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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Ed Webb

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Ed Webb

Turks intolerant of religious diversity, says poll - 1 views

www.todayszaman.com/...gious-diversity-says-poll.html

Turkey religions tolerance opinion poll data ethnicity

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • Turks intolerant of religious diversity, says poll A survey conducted by a private research company has shown that a great majority of the public does not want atheists, Jews or Christians for neighbors and also disapproves of their employment at top state institutions, the Radikal daily reported yesterday.
  • Fifty-seven percent of 1,108 people surveyed in the poll said they did not want to have atheist neighbors, while 42 percent said they did not want Jewish neighbors and 35 percent of respondents were reluctant to have Christian neighbors
  • When participants were asked whether they have close friends who are Alevi, Kurd, atheist, Greek, Armenian or Jewish, 64 percent stated that they had a Kurdish friend, while 53 percent said they had a friend from the Alevi community.
Ed Webb

FRONTLINE: Tehran Bureau: Me and My Basij Friend | PBS - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...me-and-my-basij-friend.html

Iran election basij violence politics demonstration human rights

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Me and My Basij Friend
  • the actual result is mixed. Such high schools give rise to two kinds of graduates. On one hand, there are the ones who take the message to heart and become members of the student Basij. Then there are those like me, who rebel against this constant pressure of religion and state. So my high school friends became either ultra-hard-line Islamists, or they became leftists, anarchists and liberals.
Ed Webb

'World's First' Street Named After a Twitter Account - 0 views

www.wired.com/...-named-after-a-twitter-account

Twitter geography street_art internet of things

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 28 Sep 09
     
    For once, you can take the @ symbol at the front of a Twitter account name literally. The Twitter name @arjanelfassed is not only the Twitter account
Ed Webb

Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Elite Saudi university set to open - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...20099238549230496.html

KSA education higher-ed university science religion

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Saudi Arabia has set up a new research university, a multibillion dollar co-educational venture built on the promise of scientific freedom.
  • Saudi officials have envisaged the postgraduate institution as a crucial part of the kingdom's plans to transform itself into a global scientific hub - the latest effort in the Gulf region to diversify its economic base.
  • the new university will not require women to wear veils or cover their faces, and they will be able to mix freely with men.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • KAUST has enrolled 817 students representing 61 different countries, of whom 314 begin classes this month while the rest are scheduled to enroll in the beginning of 2010.
  • 71 faculty members include 14 from the US, seven from Germany and six from Canada
  • KAUST may indirectly challenge the brand of conservatism that critics say has stifled progress in the Muslim world."We do not restrict how they wish to work among themselves," Shih said, referring to whether men and women can freely intermingle on campus."It's a research environment ... driven by scientific agenda."Officials say KAUST's embrace of scientific freedom marks Saudi Arabia's determination to not be left behind as technology increasingly drives global development.
Ed Webb

Common Knowledge : CJR - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...common_knowledge.php

media identity democracy USA cjr analysis socialmedia newspapers journalism politics

