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Mike Wesch

Arab Media: The Web 2.0 Revolution - 0 views

  • The Cairo News Company, which provided satellite services and equipment for Al Jazeera, the BBC and CNN, was raided by police after it transmitted footage of the food riots.
  • But new media applications were changing the rules. This was demonstrated by the arrest of a journalism student from Berkeley named James Karl Buck, who was detained along with his Egyptian interpreter as he photographed a street protest. Buck used the Twitter application on his cell phone to send a snapshot of himself and the text message “arrested” to a list serve of his contacts. His friends used the message to prompt intervention from Berkeley and the U.S. consulate. Buck was soon able to Twitter the word “free,” and mounted an online campaign to release his interpreter.
  • police finally located him and tortured him for his Facebook password and names of the other group members (the vast majority of which he didn’t know).
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  • But in the United States, many would-be activists have been frustrated by the gap between an online click and concrete participation. Facebook groups and causes often swell, crest and dissipate without leaving a mark on the outside world. 
  • As of August 5, 2008, Facebook listed 484,137 members in the Egypt Network. The 6 April group was alive and well with 72,274 members (six of them new).
  • There are still important differences in the way content is generated as well. The print tradition of knowledge creation tends to require more research, reflection and refinement in the process of transforming an idea from impulse to public distribution. The online environment encourages instant, reflexive responses. So the Internet as we know it has two powerful functions: as conveyor of its own immediate data, and as an extraordinary portal to traditional repositories of knowledge: the published books, reports, journalism, legal briefs and scholarly articles.
  • The Arab world has had a fundamentally different relationship to print culture, and modern published resources are sorely lacking.
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