The New Significance » Entries tagged with "Social Media"
DSG: Britain’s First Cyber Strike – How The June 30th Strike May Play Out Online
By Deterritorial Support Group: June 30th marks a very considerable mobilisation of industrial action in Britain, in the shape of a large public sector strike. The Trades Unions are making their first tentative steps towards politically motivated action for a generation, with a massive withdrawal of workers labour in response to government plans for pensions reform; whilst the pensions dispute is the legal justification for industrial action (under Britain’s strict, Thatcherite anti-strike legislation), in reality the … Read entire article »
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Enrico de Angelis: Syria & The Facebook Battleground
By Enrico de Angelis: What if social media played a much more negative role in the Syrian revolution than many think? Praising Facebook, Twitter and other social media for facilitating the Arab revolutions has become almost a cliché. Numerous articles and conferences contribute to the myth of the “Internet revolution” and praise its virtues. But this is only one side of the story. The other is much less appealing. In a recent conference held at Bologna University, Alec … Read entire article »
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Marc Garrett & Dmytri Kleiner: The Telekommunist Manifesto
By Marc Garrett & Dmytri Kleiner: “At the dawn of the new millennium, Net users are developing a much more efficient and enjoyable way of working together: cyber-communism.” Richard Barbrook. Dmytri Kleiner, author of The Telekommunist Manifesto (PDF), is a software developer who has been working on projects “that investigate the political economy of the Internet, and the ideal of workers’ self-organization of production as a form of class struggle.” Born in the USSR, Dmytri grew up in … Read entire article »
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Giorgio Fontana: Digital Democracy, Plato, And Web 2.0
By Giorgio Fontana: Far from being the natural and easy remedy to the evil of bureaucratic delegation, digital democracy risks becoming its inconvenient appendix – a deceitful form of participation, which can turn out to be the very contrary of productive dialogue. The triviality of democracy In his classic study Democracy Ancient and Modern(1973), Moses Finley traced an essential – and not merely formal – distinction between the Athenian democratic experience and the contemporary, representative one. In the 5th-4th centuries BC, … Read entire article »
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DSG: Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off In Cyberspace
By DSG: In February the Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason very succinctly laid out the radically different nature of recent popular uprisings across North Africa, the Middle East and Europe compared to earlier political movements, and the economic and sociological reasons behind it. This incisive blogpost rang true for many of those involved in those social movements, articulating, as it did, a new sentiment and new political priorities amongst those populations. The short article sketched out a … Read entire article »
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Dina Shehata & Hossam el-Hamalawy: Social Media and the #Jan25 Revolution
By Dina Shehata & Hossam el-Hamalawy: (video) … Read entire article »
Anonymous: Declaration in Two Parts
By Anonymous: Part 1: Join the Resistance (video) Part 2: System Failure (video) … Read entire article »
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Jameson Berkow: The Myth Of The “Social Media Revolution”
By Jameson Berkow: TORONTO — The revolution was indeed twittered, as many have long expected. But Twitter did not cause the revolution. As scholars and journalists alike continue to extol the pivotal role of social networks in the recent Arab Spring of popular uprisings across the Middle East, a panel of experts gathered in a conference room in downtown Toronto on Thursday evening to try and put that role in perspective. The overwhelming consensus was that social networking services such as Facebook and … Read entire article »
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Ernesto: The Pirate Bay – Five Years After The Raid
By Ernesto: (May, 31) Today, exactly five years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. At the time the entertainment industries hoped that this would silence the deviant BitTorrent site for good, but in hindsight we can conclude that they had actually awakened a monster. The raid and the ongoing battle that later unfolded reads like a script for an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster. Just a few days ago The Pirate Bay upgraded its … Read entire article »
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Yasmine Ryan: Anonymous And The Arab Uprisings
By Yasmine Ryan: The cyberactivists discuss their work and the broader global push for freedom of speech and freedom from oppression. Anonymous’s rapid rise from the depths of geekdom to becoming a catalyst and nerve centre for real-life revolutionaries is one that has taken even some of its own members by surprise. The loosely-knit hive brings anonymous techies, hackers and, increasingly, activists together under a single appellation, united in their non-violent but often illegal collective action. With high-profile campaigns, centred … Read entire article »
Ramy Raoof: Mobil Tactics
By Ramy Raoof: If you are participating in a peaceful assembly as a journalists, rights defender, or activists, your mobile phone is an invaluable asset. It allows you to communicate with allies, to document the event, and bear witness to what is happening around you. At the same time, you should take certain precautions in your mobile use and communications. The following Guide can help you to utilize your mobile phone during peaceful assemblies effectively and, at … Read entire article »
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Slavoj Žižek: Corporate Rule of Cyberspace
By Slavoj Žižek: Part of the global push towards the privatization of the “general intellect” is the recent trend in the organization of cyberspace towards so-called “cloud computing.” Little more than a decade ago, a computer was a big box on one’s desk, and downloading was done with floppy disks and USB sticks. Today, we no longer need such cumbersome individual computers, since cloud computing is Internet-based, i.e., software and information are provided to computers or … Read entire article »
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Jana Herwig: Anonymous – Peering Behind The Mask
By Jana Herwig: When Anonymous first made big headlines in early 2008 with its protests against the Church of Scientology, dubbed Project Chanology, it was not yet apparent that Anonymous would be here to stay. Three years later, Anonymous has not only gained a sizeable collection of adversaries and critics – including government agencies, IT security companies and digital rights advocacies who criticise its methods – it has also won scores of secret and not so secret admirers, especially … Read entire article »
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Julian Assange: Facebook, Google, Yahoo Spying Tools for US intelligence
By Julian Assange: The man behind WikiLeaks says his website’s revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. In an exclusive interview with RT, Julian Assange said it is only a matter of time before more damaging information becomes known. (video) … Read entire article »
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Syria’s Twitter Spambots
By Jillian C York: Twitter isn’t always a tool for protest – in Syria pro-regime accounts have been set up to flood the pro-revolution narrative. As demonstrations rage on Arab streets, a different battle is happening on Twitter. In Morocco, Syria, Bahrain and Iran, pro-revolution users of the site have found themselves locked in a battle of the hashtags as Twitter accounts with a pro-government message are quickly created to counter the prevailing narrative. Deemed a revolutionary tool … Read entire article »
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