Group items tagged

More than one-third of Egypt’s population of eighty million remains illiterate, and just 25 percent of Egyptians use the Internet. However, Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in organizing, motivating, and directing these crowds as to where to go and what to do. Egypt’s revolution was created as an event on Facebook eleven days in advance. People clicked “I’m attending.” Certainly, this was a people’s revolution, yet one based on and accelerated in many ways by the Internet. What happened in Tahrir and every square in Egypt was the accumulation of years and years of activism, including Internet activism. Social media prepared Egyptians for the revolution and enabled them to capitalize on an opportunity for change when the time came.

Internet activism started in Egypt with the appearance of Web 2.0 technology in the country around 2003

Blogging was the first valuable brainchild of Web 2.0 technologies.

The phenomenon exploded in the Arab world, with Egyptian bloggers pioneering and leading the scene. Blogger numbers in the region approached half a million by the beginning of 2009, the great majority of them coming from Egypt.

Political blogging in particular became more popular, as users felt that they could remain anonymous if they so wished

Nevertheless, most Egyptian political bloggers choose to blog under their real names, which frequently got them in trouble with the regime. The state security crackdown on bloggers was testimony to their potential impact.

As blogging was becoming a phenomenon in Egypt, some political movements started having a strong on-line presence, and taking to the streets based on their on-line organization. The most important was probably the Kefaya movement, whose formal name is The Egyptian Movement for Change. The movement was established in 2004 by a coalition of political forces, and became better known by its Arabic slogan. The word kefaya is Arabic for ‘enough,’ and as the name implies, the movement called for an end to the decades-old Mubarak regime, and for guarantees that his son would not succeed him as president. Kefaya was instrumental in taking people to the streets, thus bridging the gap between the on-line and the off-line worlds. Many of its supporters were bloggers, and many of the street protesters started blogging. So, increasingly, reports on the demonstrations found their way into blogs and were provided media coverage even when the traditional media ignored them or were afraid to cover them. One result was that many more Egyptians gained the courage to write blogs that openly criticized the authoritarian system and crossed the ‘red line’ of challenging their president.

hey were also capable of videotaping street protests and uploading the clips on YouTube. Watching people chanting “Down with Hosni Mubarak” in the mid-2000s was a totally new, riveting experience, which led many other brave Egyptians to join these demonstrations. Internet activists and blogger stars such as Wael Abbas, Alaa Abdel Fattah, Manal Hassan, Hossam El-Hamalawy, Malek Mostafa, and others uploaded hundreds of videos of police brutality, election rigging, and different violations of human and civic rights.

The structure of social media taught Egyptians that space exists that you can call your own, your space, where you can speak your mind. To many in the West, this is probably no big deal. There are countless venues where they can express their opinions relatively freely. But for people in Egypt, and in the Arab world in general, this was a new phenomenon, and one I believe to be of profound importance.

horizontal communication.’ Before social networks, Egyptian youth were accustomed to being talked at, rather than talked to or spoken with. Communication was mostly vertical, coming from the regime down to everyone else

Authoritarian patterns of communication do not allow for much horizontal interaction. But social networks do, and eventually their existence on the Internet taught Egyptian youths a few lessons in democratic communication, even if the essence of the conversations carried out was not necessarily political in nature.

The bulk of those that I believe were affected by these lessons in democratic expression were clusters of the population that were not previously politically oriented. These form a good sector of those who took to the streets on January 25, and were joined by millions who held their ground in Tahrir Square and in every square in Egypt until Mubarak was toppled. The majority of these millions, including myself, were people who had never participated in a demonstration before. They were not political activists before January 25, but they saw or heard the call for action, and it touched a nerve as they found safety in numbers

he knew it was too much to ask people to join in the protest, so she simply asked them to participate in spirit by staying home that day, not going to work, and not engaging in any monetary transactions such as buying or selling. The group was brought to the attention of the traditional media and was featured on one of Egypt’s popular talk shows, thus getting more exposure. What ensued surpassed all expectations. To Abdel Fattah’s own surprise (and everyone else’s), the Facebook group immediately attracted some seventy three thousand members. Many of these, and others who got the message through traditional media, decided to stay home in solidarity with the workers. Others were encouraged to stay home by a bad sandstorm that swept across parts of Egypt that day, and yet others stayed home for fear of the strong police presence on the streets.

