news and information hard to come by from regime channels; to plan and coordinate action; and to tell the world what is going on.

But the conditions and mix of platforms differs from country to country. Tunisians faced a more pervasive police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. The Kefaya movement had been blogging for many years in Egypt and numerous YouTube videos circulated about police torture and bread riots. Libyans have limited internet access but mobile telephony is widespread. The Egyptian Facebook pages We are All Khaled Said, set up by Wael Ghonim,  and 6^th of April Youth Movement became important nodes in a growing movement; at the end of March 2011,  they each have over 100,000 ‘followers’.

Even the Egyptian military interim government announced the resignation of Shafiq and his replacement on their Facebook page. Twitter was another way to keep in touch and share useful suggestions across national borders, as the Tunisian who tweeted “Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas” or like the Egyptian feminist, Mona Eltahawy, telling the world what is going on across the region. These platforms provide the power of instantaneity, immediate diffusion of and access to information, and extensiveness, crossing national borders and addressing diasporic and foreign populations.

But perhaps as significant as the new social media platforms has been the role of broadcasting, especially Al Jazeera Arabic and English. The Arabic channel and BBC Arabic played a multiplier role in articulating the diverse events across the region.  Al Jazeera English kept the rest of the world enthralled, with strong on-the ground coverage and moments of brilliant television direction. These included the use of split-screen to broadcast Mubarak’s last speech live whilst showing the response in Tahrir Square, the scores of shoes being thrown in the air an unmistakable sign that his end was fast approaching. A sympathetic global public opinion may have played a role in the unanimous UN resolution to instigate the no-fly zone over Libya.  In the US, Hillary Clinton has berated the US media for poor coverage which was delivering audiences to Al Jazeera.

We know that the demographic across the region is youthful and, as everywhere else, where possible they have embraced new technologies to download music and film and keep abreast of events around the world. These movements are about the rising expectations and rising frustrations of unemployed young men and the social obstacles encountered by increasingly better educated young women, and ring with an optimistic universalism for human rights and economic opportunities.

There is evidently more to come, in Bahrain, in Yemen, in Syria where the Facebook page The Syrian Revolution has 87,000 followers.  And new policies to support a free press and internet access have to be written in to the new constitutions in Egypt and Tunisia.  Small, alternative media (neither controlled by states nor by big business) are not a simple answer to political repression as Clay Shirky style cultural optimists and Jared Cohen would have the Washington beltway believe. But neither are they so controlled and monitored by strong states that nothing can be achieved, as the pessimists like Evgeny Morozov would argue.

When used creatively within a rich mix of local face-to-face politics, configured in the languages and symbols of national traditions, and in contexts where the older generation simply doesn’t want to give up power, it is evident that small media can punch way above their weight.

The Small Media Initiative invites submission of abstracts for its 2011 Small Media Symposium to be held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London on 8 – 9 April 2011.

In August 2010, Wired published an article entitled From Samizdat to Twitter: How Technology is Making Censorship Irrelevant.  Is it?  Indeed, for many, samizdat is a relic from the distant analog past. A quick glance at the news seems to suggest that we are living in the digital age of Twitter revolutions.

The role played by social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in contentious politics continues to be passionately debated by academics, activists, politicians and pundits. While there are plenty of examples of creative new politics, the recent protests in Burma, China, Iran, and Egypt remind us that governments can simply shut communication down. The question then becomes where do we go after moving from samizdat to Twitter? What alternative channels and technologies of communication can facilitate the flow of information when authoritarian regimes flick the kill switch and what alternative political practices can we invent to circumscribe state repression?

The February events in Egypt suggest that alternatives can be as low-tech as the paper leaflets with practical and tactical advice for demonstrators that have been circulating in Cairo or as high-tech as the speak-to-tweet application that lets individuals dial a phone number and leave (or listen to) a message translated to text on a Twitter page.

These alternatives we call small media, while others call them alternative media, participatory media, and social movement media. This wide range of communicative and political practices will be the focus of the Small Media Symposium that will take place at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London on 8-9 April 2011.

Areas of Interest
The symposium, to include a conference open to the public on 8 April 2011 and closed-door workshops on 9 April 2011, aims to bring together theorists and practitioners across all disciplines and sectors, including academics, activists and developers, to foster discussions about small media theory, practice and innovation.

We invite contributions by academics and practitioners on a wide range of topics and a wide range of approaches related to small media. Research, practical experience insights, product demonstrations, case studies, work-in-progress/posters, conceptual papers and proposals for workshop themes are all welcome.

Possible areas of focus include but are not limited to:
- small media theory: concepts and framing
- state/media dynamics
- un/successful use of small media
- promotion of small media
- distribution of small media
- sustainability of small media
- the changing nature of politics, political practice
- the role of human networks
- imagination and emotion in small media: beyond the counter-information paradigm
- organizing small media democratically: problems and challenges

Deadline and submission details
The deadline for submission of an abstract (400 – 600 words) is 10 March 2011.

Abstracts can be submitted to contact@smallmediainitiative.com

Travel and accommodation
We have a limited budget to assist with travel and accommodation costs.

For further information, please contact us at contact@smallmediainitiative.com

More information
http://www.smallmediainitiative.com

Partners
Internews
Centre for Media & Film Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Index on Censorship
International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR)

What has happened during only a span of four weeks in Tunisia is mind-boggling and unprecedented in the modern day history of the Middle East; that a dictator who has had a stronghold in Tunisia for 23 years has been forced to flee within less than one month of popular uprisings is extraordinary.

In the 21st century, street protests extend to and are complemented by the online realm – the sheer speed in which Tunisia has rooted out its government may or may not be attributed to the rapid speed in which information is exchanged online, but it is certainly worth looking in to. Below is an excellent article by Nate Anderson, entitled “Tweeting Tyrants Out of Tunisia: Global Internet at Its Best” which illustrates, among other things, that the online international solidarity movement is surely a social activist force to be reckoned with.

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Tweeting Tyrants Out of Tunisia: Global Internet at Its Best

* By Nate Anderson Ars Technica , January 14, 2011

Even yesterday, it would have been too much to say that blogger, tweeters, Facebook users, Anonymous, and Wikileaks had “brought down” the Tunisian government, but with today’s news that the country’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has fled the country, it becomes a more plausible claim to make.

