Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ Media in Middle East & North Africa
Ed Webb

Anderson Cooper 360: Blog Archive - The Great Silencing: Intolerance and cens... - 2 views

  •  
    Mostly about Egypt.
gweyman

Jared Cohen: Is "Social Media" Really Changing the World? - 1 views

  • "Social media" is merely a way to describe new tools in an old and narrow paradigm where we measure success by how many people are reached.
    • gweyman
       
      I tend to agree that the term social media is used most on twitter by marketers interested in boosting hits, traffic, retweets, followers etc. but not really improving understanding or information flows.
  • The term "social media" as we know it today appeared in July 2004 as a reference to participatory media like blogging, wikis, social networks, and related technologies. This is all well and good if technology was still primarily about connecting people to information, which is really the essence of media. However, this term has become obsolete in a world where technology has become a critical tool for connecting people not only to information and ideas, but also to other individuals, entities (NGOs, companies, governments, etc.), and more recently actual resources
    • gweyman
       
      I don't understand the argument here. 'Social' necessarily defines something that is between people and groups. Why doesn't he suggest an alternative phrase?
Ed Webb

Internet set for change with non-English addresses by AP: Yahoo! Tech - 0 views

  • One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic
  • Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom — a former chief of U.S. cybersecurity — said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.
Ed Webb

AFP: Morocco punishes journalists over royal reporting - 0 views

  • A court in Morocco on Monday sentenced two journalists to suspended jail terms and fines for falsely reporting that the North African nation's King Mohammed VI was sick.
Ed Webb

Iran's Politics Open a Generational Chasm - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the generational chasm
  • Because of the growing alienation of young Iranians, family dynamics could be complex, particularly among the families of elite government officials. “These children are more affected by society and even Facebook and Twitter on the Internet than their families,”
  • “This was an explosion of 30 years of suppression and intimidations of my generation,” she said of the protests. “I am happy that we finally found the courage to speak up.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “I believe she has been tricked by the country’s enemies and has become a tool for propaganda,” Mr. Kalhor told the Mehr news agency. “As a father, I advise her not take a path that has no return and not become an instrument in the hands of the enemy.”
Ed Webb

untitled - 0 views

  • "The security sector is taking a lot of resources. If you put the same amount of money into education, you get a better society," Adel Abdellatif of the United Nations Development Program said at the launch of the Arab Knowledge Report 2009.
  • "The security sector is taking a lot of resources. If you put the same amount of money into education, you get a better society," Adel Abdellatif of the United Nations Development Program said at the launch of the Arab Knowledge Report 2009.
  • Arab states could face political and social instability if they underinvest in the education of their young, expanding populations, a regional education report said on Wednesday
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Illiteracy is a big obstacle in the Arab world, where around a third of adults, 60 million people, are unable to read or write, the report said. Two thirds of these are women. About 9 million children of elementary school age were not attending school, with up to 45 percent of the population not enrolling in secondary education.
Ed Webb

Which Came First -- Orhan Pamuk's Museum or His New Novel? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The story of how a Nobel Prize-winning novelist would come to open a museum
  • Among the objects: 4,213 cigarette butts, 237 hair barrettes, 419 national lottery tickets and 1 quince grinder.
  • “My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps.” Over the years, he visited hundreds of these queer, lesser-known monuments to collecting — from the Chinese Traditional Medicine Museum in Hangzhou, China, to the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, N.C. His character Kemal visits museums, too — 5,723 of them, we learn from the novel. The similarities between Kemal and Orhan inspire a question that never fails to exasperate the author. He threw his voice, a complicated musical instrument, into the rhetorical query: “Mr. Pamuk, are you Kemal? Enough. No, I am not Kemal, but I cannot convince you that I am not Kemal. That is being a novelist.”
Ed Webb

El Koshary Today | Egypt's Most Reliable News Source - 0 views

  •  
    Mmmm, Koshary!
Ed Webb

Abdullah endorses project to spread human rights culture - 0 views

  • the project’s mission is to spread the culture of human rights in an atmosphere of brotherhood, tolerance and forgiveness. It also aims to enable both government and nongovernmental sectors to effectively implement relevant policies in line with Islamic values and international treaties and agreements. The project aims to introduce regulations, laws and procedures in the Kingdom that protect human rights.
  • It will organize workshops, activities and campaigns, and publish a magazine about human rights. The HRC will also work with the educational sector to introduce human rights in school curriculums.
Ed Webb

Student stuns Iran by criticizing supreme leader - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  •  
    Interesting to see the doubts about this - staged? real? how did he get away with it? It shows the debased media climate in Iran, but also the genuine uncertainty about where the (moving) boundaries of acceptable behaviour are.
Ed Webb

Fears over education's gender gap - The National Newspaper - 0 views

  • Emirati boys are posting lower examination scores and dropping out of high school at a much greater rate than Emirati girls, newly released research shows.It also found that among pupils who complete secondary schooling, many fewer boys go on to a university education.
  • although 70 per cent of Emirati girls enrol at university after high school, the figure for boys is only 27 per cent.
  • The drop-out rates are highest in Grade 10, the first non-compulsory year of school, when many boys abandon their education to pursue jobs in the public sector.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “By no means does this study imply that girls have an outstanding quality of education either,” she said. “I would say that neither boys nor girls are receiving the best education that they could in government schools.”
  • Dr Ridge recommended that the Ministry of Education should look at improving the quality of its expatriate teaching force, getting more Emirati men to become teachers, and making schools more attractive to pupils.
  • The Armed Forces and police were a “very attractive” career choice for some because they required minimal education
  • Emiratis make up only one per cent of the UAE’s private sector workforce. The public workforce is 85 per cent Emirati.
  •  
    What are the implications of an undereducated population for media and governance?
Tom Trewinnard