The April 6 event was meaningful because it provided a sense that people were actually willing to take an action, to do something beyond clicking a mouse

three months before the January 25 revolution, Malcolm Gladwell argued in a much-discussed article in The New Yorker under the title “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted” that social media can’t provide what social change has always required. He said that social media is good when you’re asking people for small-scale, low-risk action, but not for anything more. “Facebook activism succeeds,” he wrote, “not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.” He explained that this is because high-risk activism is a “strong-tie phenomenon,” meaning that those who carry out such acts of activism have to personally know each other well and develop strong personal ties before they would risk their lives for each other or for a common cause. Since Facebook and Twitter provide mostly “weak-tie” connections, since users typically have a strong off-line social tie with only a small percentage of their ‘friends’ or ‘followers,’ these social networks were therefore not capable of motivating people for a high-risk cause. He therefore concluded that a social network “makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”

nowing that you are in the company of many who share your utter belief in the same cause. That is something that social networks delivered

ne of the Facebook pages that played a major role in this regard was the Khaled Said page. Khaled Said was a young Egyptian who was brutally beaten to death by police informants outside an Internet café in Alexandria in June 2010. He had an innocent face that everyone could identify with. He could be anyone, and anyone could’ve been him. The Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said” appeared shortly thereafter. It started asking its members, whose numbers increased steadily, to go out on silent standing protests in black shirts with their back to the streets. The demonstrations started in Alexandria and soon spread to every governorate in Egypt. Numbers increased with every protest. More and more people gained a little more courage and tasted the freedom of dissent.

The administrators usually polled their users, asking them to vote for their place or time of preference for the next protest. The responses would be in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, and the administrators would read them all, and give a breakdown, with exact numbers and percentages, of the votes.

The January 25 demonstration was motivated and aided by an important intervening variable, the revolt in Tunisia. When Tunisian protesters succeeded in ousting President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, Egyptians felt that toppling a dictator through demonstrations was finally possible.

he Khaled Said page, which by then had about six hundred thousand followers, demonstrated its strong ability to organize. They listed all the major squares in every Egyptian governorate where they expected people to gather, and again gave specific instructions on what to wear, what to take with you, and who to contact in times of trouble. They then alerted the users that the listed venues for demonstration would change at midnight on January 24 to give police forces a lesser chance of mobilizing against them the next day. On the morning of January 25, there were close to half a million people who had clicked “I’m attending” the revolution. Today, the Khaled Said page has more than 1.7 million users, by far more than any other Egyptian Facebook page.

nd indeed that was what happened. We witnessed another key moment illustrating the power of the interaction between social media, traditional media, and interpersonal communication. Newspapers, broadcasters, and on-line outlets had been discussing the potential ‘Facebook demonstration’ for a few days prior to January 25. As groups of demonstrators marched through the streets enroute to main squares chanting “Ya ahalina endamo lina,” (“Friends and family, come join us”), people watching from their balconies and windows heeded the calls and enabled the protests to snowball to unprecedented numbers. People were galvanized by the sight. The core activists, who attended every demonstration for years, were suddenly seeing new faces on January 25, mostly mobilized by the Internet. They came by the thousands, and then by the hundreds of thousands, numbers larger than anyone had expected.