Of course there was more to such demonstrations than some new technology. An individual act of desperation set off the last month of rioting, as a college-educated young man set himself on fire after police confiscated his unlicensed fruit and vegetable cart. Tunisia’s high unemployment rate, rampant corruption, and rising food prices added to the anger at Ben Ali’s 20+ year rule.

People risked their lives in the street, with some getting a bullet for their troubles, but the Internet played a significant role in organizing these protests and in disseminating news and pictures of them to the world.

After the worst unrest in his reign, Ben Ali this week promised not to run for “election” again and to give the country a free press and the right to assemble. He fired his cabinet. It wasn’t enough; protestors sensed weakness and today they forced Ben Ali from Tunisia, fleeing ignominiously with his family for any state that would have him.

Here’s a guide to the part of this battle fought in cyberspace over the last month.

Web blocking: Soon after the protests began, Tunisia ramped up its attempts at controlling the Internet. These started simply enough, with straight-up site blocking. In an open letter to the Tunisian government, the Committee to Protect Journalists outlined the online repression:

We are troubled to learn that your government’s practice of blocking websites—including CPJ Web pages on Tunisia—has recently intensified. Local journalists told CPJ that additional news websites, as well as numerous Facebook pages carrying critical content, blogs, and journalists’ e-mail accounts have been blocked by the state-run Tunisian Internet Agency since protests erupted on December 17. Regional and international media have reported that numerous local and international news websites covering the street protests were blocked in Tunisia. One report placed your country, along with Saudi Arabia, as the worst in the region regarding Internet censorship. A 2009 CPJ study found Tunisia to be one of the 10 worst countries worldwide to be a blogger, in part for the same reasons.

We’ll take that Facebook password, please: It soon got much worse. The Committee to Protect Journalists said that its own research found that “the [state-run] Tunisian Internet Agency is harvesting passwords and usernames of bloggers, reporters, political activists, and protesters by injecting hidden JavaScript” into many popular site login pages.

This extended to sites like Facebook, where the main login page mysteriously had 10 additional lines of code inserted when it arrived at Tunisian computers. (Such code injection is technically simple using various pieces of deep packet inspection gear, and it was made easier by the fact that the Tunisian government would periodically block secure HTTPS connections.)

That code grabbed the username and password, embedded them into a bogus Facebook URL, and then attempted to load the nonexistent page. It’s unclear why this was done, though speculation is that the hack was a simple way to grab passwords; the Tunisian Internet Agency could simply log all attempts to hit the bogus Facebook link without the liability of listing one of its servers in the code itself.

CPJ noted in a separate report that “unknown parties have subsequently logged onto these sites using these stolen credentials, and used them to delete Facebook groups, pages, and accounts, including Facebook pages administrated by Sofiene Chourabi, a reporter with Al-Tariq al-Jadid, and the account of local online video journalist Haythem El Mekki. Local bloggers have told CPJ that their accounts and pictures of recent protests have been deleted or otherwise compromised.”

Al-Jazeera interviewed an anonymous source who had crafted a Greasemonkey script that could strip this additional code from login pages; on January 6, it had already been installed over 1,500 times.

On January 11, the Electronic Frontier Foundation publicized the Greasemonkey script but also asked Facebook in particular to consider a few technical changes:

Make Facebook logins default to HTTPS, if only in Tunisia, where accounts are especially vulnerable at this time. Google and Yahoo logins already default to HTTPS.

Consider allowing pseudonymous accounts for users in authoritarian regimes, where political speech under your real name is dangerous and potentially deadly. Many Tunisian activists are unable to reinstate Facebook accounts that have been erased by the Tunisian government because they were not using their real names.

Finding bloggers, pirates: The Tunisian government, not content to simply grab account information and delete the offending material, also began hauling bloggers into police custody.

On January 7, Reporters Without Borders had at least five confirmed cases of bloggers and online activists being arrested. Here’s one:

Four or five police plainclothes officers arrested the blogger and activist Hamadi Kaloutcha at his home at around 6am, seizing a computer and a central processing unit. They told his wife they were taking him to the nearest police station and “just have a few questions for him,” and “that will only take a few hours.” There has been no news of him since.

Several of those arrested, including Kaloutcha, were members of the Pirate Party of Tunisia; the Pirate Party UK later issued several statements deploring the disappearances.

“Pirate Parties around the World condemn these acts against freedom of expression, human rights and democracy, and call upon governments take firm action against Tunisia for these recent events,” one said. A later note said that one detainee had been beaten, and it said that several of the bloggers were accused of “degradation of state property on account of anonymous DDoS attacks.”

And who specializes in anonymous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against unfriendly websites? That’s right, it’s…

Anonymous: The internet’s many-headed hydra, Anonymous, launched “Operation Tunisia,” trying to attack the Tunisian government instead of the copyright holders which have been its targets for the last few months.

Al-Jazeera checked in with some of the activists, one of whom explained that Anonymous first got involved when the Tunisian government tried to block access to Wikileaks.

“We did initially take an interest in Tunisia because of WikiLeaks, but as more Tunisians have joined they care more about the general internet censorship there, so that’s what it has become,” another Anon said.

It is hard to generalize the Anons’ diverse range of motivations and ever-changing targets, but most appear to share an outrage over the Tunisian government’s censorship and phishing activities, and a sense of solidarity with Tunisian web users.

Attacking government-linked websites is much more dangerous for those living within Tunisia, they noted, who risk arrest if they are identified by the authorities.

“Although many Tunisians understandably do not feel comfortable participating in this operation out of precaution, I estimate there [were] about 50 Tunisians participating, to whom we provide the means and knowledge to properly secure their online behavior from exposure to their government,” one Anon activist wrote via email.

Wikileaks and pet tigers: Why would the Wikileaks revelations of recent months matter to a country like Tunisia? Because of some exceptionally frank dispatches from Robert Godec, the U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia.

In one of the cables, Godec reports on a private dinner he had with Mohammad Sakher El-Materi, the president’s son-in-law and a very wealthy man. Given the public dissatisfaction with a regime built on cronyism and suffused with corruption, Godec’s report fueled public anger at the regime when it appeared late in 2010.

The report was stuffed with candid details like these:

El-Materi’s house is spacious, and directly above and along the Hammamet public beach. The compound is large and well guarded by government security. It is close to the center of Hammamet, with a view of the fort and the southern part of the town. The house was recently renovated and includes an infinity pool and a terrace of perhaps 50 meters. While the house is done in a modern style (and largely white), there are ancient artifacts everywhere: Roman columns, frescoes and even a lion’s head from which water pours into the pool. El Materi insisted the pieces are real. He hopes to move into his new (and palatial) house in Sidi Bou Said in eight to ten months.

