Attempting to counter the stifled ability to express, Arabs.com interestingly points out that we must admit that we are ‘oppressed’ in order to actually combat that oppression. In his ‘message’, the founder of the website states his support for the freedom of choice and expression as well as the need for platforms without bias or guardianship.

I saw somewhere that George Orwell once said, “every joke is a tiny revolution.” In the last week of this current wave of up rise throughout the Arab world, it has been the humour in social protest that has fascinated, and perhaps even confused, me. What role do these comedic characters play?

Yesterday I went to my first protest in London. What I saw there shocked me, and not because of the violence that the press is so hyper to write about, where the focus of attention …

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 probably submit for the IAMCR conference in Braga, Portugal this summer (together with a friend of mine). The abstract below:

Is there really a ‘typical’ domestic violence situation? Can any ad ever actually cover the scope of a person’s experience? Is showing violence in its most gory and extreme form necessary or rather, the sole way to get people to notice and act?

What do you think?

In an ongoing effort to reinvent itself, Project: Carousel is launching a new monthly feature to acquaint its readers with interesting and important people/organizations working in the field of global media and cultural studies. These people/organizations have, through their work, made some kind of a difference to the lives of people around the world – a difference that has made a difference.

At the Africa Gathering conference for the past couple of days. Interesting and inspirational talks as is usually the modus operandi of this community of technologists, entrepreneurs and more general world savers. I have always thought of these events a bit like church sermons – so I approach them as such. Less critical discussion but a lot of agreeing and being on the same side of solving problems. So what is often more interesting than the “meaning” of these events is to look at the machinic assemblages that are formed between the organizations spaces, people, technologies, desires, networks so on an so on.

At the workshops in Porto currently.  A lot of the activity/discussion here takes place on Twitter: follow/search the hashtag #isdt09 if interested. Interesting first day: the talk currently demystifying the Obama campaign as being the marketing …

The recent situation in Iran has caused quite a lot of debate amongst intellectuals, academics and philosophers in the West about how they should respond to it and what the role of the public intellectual should be when faced with such “events.” The revolution in Iran has a long history of fascination amongst Western intellectual and commentators; Foucault’s infamous writings some 30 years ago come to mind. Below is a selection of some of the writings – including Zizek’s piece that had been making the rounds. How do they compare?

As some of you may recall a few months back when we set up the website, I said that at least a familiarity of new social media such as Twitter should be mandatory for all …

Weeks ago one of my *fellow anarchists* (irony added) showed me an ad ordered by the Metropolitan Police and published on one of those free newspapers handed out at any corner of London. It stated …

Being “detained” at a peaceful demonstration last night (April 1) was on the edge of being extremely uneasy and beautifully fun. 

The Climate Camp was set up on the block of Bishops Gate where the European …

For everybody who has been studying social movements and independent media in the numerous text books during this term (and I’ve talked to quite a few), this week should be an interesting time to see them taking place in practice. So I recommend you – if for no other reason than curiosity and “research” – to brave the cold and see what is happening on the streets. Social movements, remember, do not happen in libraries, so this provides an excellent opportunity to see what inspired many of the articles that we have read throughout the term.

Having myself covered some of the earlier anti-globalization protests as a student / freelance reporter, this is a rather interesting time as the post-911 anti-terrorism paranoia has now subsided and there is a new energy again that seemed to have been gone for 8 years or so. There is a sense that a shift has happened again …

We have been having very interesting discussions around the politics of video games in our Critical Media and Cultural Studies class. These have been mostly around alternative video games (activist, Middle East, around the Palestine conflict) so I thought this would be a rather interesting follow up to the previous post HERE.

But first, a question: would you trust these people to save the world?

Disclaimer:
some readers could feel that the following article is quite controversial or offensive. So, if you don’t feel like “suspending” your judgements and beliefs for a moment, please do not read it. It is not meant to offend anyone, nor to claim a Truth prevailing upon others; rather to reflect upon the madness around fundamentalisms.

“We live in a world that is experiencing a clash of civilisations”

How may times have you heard this saying?

I have been reading this book on and off in the recent year and thought it might be interesting to add a few comments about it here as we are gearing towards getting “Project: Carousel!” to go public. But before that, a few words of reflection about the site.

When I initially conceived of the idea for the site, I had two themes in mind:

The merits of the Pirate Bay case are mixed. If it didn’t exist, there would probably be less illicit filesharing; but, equally, running a search engine that offers links to potentially illicit content isn’t an offence, or else Google would be in the dock for all those people who copy content off newspaper websites wholesale and stick it on their blogs arrayed with Google AdSense ads.

What should be worrying the music and film industries is the possibility that they may actually win in Sweden. We’ve all seen those counter-intuitive studies that suggest people who get content via filesharing buy more content than those who don’t. Frankly, I don’t believe them.

I once began a class by asking students (a class on online social movements) how many of them are currently involved in social movements and online activism. A handful of hands were raised. Then I asked about how many dowloaded music and films from file-sharing services. Coyly, shyly, but surely – almost everybody raised their hands.

Despite it being still sidelined into the geekier parts of policymaking by the more “serious” political communication topics in academic discourse, copyright is now probably the most important contemporary political issue that affects us. Not that “Save Brazilian Rainforest”, “Free Tibet”, “Another education is possible” etc are not important; of course they are. But there is nonetheless something fundamental about the ability to share information freely and who has control over this in our contemporary media ecology.

Date: Tuesday 3 February 2009
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House
Speaker: Professor Clay Shirky
Chair: Charlie Beckett
Clay Shirky, one of the new culture’s wisest observers, steer us through the online social explosion and ask what happens …