When the Egyptian regime belatedly realized on January 25 how dangerous social networks could be to its survival, the first thing it did was block Twitter. Internet censorship is a ridiculously ineffective strategy, though. Users were tech-savvy enough to find their way onto proxy servers within minutes, and to post on Facebook how to gain access to Twitter and how to remain on Facebook if the regime blocks it, which indeed happened later. The government felt it didn’t have any other option but to block all Internet access in the country for five days starting January 27 (as well as mobile telephone communications for one day). By then it was too late. People had already found their way to Tahrir and nearly every square in Egypt. Ironically, some were partly motivated by the Internet and communication blockage to take to the streets to find out what was happening and be part of it. And they were joined by workers’ movements in many governorates that expanded the protester numbers into the millions. The major squares of Egypt were full of people of every age, gender, religion, creed, and socio-economic status

Gladwell, it turned out, was wrong. These people didn’t know each other personally, but the “weak” personal ties had not proved a barrier to high-risk activism. Egyptians discovered the strong tie of belonging to the common cause of ousting a dictator

ocial network users were not the only ones revolting, and social networks were not the only reason or motivation for revolt. However, the role that social media have played over the years in indirectly preparing sectors of Egyptian youths for this moment, and in enabling them to capitalize on an opportunity for change when the time came, cannot be understated.  It can also be said that the role of social networks in Egypt has hardly ended. The revolution is not yet complete. 

Pandora chose the dimensions because they are quantitative. For instance, how breathy are the vocals? Is the music diatonic or chromatic? The music analysts are trained to be able to score songs consistently. In fact, one of the test cases is, "Could a group of 10 musicologists listen to a song and agree on one score for a particular element?"

vector space.

"What is exciting about the Music Genome Project, with respect to Pandora the radio-listening experience, is that by understanding the music on a song-by-song basis we can put together a playlist that has a much more natural ebb and flow than you might be able to do with collaborative filtering data," Conrad says.

"I think curator is the right word," Conrad replied. "Of all the financial models that could be leveraged to make Pandora a successful business, the 'play for pay' model runs completely spiritually opposite to the founding of the company.

I asked what Pandora was doing to avoid being influenced by big record labels, which have been widely accused of corrupting traditional radio through payola schemes.

"Since we use a human analyst to analyze song by song, we've experimented with using a smaller number of elements," he continued. "We've determined that you can't create interesting playlists with only 20 attributes. But we do keep an eye on machine listening as it might provide a way to augment the manual analysis."

I ask myself, "What's this song doing in my Bill Evans station? This song should be in my 'Soft Jazz Guitar' station. Why can't I tell Pandora to place this tune in the appropriate station?"

"It's fascinating to me that you raise that particular example," Conrad said. "Because the scenario that you just described is--after we evolved the product over five months and took a lot of low-hanging fruit off the table--probably the number-one listener request.

Pandora creates playlists with a "matching engine," written in C and Python, for each listener station. This engine builds the low-level linkage to the "source" music (the music that listeners indicate they like) and the music that actually gets played (a mixture of what the listener explicitly indicated, mixed with music that the Pandora service believes listeners will like). The replication system is Slony.

school and college students who checked Facebook at least once during a 15-minute study period achieved lower grades

Young adults who spend more time on Facebook are better at showing “virtual empathy” to their online friends. 

Online social networking can help introverted adolescents learn how to socialize behind the safety of various screens, ranging from a two-inch smartphone to a 17-inch laptop.

Social networking can provide tools for teaching in compelling ways that engage young students.

We spoke to television scholars and media psychologists on whether marathon viewing is really enhancing our experience, beyond the buffet. If we can have everything, does everything mean anything?

"Even a single episode has so many highs and lows that by the end of it you're so beaten up, you're less receptive to the emotional and intellectual ideas being put forth. Yet still we click and watch another one."

Netflix says it's more organic that way – it also means that if you don't do anything the episodes will just keep on coming.

With more traditional distribution models there is arguably more of an opportunity to let the experience sink in, find an appreciation and look forward to the next part of the journey.

"Breaking Bad has become the greatest example of the perfect show for binge viewing, he tells us. "Not only is it okay to binge view a series like that, but it is a better way to watch it.

you can understand the inner workings of these stories if you view them in more concentrated chunks

binge watching is the antithesis to how TV traditionally works.

Now, thanks to the advent of high-speed internet and the connected services they've enabled, technology has surpassed the content.

Ironically enough, the week-to-week format we enjoyed/endured during our last hours with Jesse and Walt proved to be an anomaly for millions who latched on to the growing buzz and raced through the previous five-and-half-seasons during the 12-month pre-climax hiatus – the binge before the episodic storm.