The dinner included perhaps a dozen dishes, including fish, steak, turkey, octopus, fish couscous and much more. The quantity was sufficient for a very large number of guests. Before dinner a wide array of small dishes were served, along with three different juices (including Kiwi juice, not normally available here). After dinner, he served ice cream and frozen yoghurt he brought in by plane from Saint Tropez, along with blueberries and raspberries and fresh fruit and chocolate cake…

El Materi has a large tiger (“Pasha”) on his compound, living in a cage. He acquired it when it was a few weeks old. The tiger consumes four chickens a day. (Comment: The situation reminded the Ambassador of Uday Hussein’s lion cage in Baghdad.) El Materi had staff everywhere. There were at least a dozen people, including a butler from Bangladesh and a nanny from South Africa. (NB This is extraordinarily rare in Tunisia, and very expensive.)…

The family’s favorite vacation destination spot is the Maldives Islands…

Nesrine said she loves Disney World, but had put off a trip this year because of H1N1 flu. Nesrine has, for sometime, had Tamiflu nearby (even taking it on trips). Originally it was out of fear of bird flu. She packs it for El Materi too when he travels. Nesrine said she has visited several US cities. El Materi had only been to Illinois recently in connection with the purchase of a plane…

Throughout the evening, El Materi often struck the Ambassador as demanding, vain and difficult. He is clearly aware of his wealth and power, and his actions reflected little finesse.

Godec also wasn’t afraid to pass on blunt reports of corruption among Tunisia’s leaders:

According to Transparency International’s annual survey and Embassy contacts’ observations, corruption in Tunisia is getting worse. Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants. President Ben Ali’s extended family is often cited as the nexus of Tunisian corruption. Often referred to as a quasi-mafia, an oblique mention of “the Family” is enough to
indicate which family you mean. Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage.

One member of the family apparently even stole a French yacht, painting over it and having it delivered to Tunisia, where it was spotted and finally returned.

Writing at Foreign Policy, Christopher Alexander noted that this leak, and several other cables, did more than just stoke anger at the regime; they gave people a sense that the United States might share their concerns.

“Given Ben Ali’s reputation as a stalwart U.S. ally,” Alexander wrote, “it mattered greatly to many Tunisians — particularly to politically engaged Tunisians who are plugged into social media — that American officials are saying the same things about Ben Ali that they themselves say about him. These revelations contributed to an environment that was ripe for a wave of protest that gathered broad support.”

Tweeting the news: For those craving up-to-the minute news, Twitter has become a terrific source. Writers like Dima Khatib of Al-Jazeera and columnist Sultan Al-Qassemi are providing aggregation and opinion on a moment-to-moment basis.

“Take a breath people,” Khatib wrote today as Ben Ali fled his country. “We are living history. Tunisians have given us the best gift ever. I am happy to be living today.”

And, as The New York Times notes, bloggers across the Arab world have been cheering on the Tunisian demonstrations.

Oh, the irony: Tunisia, never a friend to openness and freedom of speech, was nevertheless a backer of the “internet.” Indeed, Tunis was the location for a U.N. meeting in 2005 that produced the “Tunis Agenda,” a document that called for the creation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

IGF is largely toothless, but in the last five years its annual meetings have been an important place for dialog about the future of the very tool that helped drive the Tunisian government from power.

New beginnings: Tunisia has a chance for a change of direction, though at this early date it is of course impossible to predict much about the country’s future. For the formerly well-connected “Family” in Tunisia, though, the good times appear to be over. On Twitter, commenters have obsessively followed the movements of his private plane, which has apparently been denied access to France and is now heading to one of the Gulf States.

As for El-Materi, the son-in-law with the private tiger, Al-Jazeera says that he too has made it out of the country and is heading for Dubai.

Bloggers, Internet activists, and Facebook users may have helped push a regime out of power, but it doesn’t look even they have enough power to force Ben Ali and his family into a real-life reckoning.

Source:http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/tunisia

“This is about The War You Don’t See” intones John Pilger in the introduction of his film by the same name. Pilger, award winning journalist and creator of acclaimed documentaries including Vietnam – The Quiet Mutiny and Stealing a Nation was on-hand at the Curzon SoHo on Monday night for the opening of his latest film. A group from the SOAS Transnational News course attended the screening and the Q&A with Pilger that followed.

The War You Don’t See examines the relationship between media and war. Pilger explores the problematic disjuncture between the picture of war that is widely presented by mainstream media outlets and the actuality of war by those who live it, on both sides of the conflict. Looking specifically at the case of the Iraq War, Pilger delves into the media strategies that governments use to “sell” war to their populaces, as well as the integrated nature of the wartime relationship between much of the media and government.

Drawing on a wide variety of alternative, leaked, and mainstream media accounts of the most recent Iraq war, Pilger constructs a pointed account of the deliberate campaign waged through the media – and with its consent – for the current war in Iraq. In light of the present situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, the frothy aggression and video-game graphics frequently on display in broadcasts leading up to the 2003 invasion are a sobering reminder of the ease with which our “Fourth Estate” can be transformed in preparation for conflict – or in anticipation of the next Great Media Spectacle (emphasis mine).

Some of the film’s most pointed conversations are between Pilger and mainstream media executives regarding their handling of the war. There were those in our group who saw a problematic antagonism in Pilger’s approach towards mainstream media sources; others thought that the distinction between the realities and the reports of war have been so drastic that a sharp critique was necessary to balance viewers’ modes of perception.

Regardless of your level of interest in journalistic inquiry, The War You Don’t See is well worth viewing if only for its humanizing account of the children, mothers, fathers and others caught up in nations’ aggression – real people with real lives who might otherwise only be acknowledged by a bleak statistic in an increasingly large column titled “collateral damage.” But it also provides vital insight into the relationship between power and the media; in the ways by which we are guided into conflicts that we are asked to support and execute – an essential area of education for every engaged citizen.

The War You Don’t See Trailer

The War You Don’t See is showing tonight (Tuesday, 14 Dec) on ITV1 at 10:35pm. The film is in limited release at cinemas across the London area. 96 min., 12A

One problem with trading principle for power is that you then have to be a better Machiavelli than everyone else. It seems clear, Mr. Clegg, that you are not.

