I wonder of it will look as nice as Paper.li, one of my favorite social curation tools -- Howard "Google News, meet Twitter News. 
"After watching Arab Spring protests topple regimes in Tunis and Cairo, Shiite protestors in Bahrain took to social media to organize their own movement against the royal family. They were unaware these same online efforts would be turned against them by the country's internal security forces, which used pictures from profile pages to identify protestors, and also hosted a Facebook page, "Together to Unmask the Shiite Traitors," which acted as a virtual snitch line. As it continues to punish its rebellious citizens, Syria has adopted more proactive tactics, closely monitoring social media sites to identify people as protests happen. According to The New York Times, protestors are forced to give up the passwords to their Facebook accounts and are jailed. The newspaper reports that Syrian activists are creating false accounts as a countermeasure." 
"The online mob that prompted Kashgari’s downfall calls into question the notion that social media is an inherently positive force. In this disturbing case, it was the righteous and the blood-hungry who mobilized first. Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Director of the Social Media Lab at Dalhousie University, says that, “as a tool, social media can be used for good or for evil.”" "If you no longer marvel at the Internet's power to connect and transform the world, you need to hear the story of a woman known to many around the globe as, loosely translated, Dog Poop Girl. Recently, the woman was on the subway in her native South Korea when her dog did its business. The woman made no move to clean up the mess, and several fellow travelers got agitated. The woman allegedly grew belligerent in response. What happened next was a remarkable show of Internet force, and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future. One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone and posted them on a popular website. Net dwellers soon began to call her by the unflattering nickname and issued a call to arms for more information about her. According to one blog that has covered the story, "within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Requests for information about her parents and relatives started popping up, and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying" because her face was partially obscured by her hair." 
"The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state." 
The SOPA and PIPA reaction shows social media has become a powerful force for change not just in Egypt and Tunisia but also right here in America. Via JoseAlvarezCornett About a dozen links, some of which I will add here. 
"The slogan that seems to be catching the imagination is something we put out in a tactical briefing recently: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” I think that’s a beautiful way to describe the future of the movement, because it’s going to be swarms of occupiers." 
"More than 1 million photos and 1,000 hours of video have been sent to the Vancouver police in an attempt to bring anonymous rioters to justice. Social media sites have become hubs for identifying the previously unknown agitators." 
In the context of multiple crises – ecological, political, financial and geopolitical restructuring – there are emerging forms of social cooperation. 
"Stott boils down the violent potential of a crowd to two basic factors. The first is what he and other social psychologists call legitimacy—the extent to which the crowd feels that the police and the whole social order still deserve to be obeyed. In combustible situations, the shared identity of a crowd is really about legitimacy, since individuals usually start out with different attitudes toward the police but then are steered toward greater unanimity by what they see and hear. Paul Torrens, a University of Maryland professor who builds 3-D computer models of riots and other crowd events, imbues each agent in his simulations with an initial Legitimacy score on a scale from 0 (total disrespect for police authority) to 1 (absolute deference). Then he allows the agents to influence one another. It’s a crude model, but it’s useful in seeing the importance of a crowd’s initial perception of legitimacy. A crowd where every member has a low L will be predisposed to rebel from the outset; a more varied crowd, by contrast, will take significantly longer to turn ugly, if it ever does. It’s easy to see how technology can significantly change this starting position. When that tweet or text or BBM blast goes out declaring, as the Enfield message did, that “police can’t stop it,” the eventual crowd will be preselected for a very low L indeed. As Stott puts it, flash-mob-style gatherings are special because they “create the identity of a crowd prior to the event itself,” thereby front-loading what he calls the “complex process of norm construction,” which usually takes a substantial amount of time. He hastens to add that crowd identity can be pre-formed through other means, too, and that such gatherings also have to draw from a huge group of willing (and determined) participants. But the technology allows a group of like-minded people to gather with unprecedented speed and scale. “You’ve only got to write one message,” Stott says, “and it can reach 50, or 500, or even 5,000 people with the touch of a button.” If only a tiny fraction of this quickly multiplying audience gets the message and already has prepared itself for disorder, then disorder is what they are likely to create." "What’s important to remember in hindsight is that one of the most provocative ideas of late 2010 — published just two months before a Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, posted his suicide note on his Facebook Wall, and three months before the Egyptian government blocked Twitter in an effort to muzzle its people — was Malcolm Gladwell’s characteristically iconoclastic assertion that, as the subhead to his October New Yorker essay put it, “the revolution will not be tweeted.” At least in public, Mr. Gladwell is sticking to his guns, but not too many other people are. In one informed example, consider a recent public interview I conducted with Naguib Sawiris, the Egyptian telecommunications billionaire and liberal politician who backed the Tahrir Square demonstrations. When I asked him about the Gladwell theory, Mr. Sawiris first wondered, “Is he here in the room? Do I have to be polite?” and then went on to explain his criticism: “He has no clue what this technology has done to my part of the world. Ninety percent of the success of this revolution is attributed to it.”" 
