the Armchair of El Diablo

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

Overstating Twitter in Tunisia

This is an interesting article about the current turmoil in Tunisia and Twitter’s role facilitating social movements versus its responsibility for causing them. 

Its a critical distinction to make. We’re starting to get a more sophisticated understanding of the role of social media in changing and initiating behaviours … it’s probably time to challenge some of the blanket assumptions about what constitutes ‘influence’. 

FROM TODAY’S CRIKEY.COM.AU….

Tunisia and Western obsessions

Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes: 

It’s a little sickening watching the Western media suddenly start trying to “explain” events in Tunisia. For weeks they blithely ignored what was happening in that country — presumably because the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali wasn’t despised like the butchers of Iran’s theocratic-military complex are. Indeed, Ben Ali was a Western ally in the fight against terrorism, and the recipient of generous US military aid.

Despite the rampant corruption “revealed” by the WikiLeaks cables and Ben Ali’s mammoth internet censorship (which attracted the attention of Anonymous via a series of effective DDOS attacks on Tunisian government websites) perhaps that’s why Western governments were conspicuously quiet before Ben Ali’s fall.

In any event, the commentary and analysis (today’s facile editorial in The Australian is a good example) has mostly been a mash-up of traditional Western cliches about the Middle-East — the innate instability of Arab society, the dangers posed by al-Qaeda, the vague call for greater freedom — although not of course at the risk of doing anything to encourage “Islamists”. Whether generalist or expert media, the events in Tunisia seem to get clumsily shoehorned into whatever narrative Western journalists and commentators want to run.

The argument over the role of social media and WikiLeaks is a particular example of this shoehorning. Ben Ali’s plane was still in the air to that noted retirement home for dictators, Saudi Arabia, when commentators turned the revolution into a debate about Twitter and WikiLeaks.

I suggested in a piece on Saturday that social media played three roles in recent events in Tunisia:

1. An information role — Facebook, Twitter and blogs were used as organisational tools for protests, and exchanging critical information during and after them.
2. A motivational role. Videos and photos of what Tunisian authorities had done to protesters — there are several profoundly distressing photos videos of shot protesters — appears to have played a role not in deterring but in inspiring them, as did coverage and discussion of the self-immolation on December 17 of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose actions set off the unprecedented wave of protests.
3. A media role — in the virtual absence of Western media coverage (some honourable exceptions such as the Guardian’s Brian Whitaker) social media and al-Jazeera — became the only way for those outside Tunisia without contacts there to monitor what was happening. The Twitter hashtag #sidibouzid — named after the central Tunisian town where Mohamed Bouazizi lived — became the primary way to keep track of events on the ground in Tunisia as protesters — having seen Ben Ali blink last week with a range of concessions — moved to force him out altogether.

I called these roles “facilitative”, and suggested they not be confused with causation, which several commentators appear to have done. To talk about a Twitter revolution, or a WikiLeaks revolution, I think, does a very great disservice to the hundreds of thousands of Tunisians who risked their lives standing up to Ben Ali’s forces, and particularly to the scores who died at the hands of Tunisian police, and their families, and most especially to the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi. It smacks of infantilising Tunisians, as though they were incapable of acting themselves until cool Western technology or Julian Assange enabled them to throw off their chains.

That hasn’t stopped a furious debate breaking out between critics and opponents of social media and WikiLeaks — right up to the US State Department, which yesterday took the extraordinary and highly-revealing step of explicitly rejecting any suggestion the reviled WikiLeaks could played a role in what is happening in Tunisia.

Even Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi — now facing his own riots over housing — bought into the debate with a bizarre rant in the aftermath of Ben Ali’s flight attacking Facebook, Youtube and “Kleenex” (although Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to link Tunisia and his refusal to negotiate with Palestinians was almost as ludicrous).

One of the fiercest disputants has been Evgeny Morozov. Morozov has recently released a well-received book, The Net Delusion, which has received a charmed run from the mainstream media because, one suspects, one of its basic contentions — that online media tools ultimately benefit repressive regimes and social media advocates are guilty of cyber-utopianism — gives the MSM an excuse to dismiss social media as irrelevant.

Apparently mortified that events in Tunisia seemed to undermine one of the premises of his book, Morozov rushed out not one but two pieces attacking any links between social media and the outcome on the ground. The second, “What if Tunisia’s revolution ended up like Iran’s?” (Answer: Um … well, it didn’t) was a quite bizarre attempt to prove his point by arguing that the opposite may very well have happened in Tunisia.