The last election saw the continued rise of a third party in Britain. The Lib Dems not only achieved 23% of the vote, but also drew disproportionately from students, the youngest sector of the British vote. This presents a problem in the future for the party that draws primarily from the older segments of the population – namely, the Tories.

Being relatively new to power, you didn’t seem to recognize your own strength. While 23% wasn’t enough to take power outright, it was enough to give you the deciding vote as to which way the government would be formed. Then the Tories offered you a role in the government, and the title of Deputy Prime Minister – but in exchange, you had to give up one of your core campaign principles – no tuition fee rises. A simple tradeoff, one might think – a worthy compromise to be able to impact the next five years of British government.

If only it was that simple.

Deficits and the need for cutbacks were given as the reason why these university reforms had to be made. But there was no fiscal imperative that made higher education the spot where these cuts had to fall so disproportionately. You could have insisted that universities be protected as part of joining the coalition; the money cut from universities could have come from another sector, or even from a token tax on the banks – something that would have made you quite popular. But not realizing your bargaining position and given a whiff of power, you fell for it.

Oops.

For if these cuts did fall so heavily on higher education, it would alienate your party from its emerging voting block, divide the LibDems, and damage your credibility – and with it, your viability as a future political alternative. And because of your very vocal opposition to university cuts during the campaign, you would be made the public face that had to justify them.

It may be that the Tories will soften the blow to students, in the form of shaving a bit off tuition fees, or some amount of additional scholarships – probably a couple of years from now, nearer the next election. But the damage to your party has been done. It’s tempting to think that likeability makes up for your actions – at some point it doesn’t.

Famously pledging not to hike tuition fees and then being the face of the cuts to the British student body isn’t something you can gloss over by sitting down with them in a t-shirt over coffee. I wouldn’t bet on the 14-year-olds (who will be voting in the next dozen elections or more) who were kettled for 9 hours in the freezing cold without food, water, or toilets – for the offense of coming out to protest peacefully – voting LibDem anytime soon.

It’s hard to feel too sorry for you, Mr. Clegg, but it’s a pity – the British people, especially young people, were clearly hungry for a new breed of politics – something fresh and optimistic, something that moved beyond the calcified divisions of left and right. But that’s damaged now, isn’t it. And more’s the pity. The British people – and especially, the British students who placed their trust in you – deserved something better.

And it’s yet another example of why to keep your promises.

In solidarity with the SOAS Occupation and the student protests agains the proposed increase in tuition fees, we had some fun with the Liberal Democrat and Conservative Facebook pages last night.

There’s been a lot of talk in the media about how the current student protests are organised using ‘social media’. But how is it being done? Here’s my quick guide to organising a successful protest using online tools.

1. Set up a Twitter account

Any self-respecting online activist needs a Twitter account. Here is a list of all the student occupations on Twitter, but arguably the most successful one is @UCLoccupation, with 3,000 followers.

2. Use hashtags

Hashtags are a way of organising conversations around a particular topic. A widely used hashtag during the last two months of protests has been #ukuncut, originally used to organise the anti-Vodafone protests in October by anti-cuts campaigning group UK Uncut, but now used by most anti-cuts protesters.

During the first student protest on 24 October, the hashtag #demo2010 was used. However, a rumour went around that Twitter was intentionally stopping the hashtag from ‘trending’, so many people started using #dayX during the second day of protests instead. For today’s protest, #dayX2 was used.

3. Set up a blog

There is only so much you can can say in 140 characters, and while Twitter is useful for building a network and having conversations, blogging is a much better way of getting your ideas out. Our own SOAS Occupation is doing this well and so is UCL Occupation.

Here is a list of all the student occupation blogs.

4. Use video

Record videos that poke fun at those in authority, encourage others to get involved and, of course, expose police violence.

SOAS students making fun of the Liberal Democrat’s pre-election video ‘no more broken promises’:

Cambridge students protesting:

Police hitting an old lady with a baton:

5. Use maps and location based tools

Use maps to easily visualise location-based information, like this Google map of all the student protests and occupations or www.wherearethecuts.org, which uses the crowdsourcing ‘crisis mapping’ tool Ushahidi to crowdsource information about people being affected by local cuts in services.

6. Do something funny

The internet loves funny. Who hasn’t heard of LOLcatz? So why not challenge occupiers at other universities to a dance-off?

7. Get some user generated content

Let other people do the talking for you for a change.

8. Put it all together

With so much content being generated across the web, it’s useful to put it all in one place. Once again the students at UCL are ahead of the game, putting together a site that pulls in blog feeds, their Twitter stream, videos, images. etc.

9. Take to the streets!

Don’t forget the most important bit. There is another protest on Saturday, for example.

I thought I’d share a campaign I’m working on at the moment at the World Development  Movement: ‘stop bankers betting on food and causing hunger’ and what we’ve been doing to promote it online.

The aim of the campaign is to pressure the UK Government to backregulation to prevent investment banks and hedge funds from speculating on food prices in financial markets. The issue of speculation is quite complex, but essentially allowing speculators to bet on food prices causes unexpected food price spikes – catastrophic for the world’s poor who spend most of their income on food. Read more here.

What we’re trying to do is get the issue on the agenda and create a broad movement of people which can be mobilised next spring when the proposals for regulation will be put forward.

So far we’ve done two online pushes – one at the moment and one which we ran a few months ago.

Phone the Financial Services Authority and complain about speculation

This was run at the end of July. We’ve historically used a lot of online email actions to pressure policy makers. You know the type – you set up a systemwhere lots of people can send an email via a website to an MP, for example. What we’re increasingly finding, however, is that these email campaigns are becoming less effective. Policy makers simply delete them. This problem is particularly excasparated by organisations like 38 Degrees and Avaaz who can easily mobilise thousands of emailers to write to one MP.

So this time we thought we’d do something different – ask people to phone the Financial Services Authority, complaining about speculatuion and asking it to request powers to regulate financial betting on food. On purpose we kept the target hidden until the last moment, instead asking people to provide their mobile numbers so that we could text them the target, the number and instructions on the day.

To help promote this we created a humorous animation about ‘phoning the cops’:

In the end over a thousand people signed up to phone the FSA – a real success.

