Group items tagged

poor and the dispossessed presented as unruly

Pro-revolution writers and public figures  challenge on a daily basis the demonization of the revolution and the assault on the symbolism of Tahrir square. Young men and women cover the walls and buildings in downtown Tahrir with graffiti that ridicules official media campaigns against protesters

The issue of who tells the story, who has ownership of the narrative of revolution was at the centre of many debates

how can we recognize the inspirational effect of Tahrir Square on the Occupy Wall Street movement for example, and still acknowledge the differences in the demands and contexts, without suggesting that one protest movement is more genuine or more original than the other?

The Iraq story of a backlash against women’s rights dressed up in the robes of traditional culture was all too familiar to Egyptian and Tunisian feminist activists and researchers

In a panel introducing the mosireen ↑ group, members of the group, Lobna Darwish, Omar Robert Hamilton, Yasmine Metwally and Philip Rizq, showed video clips ↑ which documented violence perpetrated by the military against civilians.  The group met in Tahrir square and organized to expose the stories untold in the official media:  “We think of ourselves as a propaganda machine for the revolution… we are not neutral… we give space to people without a voice.”

to bear witness as a means of resistance against official media campaigns aiming to discredit protesters and protest movements. The media mantra about objective and distanced reporting is replaced by emphasis on the personal, the immediate, the fragment as an antidote to official dominant narratives, or counter-revolutionary narratives

it hasn't just been the past twelve days that has exposed the biased and obsolete agenda of Egyptian state TV--that's been happening gradually for the last 15 years. The model for controlling a people, once a great tool, is "locked in the past, in a world where the government controls the message," according to Lawrence Pintak, a professor, former journalist, and the author of forthcoming book "The New Arab Journalist: Mission and Identity in a Time of Turmoil."

News media in Egypt are "weapons of war," said Pitnak. "Government media is a weapon of pro-Mubarak people; the majority of the rest of the media have become weapons of people."

"As journalists, we're human beings. Once they start shooting at you or beating you up, it's hard not to take it personally. It is no longer objective, unbiased coverage. It has become a struggle between media--Arab and Western--and Mubarak."

Perhaps most indicative of the changing face of Egyptian television is Shahira Amin, whose departure after twelve years at Nile TV drew attention to the network's habit of prioritizing regime solidity over truth. Her resignation became a news story in and of itself, and when she told it to the media, she did so live from Tahrir Square--in an interview with Al Jazeera.

by being posited as films that inform, educate and explain what is going on here to audiences over there, these films become central to a pre-existing East-West dynamic—a sphere of knowledge production and image-making that tries to translate the orient to an elsewhere

These are discourses that seek to “save brown women from brown men” or brown liberal men from oppressive brown regimes, or basically to save the Arabs from their Arabness, with all the cultural stereotypes such a term entails.

The problem with these films is that they ignore the interconnectedness of “developed” and “developing” countries, of authoritarianism in the Middle East and liberal democracies in the west, of Islamic fundamentalism and the Cold War, and of metropolitan centers of global capitalism and the dispossession of millions all over the world. The problem gets even more complicated when entitlement and ability to represent becomes unquestioned.

These films portray living stereotypes of actual people, focusing on the elements of their lives that are ‘interesting’ only in so much as they tell us something about clichéd versions of Egypt, Tahrir, Islam, women, art and war, conflict, poverty, dispossession and resistance. These topics are not interesting for those who live in war, conflict, poverty and dispossession, those for whom Tahrir was not a spectacle and resistance is a complicated act. In such a context these issues might be relevant, but they are only interesting somewhere else.

I am skeptical of the act of representation itself, the provision of ready-made, easily translatable narratives about 2011 as if the revolution was a thing, and as if "Arabness" is also a thing. If postmodernism declared the death of the meta-narratives—teleogically oriented, totalizing worldviews that tend to put in a claim for the universal and promise utopian resolutions that are yet to occur—Arab Spring documentaries lie on the opposite side of the spectrum. The conditions of their existence, profitability, visibility and circulation depends first and foremost on their claims to a certain truth about “what really happened” over there. But neither the "Arab Spring" nor the "Arab World" can be explained through the sum of their parts. They are constructed, time and time again, through the very narratives that eclipse alternative imaginaries, historical renditions or analyses by foreclosing the realm of imagination all together.

