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Ed Webb

Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Era: Critique of an Emerging Phenomenon - www.jada... - 0 views

www.readability.com/...tijebiht

socialmedia activism youth Arabs mediterranean analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • how the young enacted their citizenship in the digital age as a way to both confront power and imagine a different future
  • While the economic benefits of globalization had bypassed the Middle East’s young generation, the information revolution did not (at least not to the urban centres). The children submerged in the information technology of the 1990s onwards are today’s youth.
  • El-Sharnouby analysed Egyptian news sources since the turn of twenty-first the century to examine how the government sought to accommodate the "youth bulge." The Mubarak government conceived of youth as prone to laziness and passivity. Moreover, El-Sharnouby highlights that many scholars erroneously thought that disenfranchised youth would turn either to drug abuse or religious extremism. It therefore came as a surprise to them when scores of the “problematic,” “apathetic” and “lazy” youth were the main actors and agents of dissent in the January 25 revolution
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  • a new generation of Arab artists who monetize their work directly online, not mediated through galleries or other parts of the artistic establishment
  • social media are increasingly becoming the space for transnational and global activism for Palestine
  • Hisham Soliman spoke of a pre-revolution identity crisis that permeated Egypt’s young population and made citizenship and national feeling count for very little. Scores of youth, especially young men, considered emigration as one of the only solutions. But the new media allowed them access to new spaces and empowered them with new techniques to redefine their senses of identity and belonging. Instead of keeping them in their private spaces, it allowed them virtual alternative spaces that compensated for the absence of an actual public space. It even provided them with the means to aggregate and to later claim back the actual public sphere
  • transposing the model of the salon to blogs on the Egyptian Internet
  • A limitation of virtual media is its inability to give rise to a coherent discourse and set of ideas. Online activism might even be inhibiting deeper thinking and analysis of complicated political and economic problems
  • Surian, drawing on arguments made with regard to “filter bubbles” argued that the individuals, through Google searches and Facebook filters, are being locked into patterns. Facebook and Google become familiar backyards, leading to reduced thinking and a closing rather than opening of ideas and social spaces.
  • Gramsci states in his Prison Notebooks: If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer leading but only “dominant,” exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Ed Webb

Mohammad Khatami, a Former President, Criticizes Iran's Government - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07iran.html

Iran election Gramsci ideology media

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Sep 09 - Cached
  • opposition leaders — much like their hard-line foes — are girding supporters for a long-term battle to be waged as much through ideas and quiet social organizing as through the public protests that followed Iran’s disputed presidential election on June 12. Both Mr. Khatami and members of the group he addressed, the Islamic Society of University Professors, expressed deep concerns about threats to academic freedom in the coming school year. On Saturday, after days of calls by conservatives to purge Iran’s universities of professors and curriculums deemed “un-Islamic,” the government announced the start of a high-level investigation on how the humanities are taught.
  • a “soft war” against internal enemies. Anyone in the field of culture must now recognize important distinctions between “friends and enemies,” “attack and defense” and “explanation and propaganda,”
  • He warned that the West, with its sophisticated media outlets, is better equipped for soft war than Iran.
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  • like his conservative counterparts, Mr. Moussavi also spoke of the need to deepen his movement with a “social approach, not only a political approach.” And he suggested that the opposition movement, despite its apparent weakness in the face of arrests, trials and intimidation, had won substantial moral victories.“Despite the regretful, bitter developments of recent days,” Mr. Moussavi wrote, “people now have timeless convictions that are miles more important than the election of one man.”
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