Online  ‘human blackjack’

This week we launched another online campaign. In keeping with the ‘betting’ meme that we’ve been using throughout the campaign, we’ve developed an online game of ‘human blackjack’. The game is divided into two stages. Earlier today  I sent out a ‘viral’ email, asking people to play their first hand and invite their friends to play. As I’m writing this, a few hours after the launch, it has been shared 99 times on Facebook and 107 imes on Twitter.

In the second stage we will invite people to play an oline blackjack flash game, taking place on 26 November. As a player of the game users will be able to choose to be one of Barack Obama (who has successfully pushed through this regulation in the US), a Kenyan laundrywoman called Judith Atieno (who had a hard time during the 2007-2008 food crisis) or the head of Goldman Sachs (who makes billions every year from food speculation). The ‘bank’ is George Osborne – the biggest obstacle to successfully introducing this legislation in Europe. Depending on who wins, the game will have different outcomes – good for the world’s poor, good for the bankers, and so on. My colleague Gary outlines more details in this blog post.

Fancy having a go? Start off by playing your first hand and signing up here.

I’m gutted that Sweden hasn’t qualified for this year’s World Cup. Last time it happened – the only time in the last 20 years – I was just 17 years old. So who should I cheer for?

Luckily, I’ve been involved, through my job at the World Development Movement,  in a really fun project, building www.whoshouldicheerfor.com – a site that ranks the countries in the World Cup based on a range of social justice indicators. The site is intended to be a fun way of thinking about serious issues of poverty and inequality.

Why is it that the US, the richest country in the World Cup, gives so little aid? How come Nigeria is the poorest country in the World Cup, despite having among the world’s largest oil reserves?

So if your country has not qualified or if you can’t decide who to support in a match that your team isn’t playing in, here’s a great way to decide.

So who are you cheering for?

I’m cheering for Nigeria, by the way.

Following on from my previous post about the digital divide not being the internet’s fault, I thought I’d write about some more practical stuff. As the benevolent dictator said: ‘Ttheory is good only as far as it connects to something’.

So in this post I’ll be looking at digital activism in Zimbabwe - sokwanele.com and kubatana.net.

But first a bit of scene-setting.

Zimbabwe has a relatively good telecommunications infrastructure. A direct internet network link to the US was set up in 1996-97, meaning that Zimbabwe was one of the first African contries to be connected to the web (The first time I ever used the internet was actually in Harare in 1996). There are currently over 1.3 million internet users, 11% of the population, which puts it above South Africa in terms of usage.

There are a large number of political websites, many set up by Zimbabweans living abroad – it is estimated that since 2000 about 3.5 million people have left the country. However, the websites that they have set up, for example newzimbabwe.com and talkzimbabwe.com are now widely used inside the country too.

The growth of the internet and the digitial public sphere has partly beeen attributed to Zimbabwe’s harsh and repressive political environment. Since 2002 the Zimbabwean government has enacted a number of repressive laws to curtail civil liberties. As Last Moyo says:

These laws and some extrajuridicial tactics used by the government have not only muzzled the media and contrained civil society’s political activism in ‘real’ space, but have also arguably closed the democratic space for civic networking, mobilization and participation in national politics.

There might be some paralells with Iran here. As Annabelle Sreberny has hinted – the fact that the public sphere is so severely restricted, forces people to take their politics somewhere else – in this case online. I think it could be interesting to do a comparison of online activism between Iran and Zimbabwe – there seems to be some similarities. Large diaspora, repressive regime, high literacy, fairly widespread internet and so on. But I digress.

Sowanele, which means ‘enough is enough’ in Ndebele is a pro-democracy underground activist movement. Its main way of communicating is online – through sokwanele.com, the This Is Zimbabwe blog, its YouTube channel, Facebook page and Twitter account. It also uses crisis mapping (which I’ve blogged about previously) to great effect. Its clerarly an expert in online activism. And it inspires action too. Here’s a recent tweet:

Kubatana.net is an online network of over 250 Zimbabwean activist organisations organisations. One of the things it does is provide a searchable online directory of civil society organisations. This is a way to find organisations in human rights and activism in Zimbabwe but it’s also a way for organisations that don’t have the capacity or resources themselves to have an online presence.

It also organises mass protests and encourages people to send mass protest emails and letters against the Zimbabwean state’s attempts at cyber surveillance. Last Moyo again:

…it could be argued that kubatana.net represents a potentially powerful tool for democratic participation and digital resistance for Zimbabweans who have access to the Internet.

Update: Just seen that Kubatana has recently released ‘Freedom Fone’  – a mobile information service. More information on mobileactive.org.

Image credit: sokwanele.com

UPDATE.  Here is the new version presented as a joint presentation / panel.

CHASING THE LONG TAIL OF CLIMATE CHANGE – IAMCR PROPOSAL

The paper/presentation “Chasing the Long Tail of Climate Change” is a small part of a wider ongoing research project and investigation into the current debates on climate change. Presented as a working paper and a theoretical intervention, it compares and contrasts the research of the two authors with their participation in the COP15 climate change conference as members of the official NGO delegation. Relying both on the participant’s close proximity as well as the distance of critical reflection, the paper provides a critical analysis of the recent event / media spectacle of COP15 – an event that many commentators have labelled as a “spectacular failure”.

More specifically, by juxtaposing our personal experience of participation at the COP15 with our research projects in India and Ethiopia, the paper will argue that, because of the hyper-mediated nature of the contemporary rhetoric on climate change, current frameworks of analysis are no longer capable of addressing the “antagonism” of climate change. Drawing theoretically on eclectic sources from contemporary assemblage theory, object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism, the paper therefore calls for a new more experimental approach and method that would look in detail at the complex assemblages, “objects” and relationships that underlie the contemporary discourse on climate change both in the North and the South. The existing closures and myths around environmental debates, we will argue, need to be pried open in order to allow space for new ways of imagining the pressing problem.

The paper relies on the ongoing research of its two authors. In specific:

Matti Pohjonen is currently a Fellow in Digital Culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), at the University of London. He has been working for the past six months on a pilot project in Ethiopia combines two unusual bedfellows: mobile phones and climate change. The aim of the project is to develop a mobile-based prototype that would encourage carbon sequestration by channeling carbon offset funds via the mobile phone to hundreds of thousands of farmers in Ethiopia planting trees on their small farms. His work therefore aims at investigate some of the methodological and theoretical challenges that such practice-based research raises when we try to leapfrog the digital divide by the use of mobile technology in especially rural part of Africa and Asia and by combining technology, forest ecology and and science in new ways.