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Berelson’s analysis documented what we denizens of the burgeoning ecosystem often shorthanded as “the new media landscape” understand instinctively: that news is much more than information. That it is more, even, than a cultural commodity. Berelson highlighted news’s status as a source both of intimacy and anxiety: news is not only a reflection of the world we live in. It is also a reflection of ourselves.
  • Aren’t consumers better served by many outlets that are specialized than by a few outlets that are generalized? And national news, even in its halcyon days—one thinks of Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America”—was never a paragon of cultural comprehensiveness. Master narratives, the closest we’ve ever gotten to macro-communal news, have been, as well, products of oligarchic exclusivity.
  • consumers are increasingly presented with, and made to choose among, an expanding variety of ever-narrowing news sources
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • the inconvenience of being challenged in our beliefs.
  • Increasingly, we are able to choose not just which opinions to embrace, but also something more foundational: which facts to know in the first place.
  • a troubling paradox: the democratization of information, it turns out, is in some ways at odds with democracy itself.
  • Where is the middle ground between monopoly and chaos? How do we balance the individually empowering elements of the niche—and the passion and participation they encourage—with news that is empowering in a wider sense of civic life? How do we reconcile the intimacy of news consumption with Berelson’s insight that news is, at is core, a solidarity good? How do we structure a system of news that acts, in varying ways, as democracy’s common denominator?
  • news consumption itself has taken on a quality of itinerancy: audiences, per Pew’s most recent State of the News Media report, now “hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media.” And consumption itself has thus taken on an increasingly self-definitional property: to read The New York Times, or to watch Fox News—or MSNBC—or the NewsHour—or to curate a personalized RSS feed, is, of course, to make not merely a commercial decision. It is also to make a declaration about who you are and how you see the world.
  • There has always been more information in the world than there have been news outlets to convey it; but the explosion of outlets, in particular, means that no longer is slant the key self-definitional distinction in news
  • “The news” itself, as a unitary entity, is no longer something we can take for granted. On the contrary: it is increasingly incoherent—“a mass of niches,” Jeff Jarvis has it. Indeed, the notion of a master narrative itself—the communal melody that, even in its exclusivity, also binds us together in its tunes and tones—is slowly dissolving into white noise.
  • echo chambers—even those that many might think of as ‘the good ones’—have an insularity that impedes broader political and cultural discourse. They distort reality through their very presumption of multiple realities. They assume—and, then, foster—a disconnect between sub-truths and, simply, truth.
  • In And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Bill Wasik describes the “feedback loop among bloggers and readers,” citing a study finding that 85 percent of blog links led consumers to blogs of the same political bent—“with almost no blog showing any particular respect for any blog on the other side.” In this way, selective exposure becomes a communal activity.
  • “The problem is when extremism emerges from the logic of social interactions”—from, in other words, a system of discourse that allows for self-segregation. And that’s the problem we’re seeing, increasingly, in our journalistic infrastructure. On the one hand, people have access to more dissenting views than ever before; on the other, paradoxically, they are more able to ignore those views than ever before. My reality here. Your reality there.
  • Without “popular information,” we lose not only our baseline of knowledge about the political world, but also our bearings within it. We risk becoming subject, as it were, to subjectivity itself—and ending up with a society, as William James had it, in which “people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
  • That journalism is crucial to modern democracy seems clear; that it is not by any means sufficient to democracy seems equally clear
  • News serves the public not only by feeding it information; it also fosters, in the phrase of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the “sociological imagination”—the habit of mind required to connect one’s private concerns to the “public issues” that give rise to them. News itself is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy. In learning about our fellow citizens, we come to see their lives as they are: inextricably linked to ours. News begets empathy—and, in that, social capital. Connection is key: as Robert Putnam notes, “a society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.”
  • Mediated knowledge, in other words, united the country. Not by whitewashing differences among its consumers, but rather by giving those consumers a baseline of shared information and discourse that, eventually, transformed an awkward amalgam of loosely connected states—the experiment—into the United States. The nation.
  • The challenge, as we navigate the chasm between old ways and new, is to find a way to mingle the productive properties of commotion with the enduring value of community.
  • “It is hardly possible,” Mill had it, “to overstate the value in the present state of human improvement of placing people in contact with others dissimilar to themselves, and in contact too with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.”
  • Ed Webb on 21 Sep 09
     
    Essential reading on media, identity, democracy, community.
Ed Webb

Shaikh-Down - 0 views

www.shaikh-down.com

idiocy orientalism

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 15 Sep 09
     
    Um. No. Please let this not be a real book.
Ed Webb

Eyewitness Account of the Conditions in Evin and How Amir Javadifar Died - 0 views

hra-iran.net/index.php

Iran elections torture human rights IRGC blog

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Sep 09 - Cached
  • They gave to all us a paper to write down our home addresses along with our emails and passwords.
  • Some times a guard would come in to the cell with his face covered and then would leave without saying a word.
  • The interrogator asked the question and we had to write down the answer on the paper. The questions included: what were you doing the day you were arrested; what do think of the election; what do you think of the protests and the demonstration?”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • here were some prisoners who were transferred from IRGC or Basij units and were in particullary bad shape. Following their arrests, they had been threatened to die with a gun on their heads. They were forced to repeat sit-ups until they fainted. Their condition had become so critical that some Basijis had protested their treatment.
  • I did not dare to call other prisoners after I was released. They said they would come after me if I tried to contact others. When I was walking out of gates a woman showed me a picture. I could not remember the face on the picture at the time because I was feeling very weak physically. A few days later I recalled seeing him in the Precinct 148. When I arrived in the UK I called them and was told that the person on that picture was Amir Javadifar and he had been martyred.”
  • Ed Webb on 09 Sep 09
     
    Note the emphasis on communications - requirement to give up email addresses and passwords; being cut off from outside; false information.
Ed Webb

Google launches user-led Q&A service in Arabic by AP: Yahoo! Tech - 0 views

tech.yahoo.com/...ml_tec_techbit_mideast_google

google yahoo ejabat Arabic internet news

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Google Inc. launched an online tool Tuesday that allows Arab users to answer each other's questions, a move designed to boost the amount of Web content available in Arabic.
  • Google decided to launch its tool, called Google Ejabat after the Arabic word for "answers," after discovering many of its Arabic users' searches failed to turn up relevant results. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company estimates that less than 1 percent of information online is in Arabic.
  • The company does not offer a service like Ejabat in English, but has launched similar tools in Russian, Chinese and Thai, Dubai-based spokeswoman Joanne Kubba said. "We pushed it ahead in Arabic since we know it to be a very useful tool to help generate ... content," she said.
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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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.”
Ed Webb