Mansour affirms that in the past many of her co-workers practiced self- censorship because they were afraid of losing their jobs or worse still, of facing an investigation by a military court. These fears have been reinforced by recent media reports of fellow journalists and bloggers being summoned for interrogation by the Military Prosecutor —  a trend, which according to the protesting journalists has become “all too common” in the post-revolutionary era.

the channel has also extended its boycott of outspoken critics of the military rulers such as former Presidential-hopeful Mohamed El Baradei and author Alaa El Aswany.

“Last year, we were confined to our studios and were not authorised to report from Tahrir. Now we are being told to cover the pro-military rally in Abbassiya instead. But we are not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. Our cameras will be in Tahrir too. We share the aspirations of the pro democracy activists,” El Attar asserts.

In November 2013, a few hours after Prime Minister Beblawi inaugurated it, protesters vandalised a memorial that the government built for ‘the martyrs of the revolution’. In his inaugurating speech, Beblawi referred to January 25 and June 30 ‘revolutions’ as well as the martyrs of the police and the army. That was interpreted by the protesters as another attempt to conflate the meanings and disrupt the image and the perceptions of the January 25 Revolution in the Egyptians’ collective consciousness

the military, Egypt’s central power, endeavoured to restrict the public space and erase the memory of the January 25 revolution. For this power knows that while memories are linked to the past, they determine how many Egyptians will perceive the future. The military pursued 1984’s Orwellian prophecy: ‘he who controls the past controls the future’.

the walls of revolutionary graffiti were repainted, CCTV cameras were installed in central spaces, and governmental offices were relocated away from the heart of Cairo

in dismantling the revolutionary symbols, the regime intended to construct a collective memory that excludes rival interpretations of events to its own. That is reminiscent to the Bahraini government’s destruction of Pearl Roundabout, the rallying point of the 2011 mass anti-government protests.

the activists’ 2012 campaign: Askar Kazeebon (Lying Military) whose modus operandi was to broadcast videos and documentaries to pedestrians that falsify the military’s accounts of various events and expose the soldiers’ crimes and human rights violations that official and regime-friendly media ignored

The unprecedented crackdown on dissent and the draconian laws that reportedly imprisoned tens of thousands of activists had prompted many to surrender the public space. Some are silent out of fear or disappointment. Others tried to put the memory of the revolution aside, so that they can go on with their own personal lives

Since the 2013 military coup, state and private media outlets – mostly controlled by the regime’s clientele – have kept glorifying the military’s role in recent years as well as defaming the revolution and activists as tools of the west to destroy Egypt

tech-savvy young activists already utilised memorialisation to foment the democratic uprising. We Are All Khalid Said, a Facebook page created to commemorate the 28-year old Khalid Said who was brutally tortured and killed by police, in 2010, became the January 25 protests’ virtual rallying point and main coordinator.

there are many initiatives to resist forgetting the revolution and silencing its voices. The most recent of which is Mosireen Collective’s 858 archive of resistance. In the Collective’s own words, the archive includes raw photographs, videos and documents that ‘present thousands of histories of revolt told from hundreds of perspectives. While the regime is using every resource to clamp down on public space and public memory the time has come to excavate and remember and re-present our histories.’

Wiki-Thawra whose slogan is ‘so we don’t forget’; UCLA’s Tahrir Documents; AUC’s University on the Square; and MIT’s 18 Days in Egypt.

After the 2013 military takeover, thousands involuntarily left the country to live in exile abroad. A minority among the exiled are still engaged in telling stories of the revolution and protesting al-Sisi government’s human rights violations and destruction of Egypt’s democratic hopes. Using art and satire, they continue to disturb the regime’s hegemonic revolution-defaming narratives.

it is still uncertain whether the regime has successfully dominated the Egyptian collective memory of the January 25 Revolution. That is because collective memory is not a static realm but rather a fluid construct that shapes – and is shaped by – current conditions and future aspirations.

a single Californian company making decisions over what counts as hate speech and profanity for some of the world's most popular sites without anyone ever examining whether its own algorithms might be biased or excessively conservative

It's the proliferation—not elimination—of intermediaries that has made blogging so widespread.  The right term here is “hyperintermediation,” not “disintermediation.”

this marriage of big data and automated content moderation might also have a darker side, particularly in undemocratic regimes, for whom a war on spam and hate speech—waged with the help of domestic spam-fighting champions—is just a pretense to suppress dissenting opinions. In their hands, solutions like Impermium's might make censorship more fine-grained and customized, eliminating the gaps that plague “dumb” systems that censor in bulk

Just imagine what kind of new censorship possibilities open up once moderation decisions can incorporate geolocational information (what some researchers already call7 “spatial big data”): Why not block comments, videos, or photos uploaded by anyone located in, say, Tahrir Square or some other politically explosive location?