Somnath Batabyal is a Research Fellow at the University of Heidelberg and works on environmental activism. His research particularly examines transnational networks and the role of media in changing the scope and understanding of environmental politics. His work in this presentation will seek to highlight through case studies the complex assemblages of actors, both in the Global North and the South, who control the discourse of environmental politics and in effect, limit the possibilities of producing real “antagonisms”.

So despite how it may sometimes seem, I am actually involved in research quite actively, yes.  Knowledge works in mysterious ways.  So just to give you Carouselians an idea of what is going on, here is a recent conference proposal I will submit for the IAMCR conference in Braga, Portugal this summer (together with a friend of mine who we are kind of doing something similar if I can commit to one topic for more than a week).   The abstract below as of today:

CHASING THE LONG TAIL OF CLIMATE CHANGE

For the past 6 months, I have been working in rural Ethiopia developing a pilot project that combines two unusual bedfellows: mobiles phones and climate change.  The prototype that we have been testing together with technologists, forestry experts and climate change scientists aims to facilitate the channeling of carbon sequestration funds between the North and the South: from the carbon offset markets to the hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers in Ethiopia in support of their ongoing reforestation efforts. A simple concept: more carbon dioxide that gets tied to the biomass of growing trees over time; the more money produced for the farmers who plant trees.  And all of this mediated via the mobile phone from data gathering to calculating biomass patterns and carbon sequestration to accounting and payment.

The paper I propose has therefore two distinct aims.  On the one hand, it will present some of the key problems that get raised when we research mobiles phones in the poorest parts of Africa.  It will look specifically at the methodological challenges such practice-based research raises when we try to leapfrog the digital divide through the use of mobile technology.  Yet, on the other hand, the paper will also extrapolate on some of the more radical theoretical implications such work on climate change and technology raises. Comparing my research in Ethiopia with my experience on taking part in the COP15 climate change conference/spectacle in Copenhagen, the paper will argue that because of the hyper-mediated nature of contemporary rhetoric on climate change, current frameworks of analysis are in fact no longer capable of coping with the real “antagonism” of climate change. Presented as a working paper, the paper therefore explores possible alternative theoretical frameworks that might help us better understand this pressing problem. In specific, drawing on lessons from contemporary assemblage theory, object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism, the paper proposes a new experimental approach based on the detailed analysis of the complex assemblages, relationships and objects underlying the contemporary climate change rhetoric.

Well, my ethic does unfortunately dictate me to go to conferences only in place I would go for vacation anyway so it does help that the conference is in Portugal and not in Sheffield or in West London.  This does remind me, however, that I have a few hundred pictures I still need to work through from COP15 that I want to put up here eventually.  Comments?

Listening to a lecture on the New Social Media by Goldsmiths’ lecturer Natalie Fenton, I want to share a few thoughts and outline some assumptions and highlight some presuppositions that underlie the discussion.

It seems an inherent trope of western, European society to ascribe progress taking place in the field of technology to a change (often positive, i.e. into the “right” or correct direction (no political affilitation with the term here)) of the condition of humanity. What do I mean by that?

The emergence of new media, i.e. the internet, web 2.0, twitter and mobile phones for that matter, seem to signal the establishment of participatory platforms, where individuals can meet and group according to their own tastes, agendas and preferences. Thus, the space that has opened up in a kind of third dimension, the internet, for example in Facebook, can bring people from different geographical, local settings together in a kind of global space and context.

It can. But does it really happen? Does the emergence of a global space, the internet allow for transnational exchange of ideas and activism or, rather does this space merely mirror, or less drastically a term,  reflect local (not necessarily national though) interests and affiliations? How does a person act when entering the cyberspace? Does s/he leave their physical contextualization behind? By that I mean, in how far does the background, political conviction and personal preferences determine the way people act in the cyberspace?

I do not dispute that new social media allow for an easier, faster and more effective way of communication and, indeed, mobilization. But, I think, the crucial step, the activism, has to take place in another space (trying to avoid using the term real world), outside of cyberspace, in order to actually achieve something. Or does it?

For seven years, I used to read Editor: Myself, while sipping on my morning coffee. Hossein, had chosen this name for his blog to reflect his protest to the censorship he had known in Iran. Once landed in Canada, he had started his blog in Persian and English, opening the way for an impressive wave of socio-political movements in Iranian recent history. Iran is one of the rare countries where blogging is the most influential way of communicating among its youth. Through blogs, otherwise imprisoned minds are set free and ideas flow with no constraints.

Hossein understood the power of blogging very soon. He used all sorts of media forms such as recorded interviews, photo streams, and films to communicate with his audience. Although the layout of his weblog resembled that of a newspaper, his writing style was far different from it. He chose to adopt spoken Persian for his posts, breaking the barrier between the writer and the reader. His simple language combined with his provocative remarks made his blog one of the most read Persian blogs of our times.

In the heydays of his weblog, Hossein covered all sorts of subjects from politics to social event, to music and even his daily life. We followed his “metamorphosis” in his political views, enjoyed his taste in music, admired his boldness in tackling taboos, traveled with him to Israel, and why not we were entertained with his various adventures.

For Iranian bloggers, his weblog was a hub and he himself was a reference. At the right side of his blog, Hossein had made a list of most of the blogs held by Iranians, sorted by language, to facilitate access to them. Whenever he would find a blog that he liked, he would do the promotion. Many of today’s famous Iranian blogs got their debut in Editor Myself.

I met Hossein after many years, when our paths crossed in Paris. At that time he had already lost his spotlight. His political views had taken a different orientation than that of the Iranian “intellectuals” and he had become the ugly duckling of the Persian blogsphere. He was not happy about the situation but his beliefs were stronger than the desire to be popular. I admired him for his honesty, his transparency, and his ability to question the mainstream opinion. Even if I was not always in agreement with his analysis of the political situation in Iran, it was stimulating to read his posts and ponder about his point of view.

These days, Iran is traversing a hard period in time. Many things have changed inside the country since Hossein has been imprisoned. Many innocent people have lost their lives and many more imprisoned. I always wonder, what would Hossein write if he were free. Indeed, we are missing him in our virtual as well as real world.

Karineh is a researcher working in Paris since 2006. She was born and raised in Iran, and completed her studies in the United States. Reading weblogs has been one of her favorite activities over the years. In 2007 she started her own blog called “Between the lines” (http://clarinetteblog.net/), where she sporadically posts her writings.