"I think Breaking Bad is probably as close as we're going to come to such a universal, cultural televisual event again," said film and television historian and associate professor at UCLA Jonathan Kuntz.

Breaking Bad, as it turned out, bridged the two eras perfectly, offering a stunning paradox of each distribution model's merits.

"The generation coming up now, all they're going to know is on demand. What pleasure they derive from anything will come from that,"

Another factor to consider in the great binge debate is that feeling of withdrawal when we run out of new episodes.

"The [binge viewing] experience is so good that you feel physically sad that it's over. That sense you had is more attached to it being a great artistic experience,"

The strength of our desire for gratification plays into a debate the psychologists call Connoisseur vs Addict. The former loves to be present in the moment, can savour the engagement and sees how everything ties into a beautiful package. The latter just needs a fix.

"An addict is working on a two-pronged schema, which is aspiration and completion. Aspiration is thedopamine-fuelled desire to recapture a feeling," he told TechRadar."When you get the completion, it's not about the rush, but ultimately about achieving the aspiration of the completion. When things are that accessible, what happens to the value of the product?"

he three things that correlate most strongly with a self-loathing screen hangover are basically the three things that Instagram is currently for: loitering around others’ photos, perfunctory like-ing, and “broadcasting” to a relatively amorphous group

“I would venture to say that photographs, likes, and comments are the aspects of the Facebook experience that are most important in driving the self-esteem effects, and that photos are maybe the biggest driver of those effects,”

Instagram is exclusively image-driven, and images will crack your mirror

“A photo can very powerfully provoke immediate social comparison, and that can trigger feelings of inferiority. You don’t envy a news story.”

“If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram,” she says, “one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.

“You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don’t necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing.”

Again, this happens all the time on Facebook, but because Instagram is image-based, it creates a purer reality-distortion field.

“Music collections always replace each other and radio always tends to be yet another choice,” he says. “Satellite didn’t kill FM. AM didn’t kill FM. (Streaming music) one more choice and one more device you can listen to the radio on.”

digital is an important growth area for the business, even if the $17 billion or so that advertisers spend on radio each year is slow to move over to the Web.

In 2012, Clear Channel made strange bedfellows when it joined forces with Pandora to lobby Congress to lower the rates their services were required to pay artists to stream their music online. The companies eventually backed down from that effort in order to focus on a different political tact.

Online, people “tend to have a favorite and then they bounce around a couple different services,”

Some music lovers dislike Pandora’s approach to choosing music based on its characteristics rather than cultural associations.

“It’s not just that this has an 80-beat-a-minute guitar riff,” he said. “It’s that this band toured with Eddie Vedder.”

For Pandora and its listeners, it was a revelation. Internet radio was not just for the computer. People could listen to their phone on the treadmill or plug it into their car or living room speakers.

In January, Pandora announced a deal with Ford to include Pandora in its voice-activated Sync system, so drivers will be able to say, “Launch my Lady Gaga station”

In 1972, using the laser interferometer method and the new definitions, a group at NBS in Boulder, Colorado determined the speed of light in vacuum to be c = 299792456.2±1.1 m/s. This was 100 times less uncertain than the previously accepted value. The remaining uncertainty was mainly related to the definition of the metre.[Note 8][104] As similar experiments found comparable results for c, the 15th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures (CGPM) in 1975 recommended using the value 299792458 m/s for the speed of light.[136]

In Q4 2013, Netflix acquired 2.3 million new American households, the highest performance in three years.

From a strategic standpoint, Netflix is starting to up the ante for summer viewers by airing original shows like Orange is the New Black in June.

It just cares about what people are watching, McCabe says.

The average user prefers to watch a series from beginning to end, consume it wholly, then move on to the next thing, according to McCabe.

Thanks to summer vacations, kids are watching way more Netflix. Considering how tech-literate children have become, it will be interesting to watch how cable TV fares against Netflix as this younger generation gets older, raised with both options.