For governments and corporations alike, the next frontier is to learn how to identify, pre-empt, and disrupt emerging memes before they coalesce behind a catchy hashtag—this is where “big data” analytics would be most helpful. Thus, one of the Russian security agencies has recently awarded a tender12 to create bots that can both spot the formation of memes and to disrupt and counter them in real-time through ”mass distribution of messages in social networks with a view to the formation of public opinion.” Moscow is learning from Washington here: Last year the Pentagon  awarded a $2.7 million contract to the San Diego-based firm Ntrepid in order to build software to create fake multiple online identities13 and “counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.” “Big data”-powered analytics would make spotting such “enemy propaganda” much easier.

Twitter and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have been more willing to embrace their roles in activism and unrest, Mr. Zuckerman said. After the Internet was shut down in Egypt, Twitter and Google actively helped protesters by producing a new service, speak2tweet, that allowed people to leave voicemail messages that would be filed as updates on Twitter. Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders, used it as an opportunity to emphasize the positive global impact that comes with the open exchange of information. When the Internet was back up, YouTube, working with Storyful, a social media news curation service, took the thousands of videos pouring in from the protests in Tahrir Square to help people access and share the information as quickly as possible on CitizenTube, its news and politics channel.

the Global Network Initiative, a voluntary code of conduct for technology companies created in 2008 that requires participating businesses to take reasonable steps to protect human rights

TV hosts Dina Abdel Fatah and Wael Al Abrashi will be interrogate at the public prosecution office as they are accused of promoting Black Bloc culture in Egypt !! Wael Al Abrashi claimed that he spoke to Black Bloc members on Dream TV2 while Dina Abdel Fatah hosted alleged Black Bloc Members in her show on Tahrir TV. Of course the alleged and self proclaimed Black Bloc Facebook pages and twitter accounts denied that these were members in the Black Block.

to be accused of promoting Black Bloc in Egypt !! For God sake what kind of charge this is !?

Abdel Fatah is being summoned after his live TV confrontation with minister of justice Ahmed Mekki last Saturday during the Ultras trial on CBC channel's morning show

Former MP Mostafa Al Naggar was summoned to appear in front of the magistrate for the same charge : Insulting judiciary !!!

there is a long list of TV hosts and journalists like Mahmoud Saad , Lamis El Hadidy and Mona Shazly as well their producers. These TV hosts are accused of letting their guests insult the judges and judiciary in Egypt !!

a tip I got from a dear friend that the judges who reported that long list to the ministry of justice are the Muslim brotherhood's Judges for Egypt group !!! You have to know that the number of "Insulting the president" lawsuits in time of Morsi's rule "6 months"  exceeded all the lawsuits filed isnce 1892 when that stupid charged entered our legal system !! I have got nothing to say more. This is not the Egypt we want.

The ANHRI report stated, "The network has acquired information suggesting that the editor-in-chief of the agency made editorial decisions for the benefit of Shafiq. He exerts professional, moral and material pressures on journalists, at an agency that is funded by the state and taxpayers' money."

The collective formed in the days following the January 2011 uprising when it set up a "human rights media tent" in Tahrir Square as "a point to collect footage that people had of police abuses".

The citizen journalists have licensed footage under creative commons on YouTube and Vimeo, where others can download the films. These can be used by broadcasters.

"We are both attacking state media and trying to push traditional media outlets into taking a stronger stance and backing them up in being able to show things that perhaps felt they were unable to show. "We are also empowering everyone that has a camera phone to make them feel like they can contribute to a wider narrative rather than just uploading it to YouTube."

Mosireen is therefore reaching out to those without internet access, which is "one of the big, big, big challenges". "It's very easy to forget how hyper-connected we are compared to most of the world," Hamilton said

Asked whether they see themselves as activists or journalists, Hamilton explained how they have a "definite journalistic push". "We have a decentralised approach. We don't have an editorial policy, we don't have an editorial meeting at the beginning of the day to tell people where to go." Anyone can contribute footage, creating an "almost infinite number of camera people" who can be out filming, using mobile phones, DSLRs and hand-held video cameras.

It is not the international audience the activists are focused on. "We are in a fight that is going to be settled, or won or lost, here [in Egypt], so we don't need to spend too much time talking to or addressing international audiences. "It's really much more about Egyptian public opinion and the narrative within Egypt that is important, and helping people get access to the truth."