PREVIOUS STORIES:

http://www.projectcarousel.org/2009/11/mind-medium-message-part-ii/
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At the recent screening of 10 Tactics for turning information into action at SOAS, Marek Tuszynski, Co-founder and Director of Programs and Technology at the Tactical Technology Collective, talked about ‘info activism’.

I got some video of it.  The sound is not too great though.

Find out more about information activism on www.informationactivism.org

Can’t see the video? You need to get the latest version of Flash Player.

On Thursday 5 November at 7pm the film 10 Tactics for Turning Information Into Action will be shown in the SOAS Junior Common Room. After the film rights activists fromt he Tactical Technology Collective will lead a discussion on digital activism.  Description as follows:

Thursday 5th November, SOAS Junior Common Room 7pm:

Using information and digital technologies to create positive change

10 tactics for turning information into action includes stories from more than 35 rights advocates around the world who have successfully used information and digital technologies to create positive change. This project, from Tactical Technology Collective, includes a film featuring 25 interviews with advocates alongside a deck of cards that details info-activism case studies, features tools and provides advice from people about the tactics and tools they have used in different contexts.

At this event parts of the film will be screened for the first time. The audience will be engaged in a conversation that asks: Are digital tools changing activism? What are digital activists doing and is it making a difference? What are the risks and benefits of digital activism?

Tanya Notley from Tactical Tech will introduce the project and explain how it came about. http://www.tacticaltech.org

Tessa Lewin from the IDS at the University of Sussex will explain how she uses animation as a force for change in Egypt with the Women and Memory Forum http://www.wmf.org.eg/

Muzna Al-Masri an activist from Lebanon talks about the work of Solidarity Maps in addressing rights abuses in Lebanon and Palestine http://kharita.wordpress.com/

Stephanie Hankey from Tactical Tech will discuss the work of international NGO, Tactical Technology Collective http://www.tacticaltech.org

Don’t miss it!

www.informationactivism.org

(UPDATE!  The continuing discussion in NYT has made me edit my post a bit.  Please note that I have specially erased references to the comment that I referred to as I know now a bit more about who wrote it)

As it has now been profiled by the New York Times, I guess it is not that clandestine anymore so will add here a few words about my recent work.  Basically, I have been doing media strategy for an environmental project in Ethiopia that aims to use mobile phones to connect carbon trading funds to small-scale farmers in rural Ethiopia.  Nothing that flashy technically: just using text messages as the interface to the Internet for calculating how much carbon is tied to the biomass of trees and how much money this accounts for on the current carbon exchange, that is, in a way downsourcing the climate debates away from top-down centralized projects to most people in the world – ie small-scale farmers etc. Perhaps develop a more general mobile application based on this with funding in the upcoming months and so on and so on …

Check the article out below to get quite a decent overview of what has been going on – link HERE:

Selling Offsets By Mobile Phone in Ethiopia

By Jeffrey Marlow

One of the most daunting hurdles for the trade in carbon offsets is the logistical challenge of connecting customers — typically carbon dioxide emitting companies based in America or Europe — with offset producers in places like South America, Asia, and Africa.With the help of an innovative new program developed by Veli Pohjonen and the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, however, this global interaction may soon become as easy as sending a text message.

Many carbon trading efforts have struggled because of their cumbersome administration and multiple middle men, Mr. Pohjonen said — adding that they have “not led to anything remarkable in the combat against climate change.”

Under Mr. Pohjonen’s system, small Ethiopian farmers, for example, would measure the diameters of trees on their land twice a year and put the information into a text message, which, along with each farmer’s unique identification code, is then sent to the regional Watershed Users’ Association office.

Software computes the amount of carbon stored on each farm as well as the change from the previous measurement; any increase in stored carbon dioxide is converted into cash using the going rate of CO2 on international markets, and farmers are paid by their local association.

Major challenges remain, of course. Not least: keeping farmers honest and verifying the data they report, a hurdle that would almost certainly demand at least some of the administrative overhead that Mr. Pohjonen aims to avoid.

And the computer modeling used to calculate the amount of CO2 absorbed by stands of trees — a blunt tool at the moment — would need to be calibrated to account for the idiosyncrasies of Ethiopian ecology, and later, to those of other regions that might use the tool.

But finding more efficient ways to connect remote carbon offset projects to a faraway industrial world increasingly hungry for them is, to Mr. Pohjonen, the first hurdle. “Transaction costs can be minimized in another manner,” he said, “rather than just making projects bigger.”

Mr. Pohjonen’s son Matti, a Fellow in Digital Culture at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, has been overseeing the technology end of the project.

“The standard function of a mobile phone is talking and texting,” the younger Mr. Pohjonen said. But it can also be used, he added, to access the Internet and run queries regarding carbon prices or exchange rates.

The Pohjonens have been testing the system on eight farms in the country’s central highlands, where the average farmer is earning approximately 1000 Birr, or $80, every six months from their carbon offsets.

“In the Ethiopian context it is considerable money,” says Mr. Pohjonen. “It would give an added value of 10 to 20 percent compared to what he would get selling the trees as poles.”

While this article itself is not that much about media, I found there was two interesting things dealing with more general themes that we have been touching upon:

The first is how Ethiopia seems to be still being talked about and/or represented.  As we know, Ethiopia is known in the collective Western imagination as a symbol for starvation and poverty in the world (ever since especially the famine of 1984).  Probably we all still remember these images that have been burned into our collective imagination:

With this in mind, I found this comment following the NYT the article especially enlightening.

I often see a certain arrogance of people who talk about the developing world claiming to know what, in fact, is in the better interests of the people who live there – speaking in their name.  This person even claims to know the specific farmers in question (I wonder if he has actually even been to these farms we measured and talked to and have their names like we do?)  It seems to me that the rhetoric mediation here goes somewhat as follows:

1) He claims to know what the farmers want because he has been in Ethiopia more than the journalist;

2) Because of the signification of Ethiopia as a country of famine and food shortages, he therefore claims to know what all the farmers needs are (ie not some fancy mobile project dealing with complex local politics around agroforestry that would provide meager additional funding for planting of trees).

3) What the farmers therefore need is food aid (probably provided from the outside) rather than supporting their own bottom-up activities and the work they have started without outside mediation.