On U.S Middle East Policy and Amateurism | TPMCafe - 0 views

  • This was not a good week for the Obama administration's Middle East peace efforts. Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem last Saturday, Secretary Clinton seemed to be praising the distinctively partial limitations that Israel was willing to implement on settlement non-expansion. During the following days in Morocco and Cairo, she walked those remarks back, but the damage had been done.
  • On the positive side, I think the administration folks are themselves aware that this is not going swimmingly. The overall administration scorecard on Middle East peace is slipping into the red.
  • My own preference would have been for option two, and indeed, the administration could reasonably be perceived to have laid the ground deftly for such a pivot. Unfortunately, they went for option three, and it all came crashing down around their feet this week.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The Obama team is perfectly capable of charting a course from a bad week to a game-changing success, but more of the same won't get them there.
Ed Webb

NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how 'citizen journalists' can't handle the truth - 0 views

  • For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really. Despite how successful ten million actual voters marching through Washington, London and other major cities in 2003 were in stopping the invasion of Iraq, a bit of entirely virtual cyber-posturing by foreigners didn’t lead to real change in Iran.
  •  
    Mostly not about Iran, but about citizen journalism. I think Carr is all kinds of wrong here, but it's an interesting and probably important debate.
Ed Webb

A New Mosque in Nicaragua Fires Up the Rumor Mill - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • "All the Taliban," declares William Martinez, a 24-year-old barber at Le Moustache, a hair salon across the street.
  • "There are two types of people who use the mosque," she says, matter-of-factly. "The Arabs and the Iranians."
  • Many here refer to all Muslims or Middle Easterners as Turks, and seem to know next to nothing about their religious beliefs. "They pray to the god of the moon so they only gather at night," says Ms. Melendez.
  •  
    Largely a non-story, except for what it reveals of public attitudes and knowledge, or lack thereof.
Ed Webb

MEI - Middle East International - Inside MEI - 0 views

  •  
    Relaunched.
Tom Trewinnard

Daily News Egypt - Full Article - 0 views

  •  
    From the article: "Egypt's legitimacy to host such a meeting is questionable as it has repeatedly been guilty of violations of online free expression," Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a statement issued last week.
  •  
    "Egypt's legitimacy to host such a meeting is questionable as it has repeatedly been guilty of violations of online free expression," Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a statement issued last week.
Ed Webb

NGOs and the News » Nieman Journalism Lab - 0 views

  • NGOs and the News: Exploring a Changing Communication Landscape
  • essay series
Ed Webb

Mysterious 'Saddam Channel' hits Iraq TV - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  • The late Iraqi dictator is lauded on a mysterious satellite channel that began broadcasting on the Islamic calendar's anniversary of his 2006 execution.
  • The Associated Press tracked down a man in Damascus, Syria named Mohammed Jarboua, who claimed to be its chairman. The Saddam channel, he said, "didn't receive a penny from the Baathists" and is for Iraqis and other Arabs who "long for his rule." Jarboua has clearly made considerable efforts to hide where it's aired from and refuses to say who is funding it besides "people who love us."
  • Saddam's hanging three years ago was on the first day of Eid al-Adha, the most important holiday of the Islamic calendar. His execution — and the day it was done — remains a sore point for Saddam sympathizers still smarting over images of the defiant leader in his final moments as Shiites in the death chamber shouted curses.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • broadcast across the Arab world
  • One prominently displayed image is that of a man burning an American flag. Another shows graves covered with Iraqi flags
  • audio recordings of Saddam making speeches and reciting poetry. Patriotic songs urge listeners to "liberate our country." None of the pictures appear to be recent, and no announcers or commentators appear or speak.
  • In a telephone interview Sunday from Damascus, Jarboua said he is Algerian and that the Saddam Channel is based in Europe but refused to say where, citing safety concerns for its employees.
  • Ziad Khassawneh, a Jordanian Baathist who once headed Saddam's defense team, said wealthy Iraqis living in Lebanon, Syria and other Arab countries are funding the channel. He declined to give names.
  • A Mideast satellite expert said al-Lafeta's operators tried to hide any clues to their identities and broadcast sites by using a variety of satellite services and frequencies. The channel airs via Noorsat, a Bahrain-based satellite service. It also has purchased a frequency on Egypt-owned NileSat, which is run by Eutelsat, a European consortium.
Ed Webb

The Next Islamists: The Wide Green Smudge That's Changing Our World | RDBook | Religion... - 0 views

  •  
    Great review from Haroon of what sound like worthwhile books.
Tom Trewinnard

ElBaradei attacked in Egypt's state-run media - 0 views

  •  
    Here's a Meedan event I've been working on for a little while tracking the ongoing media campaign both for and against ElBaradei to stand in the next Egyptian presidential elections (for my money he's not made up his mind yet). Really fascinating to see how both the pro and anti-government media have rallied round/against him. Please add any interesting links from at home and abroad!
« First ‹ Previous 221 - 240 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page