"IT IS a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed. That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform." |
Howard -- This special issue of Journal of Communication covers the role of social media in politics in North Africa/Middle East, China, Chile, Africa "Prime Minister Vladimir Putin won this weekend's presidential elections in Russia. Soon after the results were announced, anti-Putin Russians took to the streets of Moscow and other cities to protest the outcome. Mashable is collecting the best tweets and YouTube videos from inside the country" 
"Cash mobs are perhaps one of the more interesting things to happen to small businesses in the United States in the past year. The idea is so new that as of writing, no one has made a Wikipedia page on it. Urbandictionary.com on the other hand, is more up-to-date. For who didn’t bother to click that link, you can think of cash mobs as “flash mobs” with a socio-economic slant. Cash mobs semi-spontaneously organize people into spending money in small businesses in their community. These groups often target local businesses that have fallen prey to major retail chains moving into their home towns." 
The protests that led to the Egyptian revolution last year were organized in part by Wael Ghonim, who used an anonymous Facebook page to coordinate the demonstrations. In his new book, Ghonim explains how social media helped transform his country. Via Ken Morrison 
Planned Parenthood: Planned Parenthood says Twitter and Facebook played a defining role in the national uproar over Susan G. Komen for the Cure's plan to pull funding -- and then the organization's about-face. 
"The series of protests against the Church of Scientology known as "Project Chanology" marks the emergence of an important form of contemporary protest movement defined by networked internal structures and pervasive memetic culture. Such a protest movement is highly dynamic- rapidly adapting to changing challenges and contextual settings. This cultural innovation is made possible by the increasing digital mediation of social life. In the following analysis, we trace the unique structural contours of Chanology, investigate how participants leveraged a unique internal structure and the memetic environment of the internet to grow, and conclude with an explanation of why the novel modes of protest used in Chanology contributed to its success and why these forms of protest are likely to proliferate in an increasingly digitally mediated environment. From a theoretical standpoint, Project Chanology both affirms and challenges conventional conceptions of social movements. The utility of Chwe's network analytical approach to the problems of coordination in social movements is also demonstrated." 
"The starting point for negotiation cannot be that everything the industry got while networked citizenry was weak and dispersed is sacrosanct, and the only things on the negotiating table are Hollywood's shiny new regulatory toys. The politics have changed. Everything should be up for renegotiation, or we should use the blocking power of the network in conjunction with the veto-rich environment that is the American legislative system to prevent any additional creep from today's baseline. There is an opportunity to harness the new political energy to reverse core institutional elements of Hollywood's decade-and-a-half-long land grab. The newfound political power needs to be directed not only at these most recent excesses of the persistent efforts by the twentieth century incumbents to set the terms of cultural exchange in the twenty-first century; it needs to be directed more fundamentally at preserving the freedom of expression and a freedom to operate in the networked information economy and society." "SAN DIEGO -- You've heard about flash mobs, but what about cash mobs? It's a simple idea — meet up with like-minded people and spend $20 each at a local, independent store — and it has been gathering steam. The first event that received major news coverage, held in November in Cleveland, has inspired grass-roots organizers across the U.S., from San Diego to Houston to Philadelphia." 
"Finally, Zuckerman argues that the lesson from the Arab spring is that revolutions are touched off by everyday people with everyday grievances – arbitrary detention, corruption and police brutality – and those people will use the tools they are familiar with to get the word out. The first thing that comes to mind after you capture a mobile phone video of the police murdering a family member isn't "Let's see, I wonder if there's a purpose-built activist tool that I can use for distributing this clip?" Rather, the first thing that comes to mind is, "I'd better post this on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter so that everyone can see it."" 
"Most documentaries involve months of planning before the first frame of film is shot, but the creators of an in-the-works Occupy Wall Street documentary didn’t have that luxury. The protest movement was happening around them when they decided to make the film. Now the filmmakers behind 99% — The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film are looking to raise funds to complete the project. They have footage from 75 filmmakers who captured imagery at various Occupy events across the country, but to finish the project, producers Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites are looking to raise $17,500. “It’s the amount we need to buy the hard-drive storage and editing space that will allow us to begin the massive process of sorting and editing,” the filmmakers say on the 99% Kickstarter page. “This will get us to the point that we can, at the very least, put together a promo reel to bring in additional funding.”" 
"From the beginning, the core of the Occupy movement has been the same distributed network of small protest groups that have together for a decade now to disrupt global summits and party conventions. Whether or not they see technology as their primary means of organizing, technology is utterly crucial in the way their whole model works — keeping connected without the benefit (or detriment, as the case may be) of a central authority. As Shirky puts it, digital networks “do not allow otherwise uncommitted groups to take effective political action. They do, however, allow committed groups to play by new rules.” To this assessment, I’d add something else: They create new rules for how committed people get and stay connected with one another, and how those connections get classified, even in their own minds. After all, it’s not hard to imagine that, when faced with a questionnaire asking to list their closest friends or associates, these activists would list one another, rather than their family or the people they drink with in their own hometowns. Activists may need “strong ties” to risk their lives in the streets, but it’s clear those ties can stretch across continents, and can consist entirely of bits — right up until the moment when they come together" A study has explored the dynamics behind social network sites in recruiting and spreading calls for action that contribute to mass mobilizations in riots, revolutions and protests. Via Gerrit Visser |
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