Murdoch taking stake in Alwaleed biz - Rapid TV News - 0 views

www.rapidtvnews.com/...ing-stake-in-alwaleed-biz.html

Arab TV Murdoch Al-Waleed

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Rupert Murdoch is reported to be taking an investment position in Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s music and films business, Rotana Media. The Wall Street Journal is saying that Murdoch is in talks to take a 20% stake in Rotana. The report seems well-founded, but it is not the first time that these two media giants have talked about mutual co-operation.
Ed Webb

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iraq's academy of peace and politeness - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8231162.stm

Iraq music beauty aesthetics education

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Sep 09 - Cached
  • the Academy of Peace through Art, a school created under the umbrella of Iraq's national Symphony Orchestra.
  • dozens of teenagers with different backgrounds learn that boys should open doors for girls and the art of dinner party conversation.
  • "To some people it may seem irrelevant now, because there are so many problems - but we need people who care about beauty, and I am convinced that the day will come when everyone will realise it,"
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Their next class is civil interaction, in other words, how to have a conversation without turning it into a confrontation.
Ed Webb

BBC NEWS | Technology | Jail threat for donkey bloggers - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8233598.stm

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Sep 09 - Cached
  • The Azerbaijani government denies that the bloggers' arrest was politically motivated. "People are not arrested in Azerbaijan because of political activity," said Ali Hasnov, a senior adviser to President Ilham Aliyev, in a statement.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 03 Sep 09
       
      Ah, marvelous comedy.
Ed Webb

A Song Contest Becomes a Hot Spot in Feud Between Countries - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...31iht-eurovision.html

Eurovision Armenia Azerbaijan music politics

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Sep 09 - Cached
  • The simmering conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has entered a new theater: the Eurovision Song Contest.
  • some Azerbaijanis who took impartiality to impressive lengths, voting for the Armenian entry in the 2009 final in May, reportedly were called in to the Azerbaijani National Security Ministry
  • Previously, the Armenians had raised tensions by slipping images of a memorial in Nagorno-Karabakh, the enclave at the center of the dispute between the countries, into the video presentation that introduced their representative in a preliminary round.
Ed Webb

Memo From Cairo - Hints of Pluralism in Egyptian Religious Debates - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...31cairo.html

religion Islam moderation Christianity Bahais media al-Banna

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Mr. Banna was pleased because at least his ideas were being circulated. Mr. Banna, who is 88 years old and is the brother of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been preaching liberal Islamic views for decades. But only now, he said, does he have the chance to be heard widely. It is not that a majority agrees with him; it is not that the tide is shifting to a more moderate interpretative view of religion; it is just that the rise of relatively independent media — like privately owned newspapers, satellite television channels and the Internet — has given him access to a broader audience.
  • Some of those who have begun to speak up say they are acting in spite of — and not with the encouragement of — the Egyptian government. Political analysts said that the government still tried to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned but tolerated Islamic movement, to present itself as the guardian of conservative Muslim values.
  • President Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world has quieted the accusation that the United States is at war with Islam, making it easier for liberal Muslims to promote more Western secular ideas, Egyptian political analysts said.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the dynamic was for Christians as well as Muslims in Egypt
  • this time Mr. Qimni did not go into hiding. He appeared on the television show, sitting beside Sheik Badri as he defended himself.
  • “It is an unprecedented move to recognize that one can be Egyptian and not adhere to one of these three religions,”
Ed Webb

News | Preacher's Moses story controversial in Egypt - 0 views

www.alarabiya.net/...83369.html

Egypt egyptisrael socialmedia Islam

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Aug 09 - Cached
  • The famous preacher prepared the story earlier this year and posted it on his website in May with questions that he asked visitors to respond to. "Think about these questions," he wrote on the website. "You will not find their answers in any book. They just need brains and imagination." Among the questions posted were those asking: Why did the Pharaoh order male Jews to be killed? What do you think was Moses’ political goal? Was it saving the Israelites or talking the Pharaoh into believing in God? Why didn't Moses call upon Egyptians to join his faith? The responses were remarkable because the majority linked the story of Moses to the current political situation in Egypt and viewed it as an incentive to rebel against repressive leaders.
  • The Moses story is believed to be one of the main reasons why Khaled was rumored to have been forced to leave Egypt in June. The website discussion was not welcome by state officials, unnamed security sources told Al Arabiya. A report by a state security officer about Khaled alleged the story was a means of arousing sympathy for Jews as well as attacking the Egyptian government.
  • Fathi pointed out that Khaled uses the latest technology in his program and has thus initiated a significant change on religious shows and stated that the program has received some of the highest viewer rates.
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