the Armchair of El Diablo

When is revolting, revolting?

What is a Good Revolution? We’ve spent the last year celebrating the democratic reforms of the ‘Arab Spring’. Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Jordan have all had mass movements against unpleasant regimes.

The degree to which social media was ‘responsible’  has been debated, but you have to admit… the timing is pretty coincidental.

Who’s to say that a mass demonstration of violence against a prevailing system is less valid in London than in Egypt?

Well, the objective for a common good, I guess. There’s no purpose to the London riots, no desired outcome  for a better society.

But just because this is more mob than movement, we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it as a type of revolution. A fairly scary one.

A massive change in social convention = Revolution

Iran and Egypt have shown that social media makes it easier for a group to act against repression.

London has shown that social media also makes it easy for people to mobilise on … what? Disgruntlement?

Usually you need to get a level of real common rage to fuel a group large enough to actually be unstoppable, or at least hard to contain.

Now, the cost of spreading that word is so low that when enough bored kids are crammed together, and economic conditions are low, they’ll hit the streets to rage about the lack of fizz in their Fantas.

Clay Shirky  was the first (I’d read) to suggest the internet’s main benefit to society is the lowered transaction costs of making a group. Failure is cheaper now, so audacious attempts are easier. We now see that this is irrespective of the group’s objective: be it democracy, or an armful of free jeans.

So perhaps this is a revolution - not of ideals, but as a massive change in convention. The tolerance threshold to action has been lowered: mass violence is suddenly as easy to do as apathy.

10 August 2011

• Tags
• Protest
• Riots
• London

News Cycles & AntiTwitterganda

By now, you’d know that Twitter broke the bin Laden operation story, via IT Consultant, Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual). 

That Twitter got the collective scoop is, in itself, old news now. We’re used to hearing about rumours that flare into gossip, then burst into news from the tweet-vine.

What we’re less used to is hearing how Twitter provides two things sorely lacking in news today: context and perspective.

When @ReallyVirtual started his now famous tweetstream about flyswatters and helicopters, he didn’t only inform the interverse about the minute-by-minute happenings of a clandestine operation.

He did something far more important:he made the foreign less alien.

With emoticons, fluent English, and deadpan jokes you’d expect from any IT guy in your office, he managed to convey a context that was far more familiar than the baffling images of minarets, burning flags and AK-47s that we’ve come to automatically associate with Pakistan.

John Stewart joked that ‘Abbatabad’ was exactly the sort of place name that New Yorkers would have invented, if they didn’t know the name of the place where the operation occurred.

The truth of the joke is that we deliberately use preconceptions and stereotypes to separate ourselves from the fact that bin Laden was a person – albeit a total douchebag of one – living amongst people who are actually not too different from ourselves.

This is a very convenient perspective to forget in times of war… or when we want to simulate a time of war. The alienness of foreign countries is important to promote when we want to do things there, we wouldn’t otherwise do here.

In today’s Crikey, Pakistani resident Wajeehah Sabahat wrote:

“Tears flowing down their faces, anguished facial expressions, bearded faces. These are the pictures from Pakistan news about people mourning and protesting for Osama bin Laden. What the international media repeatedly fails to mention is that these pictures belong to a very small clan of people, who do not share their views or opinion with the majority of the population.

I am talking about people of Pakistan, who watch movies, listen to music, play sports and live life in a normal way and who are devoid of any sadistic sense of brutality or vengeance.”

Through Twitter, @ReallyVirtual, provided a tweet stream of consciousness that was unfiltered, and without agenda; providing a context that made the (often inconvenient) similarity of people a little harder to forget.

As a result, Twitter provided a news source that was crucial to the story not for its immediacy, but its raw reality.

6 May 2011

• Tags
• Twitter
• Media
• Pakistan

How Al Jazeera leads the world in social media for news reporting

Stilgherrian writing in today’s Crikey newsletter… when is this guy not worth reading??

Al Jazeera’s reporting from Egypt’s revolution and now the uprising in Libya has been transformed by the use of social media and social networking tools. “The key to our success,” said Riyaad Minty, the network’s head of social media, “is getting in early.”

Following the mass protests in Tunisia starting in December 2010, Al Jazeera could see the potential for uprisings elsewhere. Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan. They started building their network of contacts.

“Based on previous experiences and what we saw in Iran and if we go back to the Gaza War, once governments start clamping down on protesters the first thing that they do was to take down communications, specifically online communications,” Minty told the Digital Directions 2011 conference in Sydney last week.

Al Jazeera therefore makes sure to have telephone and other contacts for its sources. And while YouTube, Facebook and Twitter remain the primary venues for building social networks and gathering information, Al Jazeera also runs its own social networks on its English and Arabic websites — and they tend not to be blocked as often.

“We’ve been receiving up to 4500 images a day on our own citizen media sites, which have been usually graphic images. I mean a lot of it you couldn’t actually broadcast, and images that I’ve never really seen before in any other war,” Minty said.

Al Jazeera also distributed low-cost Flip video cameras to some of its trusted sources especially to gather footage of what people are saying on the street. The main problem is that the large digital video files can’t easily be uploaded from the field, so currently this footage tends to be used in end-of-day summaries.

The most common question Minty has faced these past two months is how we can trust what Al Jazeera receives via its social networks. It’s not magic. Stories aren’t run on the basis of single reports. New sources must provide a phone number, email address and the time any photos or videos were shot, and they’re contacted to establish their bona fides.

In other words, social media sources are cross-checked — just like those contacted in any other way.

Al Jazeera’s success in reporting has led to success in audience terms. Since Egypt kicked off, traffic to its website has spiked 2500%, with some 70% of that being via links posted on Twitter and Facebook.

Most of this new traffic comes from people who can’t access Al Jazeera’s traditional broadcasts, with 45%  from the US. The most-tweeted link is to Al Jazeera’s live video stream, with each of the network’s tweets containing a summary of what’s happening at that moment.

“Most of [the new traffic] is from North America, so there’s definitely potential for us to go out there,” Minty said. “We’ve seen public perception towards the Al Jazeera brand shift overnight just because people have been able to tune in to watch us online.”

More than 45,000 emails have been sent to US cable operators calling for them to carry the network, part of a campaign Al Jazeera is, erm, “encouraging”. They’ve also taken out paid advertising on Twitter Search around keywords such as “Egypt”, “Mubarak” or now “Libya”.

Minty is keen to steer people away from letting the technology hijack the revolution, away from referring to Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions.

“It’s the people’s revolution … It’s the people on the streets that are fighting,” he said. “Libya is not very well-known for its internet connectivity or having a very active online voice, so what we find is it’s pockets of people that are using these tools effectively … Yes, technology does play a very important role in these revolutions, there’s no doubt about that. But wherever’s there’s injustice in the world people will turn to whatever media, whatever platforms, whatever tools that they have to get the messages out.”

*Stilgherrian attended Digital Directions 2011 as a guest of the organisers.

*** FROM TODAY’S CRIKEY.COM.AU

7 March 2011

• Tags
• Libya
• revolution