Amplify
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John Postill | My Amplify

Things I Amplify from the web

The #Arab student movement in 1968

Amplify’d from www.jadaliyya.com
While analysts have listed historical antecedents to the current events, such as the 1919 Revolution in Egypt and the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993), little mention has been made of the student movement to which she refers, the one that erupted in 1968 across the Arab world and lasted until the mid-1970s.
Read more at www.jadaliyya.com
 

How pundits predict events with hindsight

Amplify’d from www.bbc.co.uk
Journalists ("weekly scribblers" according to Sam Johnson) and pundits are usually taken by surprise (Cold War ending, financial crisis beginning etc) and it is an odd truth that the same "experts" who failed to predict something are then wheeled out to explain why it happened.
Read more at www.bbc.co.uk
 

Why West having hard time siding with Egypt’s democrats

Amplify’d from english.aljazeera.net
For those who don't understand why President Obama and his European allies are having such a hard time siding with Egypt's forces of democracy, the reason is that the amalgam of social and political forces behind the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt today - and who knows where tomorrow - actually constitute a far greater threat to the "global system" al-Qa'eda has pledged to destroy than the jihadis roaming the badlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen.
Read more at english.aljazeera.net
 

The internet is far more than Facebook and Twitter, #egypt

Amplify’d from gigaom.com

Facebook and Twitter? For anyone to limit the effect of the Internet to two applications doesn’t understand the evolution of the Internet and the many applications and services available. There was IRQ, ICQ, Messenger, PowWow, and a myriad of programs that enabled people to correspond and chat. Hotmail, Gmail and many email applications and then there are the blogs, web sites and straight FTP capabilities.

Media now inhabits the net from all broadcast sources and News media. Facebook and Twitter are social networking darlings right now but are by no means the end-all and be-all of communications. Skype allows face to face contact and phones now carry many of the same applications and capabilities.

Read more at gigaom.com
 

#Egypt’s economic plight, the protests and #Wikileaks

Amplify’d from zeroanthropology.net
While much has been made of the causes and catalysts of the present protests, few media reports focus on Egyptians’ economic plight, unlike the U.S. Embassy cables. This cable states that “Economic reform is ongoing although Egypt still suffers from widespread poverty affecting 35-40% of the population.” Another cable indicates that, “the effects of the global economic crisis on Egypt are beginning to be felt. As the global credit crunch worsens, Egypt remains vulnerable as exports, Suez Canal revenues, tourism, and remittances — its largest sources of revenue — are all down and likely to continue to fall.”
Read more at zeroanthropology.net
 

Group identity and scientific knowledge, via @kevindonovan

Amplify’d from democracyjournal.org
Some scientific questions now seem to be a matter of tribal identity: A vast majority of elected Republicans have expressed doubts about the science behind anthropogenic climate change, and as someone once remarked, it is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it. But there are few tasks so urgent.
Read more at democracyjournal.org
 

Media and change in #Cuba, via @ssrc_org

Amplify’d from essays.ssrc.org
Pleas for greater openness may result in part from Raúl’s invitation to Cubans to speak their mind and to criticize weaknesses of the system, but I suspect that something deeper is at work. Time and again the desire for news from abroad, for exposure to the mass media now available primarily through clandestine satellite dishes—clearly widespread despite the crackdown announced by Raúl Castro a year or so ago—arose as a central demand of a population aware of its exclusion from global culture and from reliable news about its own circumstances.6
Read more at essays.ssrc.org
 

Net neutrality tough to pin down, via @theeconomist #netneutrality

Amplify’d from www.economist.com
FOR a subject that arouses such strong passions, “network neutrality” is fiendishly difficult to pin down. Ask five geeks and you may well be given six definitions of it. The basic concept sounds simple enough: that the internet’s pipes should show no favours and blindly deliver packets of data from one place to another regardless of their origin, destination or contents. But the devil is in the detail. What happens for instance if some people want to pay for their data to go faster, or if others hog all the bandwidth? And it does not help that both political proponents and opponents of this undefinable thing claim they are fighting to defend free speech and innovation.
Read more at www.economist.com
 

#Activism: From indymedia to mash-ups

NB - the usual technological determinism alert applies: this is potentially important stuff, but let's not get carried away with the technical innovations and lose sight of everything else (culture, history, grievances, geopolitics, etc.)

Amplify’d from www.bbc.co.uk

Things changed in 1999 with the launch of Indymedia, its mission to get ordinary people to report events it claimed the mainstream media failed to cover.

But Indymedia has been eclipsed by the rise of the mobile smart phone and a plethora of tools like Flickr, blogs and social bookmarking sites.

This week, at University College London, students (pictured above) built a "mash-up" website that has been collating and disseminating thousands of items of information about the protests and occupations around the country. "Everyone is a potential collaborator in a massive act of crowd sourcing," says Sam, one of the UCL programmers.

Read more at www.bbc.co.uk
 

“Internet es una nacion libre y democratica”, re: #wikileaks

Amplify’d from www.nacionred.com

Internet es una nación libre y democrática donde cada navegante no tiene mas poder que otro. Y se ha demostrado que todos sus ciudadanos han peleado por que siga siendo asi.

Depende del futuro de la red, de si los gobiernos pueden o no pueden "vallar el campo", pero hemos vivido unos días históricos de lucha por la libertad de expresión.

Read more at www.nacionred.com
 
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