I quote:

I know this area of Ethiopia and the farmers the article is talking about. It is simply amazing to note how much disconnect exists between our Western journalists and their subjects. Which Ethiopian farmer will agree to text you the diameter of hundreds of trees twice a year? Do you know that the most basic question of the moment is the looming food shortage disaster. These farmers are worried about getting their next meal even in 2009!!! I think our friends in Finland are just being out of touch and simply addressing the wrong urgent problem.

I always wonder where this ‘discourse’ comes from? While there are no doubts food security is an issue in Ethiopia and there is, once again, a looming famine in the country, this, actually, does not affect the particular part of Ethiopia around Debre Tabor and Bahir Dar.  But I think the more interesting question here is to notice the way how agency is represented when a country like Ethiopia is talked about, often accompanied by a certain kind of self-righteous moral indignation about the ills of the world by people claiming to represent other people because of some assumed superior knowledge of what their needs are.  I recall Deleuze once said of Foucault: “he taught us the indignity of speaking for others …” Perhaps as close to an ethical guideline we can ever get.

Anyways, for some reason this comment reminded me of some of the themes we will be touching about the representation of the Other </End of rant.>

Secondly, it was again interesting to observe how quickly this article was RT:d (retweeted) as it came out.  I did a quick search and found tens and tens of retweets of this almost immediately surfacing after it came out. I suppose this again demonstrated that Twitter has come the de facto way of spreading information today about things that have been published elsewhere and a good tool to find how news is being disseminated today.

So see Twitter search feed below:

Armed by plentiful capital, driven by eager audiences or consumers, media productions as a vanguard of cultural invasion infiltrate everyone’s everyday life all over the world. Last year, a Hollywood film, the Kung Fu Panda, is probably a perfect example to explain this.

As mammal, the Giant Panda is native to south western China. It seems cute, quiet and always eating bamboo, with it black and white smart dress attracts many visitors in zoos around the world. But is panda that simple? If you just simply go through the slides below, you will found out that panda is symbolized, highly politicalized and commodified.

As a target of commodification, panda is used not only by native Chinese artist but also professional cultural business capitalists. Here comes the Kung Fu Panda. An genius idea to put “Panda” and “Kung Fu” together. What a perfect Chinese character for the worldwide audiences.

As you can see from the slides, the Kung Fu Panda raised so many questions need to be answered. Is a panda from (the) Hollywood(s) still a panda? How a panda is symbolized and commodified? Who has the right to explain the characters of panda and Kung Fu? Is this panda a vanguard of cultural invasion? Why the Chinese unable to make such successful film to gain more say in Chinese culture(s)? It brings me to another concern about China’s communication strategy with the rest of this world (another huge topic).

Just look around of yourself, it seems there is nothing can not be commodified? From a drop of natural mineral water to a bottled manmade soft drink; from a venture enterprise idea to a pack of leveraged equities; from money built Hollywood superstars to power symbolic monarchs; from academics knowledge to governmental power; etc. Even god itself can’t escape from this. In China, the ShaoLin Temple takes over other temples as its brand expansion. In the US, a popular religious website, Beliefnet, was acquired by Murdoch’s News Corporation.

The concerns in China for the Chinese people apply to the whole world. It is not only about the commodification of culture itself but also about who do, how to, what contents and the impacts of this process.

I like to keep an eye on what Jeff Jarvis is saying over at Buzzmachine. He basically spends all his time thinking and writing about how the news business model needs to be radically rethought and that there is a no point in charging for online news content. Sometimes he rants a bit too much, other times he hits the nail on the head, for example:

(Note: I’m going to link to the Financial Times three times in this post. You’re allowed two views a month at FT.com before being forced to register. If you’re conserving, I suggest you read the second two FT links.)

He now criticises a new report titled The reconstruction of American journalism which apparently (I haven’t read it) concludes that journalism is at risk because the advertisement-funded model of newspapers is no longer working. Jarvis, and I would totally agree with this, maintains that newspapers failing does not mean the end of journalism. As he says:

Just because newspapers put themselves at risk, it does not follow that journalism is at risk. Newspapers no longer own journalism. As too often happens in this discussion, they focus only on the revenue side of the business ledger of news – advertising falling from monopolistic heights – and not on the cost side and the efficiency new technology – and thus collaboration – that technology allows.

Indeed. There are some arguments about the costs of foreign reporting resulting in poor journalism, but I think that we the areas of the world where ‘journalism is in crisis’ are actually in a transition state, not a crisis state, and that something new will appear that will totally transform thinking about ‘news’ and journalism in general. It will probably mean a whole bunch of journalists being made redundant, however (like the 100 at the New York Times announced this week) and we’ll lose a lot of newspapers in the meantime. But eventually other things will appear.

Perhaps that something will be ‘community journalism’. The authors of the report mentioned above say this in the Washington Post:

Journalists leaving newspapers have started online local news sites in many cities and towns. Others have started nonprofit local investigative reporting projects and community news services at nearby universities, as well as national and statewide nonprofit investigative reporting organizations. Still others are working with local residents to produce neighborhood news blogs. Newspapers themselves are collaborating with other news media, including some of the startups and bloggers, to supplement their smaller reporting staffs.

The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers but also freelancers, university faculty and students, bloggers and citizens armed with smart phones. Financial support for news reporting now comes not only from advertisers and subscribers but also from foundations, philanthropists, universities and citizen donors.

Reading that, I thought of some examples from the UK that I’ve come across recently. Here goes:

They work for you – Set up by volunteers who thought it should be really easy for people to keep tabs on their elected MPs, and their unelected Peers, and comment on what goes on in Parliament. You can search for your local MP, find out exactly when they have bothered to turn up in parli, how they voted on various issues etc. Now maintained by MySociety

Help me investigate -  Set up by a bunch of Birmingham bloggers (Nick Booth, Jon Bounds, Paul Bradshaw and others) as a way for people to organise investigations into things of public interest. Investigations can be anything from ‘How much does Birmingham City Council spend on PR?’ to ‘Where is Diana really buried?’. Focuses mainly on the West Midlands but has huge potential. Simply submit an investigation and people will help you investigate it.

Investigate your MP’s expenses – Maybe shouldn’t qualify as it was set up by a mainstream newspaper, but this crowdsourcing site set up by the Guardian enabled over 24,000 people to look through 210,000 MPs expenses claims and post the juicy bits online. Genious.

So, those are my three. There must be loads out there – which ones are yours?