I’m fundamentally with Morozov on the need to debunk the idea of any “Twitter revolutions”. But he appears guilty of the same thing as social media advocates. Both sides appear to be obsessed with media platforms — Twitter and Facebook — or an internet phenomenon — WikiLeaks — to the extent of seeing far more important issues purely through the prism of how they feel about social media or Julian Assange. Whether it’s Morozov, or the US State Department, or Andrew Sullivan, it all looks like Westerners fitting what’s happening in Tunisia into a mental framework constructed around issues they’re familiar with and predisposed to debate.

Blogger Karin Kosina was intrigued by the issue and decided to obtain a Tunisian perspective on the debate. It’s only one person’s view, but as they say, “we are living it. We are the witnesses.” The rest of us are mostly just Western observers with our own obsessions and agenda.

FROM TODAY’S CRIKEY.COM.AU

17 January 2011

• Tags
• Twitter

‘Make no mistake, this was a Twitter revolution’

This was Reza Aslan’s (Harvard scholar, Daily Show guest and founder of Aslan Media) response to my question whether Twitter’s role in the 2009 Iranian protest had been overstated. 

With the other panellists (the savvy Ali Alizadeh and the remarkable Sara Haghdoosti) at this weekend’s Sydney Writers Festival session,  Aslan discussed the role of technology in Iranian politics spanning from the (likely CIA-backed) revolution of ’53, and the religious revolution of ’79, to last year’s so-called ‘Twitter’ or Green revolution.

Some of the most interesting points:

• No Leader req’d: In previous revolutions, revolution leaders used illegal cassette tapes that were copied and passed around.  Last year, when the leaders tweeted messages – such as “don’t turn up to Naghsh-i Jahan Square, police are waiting”, people would turn up, often in greater force. For some reason Twitter didn’t become another leader’s mouthpiece to be obeyed, it became an expression of mass will.
• #CNNFail: This was among the most common hashtags during the Iranian tweetstream - no mainstream agency could keep up with Twitter as a news source, just as the security agencies struggled to keep up with flashmobbing youths.
• Mobiblogs – In the lead-up to the election, ‘mobiblogs’ were written in SMS, then forwarded through people’s mobile phone contact lists. These were extremely popular, fast-travelling and were almost completely untraceable to their source.
• Ingredients for a tech-revolution: What would have happened if there was Twitter in Tiananmen Square in ‘89? Probably nothing. It seems certain preconditions are required to make it possible for mass political movements to be sparked through Twitter. These elements were:

1. -      High levels of Literacy & education (Iranian women are particularly literate with high proportion of PhDs after the Irab-Iraq war decimated the young male population).

2. -      Tech savviness.

3. -      Established middle class.

4. -      Stark clash of political ideas: the motivation to resolve a political issue.

Will Twitter ever make a splash in Australian politics?

This Twitter effect doesn’t only happen in developing or turbulent nations. I’ve banged on before about when I fell in love with Twitter, during the G20 protests in London last year. 

In Australia there exists all Reza Aslan’s preconditions… except the motivation. We’re a safe and stable democracy whose real crimes will be written in the fossil record, rather than the news.

Julian Assange, the wispy frontman of Wikileaks, said yesterday that “Australia is a bit of a political wasteland. That’s ok, as long as people recognise that. As long as they recognise that Australia is suburb of a country called Anglo-Saxon.”

He has a point. Here, Twitter will remain an interesting political niche, used mainly for conversation and link sharing. It’s a fortunate pity that Australians won’t experience Twitter in its most interesting capacity: as a rapid, mass-mobilisation tool.

24 May 2010

• Tags
• Iran,
• mass protest,
• Twitter
• Mobile
• revolution
• journalism

Summit’s up

So, the G20’s in town. The credit crunch, or whatever the hell they’re euphemising the global recession to be now, has drawn the 20 richest nations to London for the biggest inter-governmental slap-up since the first UN congress took place in 1946.

The conservative press has been anticipating the hippy and prol response to be guerrilla warfare and mayhem. So, yesterday I trundled along to get some shots, get the goss, and to try and catch the rage, man.

In fact, it was a fairly peaceful affair. Some cool musos were dotted throughout the crowd, drumming away to keep the mood up. It was like a very irritated family day out.

There were a lot of folks angry about cowboy bankers, many upset that the climate was taking a backseat (‘Nature doesn’t take bail-outs’, was one pithy sign). And of course, the ever-present bolshies who were angry that, well, they’ll never get into government.

Overall, while it sure wasn’t a police horse and hose event, it just wasn’t clear what the march was a protest against, or where the anger was directed.

The most interesting thing about the day was how it was reported. The Guardian had a few journos in the grumpy mob, tweeting away. That let me monitor what was going on, and get myself to the more interesting areas to get my shots.

Subtle in effect, but the pundits are right: Twitter changes the whole way events get reported, who reports them, and how we participate.

30 March 2009

• Tags
• mass protest,
• G20
• Twitter
• mass