Tunisie: les blogueurs à l’assaut de l’assemblée constituante - Ma Tunisie sans Ben Ali. Au lendemain du 14 janvier 2011, la nomination du blogueur et cyberactiviste Slim Amamou comme secrétaire d’Etat à la jeunesse et aux sports, relayée par les médias internationaux comme un événement historique, a constitué un véritable espoir pour la jeunesse connectée de voir les valeurs et les idées qu’elle n’a cessé de défendre portées aux plus hautes sphères d’un gouvernement gérontocrate. Mais cet espoir s’est peu à peu évanoui et il est aujourd’hui indéniable que la nomination de Slim Amamou n’était en fait qu’une manœuvre politique destinée à amadouer les virulents jeunes internautes tunisiens. Les internautes et plus particulièrement les blogueurs ont compris que le changement profond qu’ils attendaient ne pouvait se faire que depuis la société civile vers ce gouvernement illégitime et non l‘inverse.
La course pour l’élection de l’assemblée constituante a débuté. Et l’on a ainsi pu voir, parmi les 1750 listes déposées, plusieurs blogueurs se déclarer candidats à ces élections. Twitter, Facebook, and social activism. At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina.
They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away.
The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. What makes people capable of this kind of activism? U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors Abroad. The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.” Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication. Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.
The Invisible Web Then there was Mr. Mr. Ramesh Srinivasan. L’information, nouvelle forme d’impérialisme? Les campagnes d'alphabétisation numérique menées par les Etats-Unis dans de nombreux pays auraient joué un rôle dans le Printemps arabe. Entre financement des réseaux parallèles et promotion des voix dissidentes, l'impérialisme s'exprime dans l'information. Article initialement publié sur SavageMinds et repéré par OWNI.eu ; tous les liens de l’article sont en anglais. Selon un récent article du New York Times, le département d’Etat américain dépensera 70 millions de dollars avant la fin de l’année en technologies de communication furtive pour permettre aux activistes de communiquer loin des dictateurs. Ces outils sont déployés pour promouvoir les priorités d’une nation sur une autre. Dès lors, comment aborder l’impérialisme de l’information ? Alphabétisation numérique et révolution Je ne souhaite pas contribuer à ce débat ici sans les données empiriques qui sont collectées en ce moment même par Srinivasan au Caire.
Cyber-Célébrités Leurs histoires étaient captivantes et bien rodées.
Sénégal: les derniers jours du président Wade? Jusqu'ici cité en exemple, le Sénégal vient de vivre coup sur coup une tentative - avortée - de coup d'État constitutionnel et des émeutes de l'électricité. "Wade dégage! Le courant ne passe plus... ", scandent à chaque occasion les manifestants. Pneus brûlés, course poursuite avec les forces de l'ordre, attaques contre des édifices publics, à huit mois des élections présidentielles, "le pays va mal! ". Cette fois, il s'agit de convaincre Abdoulaye Wade, 88 ans, au pouvoir depuis 2000, de ne pas se représenter à un troisième mandat en 2012. Le 23 juin, ils avaient appelé les jeunes à manifester pour empêcher l'adoption d'un projet de réforme constitutionnelle visant à faire élire un ticket présidentiel, au premier tour, avec 25% pour cent seulement des suffrages exprimés.
Lundi soir, les émeutes qui se sont déclenchées spontanément un peu partout dans le pays pour protester contre les coupures à répétition ont bien failli avoir raison du fils.
Dr. Philip N. Howard, University of Washington, The Internet and Islam. Project on Information Technology & Political Islam. Arab spring: an interactive timeline of Middle East protests | World news. Untitled. Prior to the MENA uprisings, Clay Shirky wrote an article published in Foreign Affairs titled “The Political Power of Social Media.” This piece although significantly shorter than either of his two books Here Comes Everybody or Cognitive Surplus, explains Shirky’s thinking on the role of social media in relation to democracy, and/or the possibility of people powered revolutions which leverage this technology for change. Unlike Here Comes Everybody in this article Shirky strikes a more cautious tone, while arguing that social media technologies are transformative and ultimately a net gain for those seeking social change, there is a recognition that digital media can also be used for ill, and might pose its own set of problems as a means to restructure power.
Shirky’s claim is still that digital technologies fundamentally alter a society which uses them, a claim I agree with (indeed I agree with Deen Freelon’s grouping and characterization of positions). Browse Timeline Add a Comment. Analysis: Do leaderless revolts contain seeds of own failure? News, Augmented » Navigation temporelle. Malcolm Gladwell: Social Media Still Not a Big Deal.
Author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell caused some controversy last year when he said social-media tools like Twitter aren’t worth much as a tool for social activism (or at least not “real” social activism). After the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — both of which involved extensive use of Twitter and Facebook by demonstrators — many wondered whether Gladwell would alter this stance based on some powerful evidence to the contrary.
The author made it clear in a recent interview with CNN, however, that he still doesn’t think such tools amount to much. In the interview (there’s a full transcript here), Gladwell says Twitter and Facebook may have been used by demonstrators to communicate during the recent uprisings in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, but it isn’t clear they were crucial in any way to the revolutions there. I mean, in cases where there are no tools of communication, people still get together. How Activist Investors Use Social Media to Influence Companies. Patrick Kerley is the Director of Levick Strategic Communications Social & Digital Media Practice. He is also a contributing author to Bulletproof Blog™ and can be found on Twitter @pjkerley and on LinkedIn.
Over the past several years, social media’s impact on global activism has been undeniable. Across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, small bands of like-minded reformers have transformed whisper campaigns into all-out populist movements aimed at altering the political, economic, and societal dynamics at work in some of the world’s most troubled regions. All the while, however, it hasn’t only been tyrannical leaders and despotic regimes in the crosshairs. Quietly, activist investors have been utilizing social media to overthrow boards, oust embattled CEOs, and reverse well-entrenched business practices at some of America’s most well-known corporations.
And when it comes to digital savvy, they are often leaving their freedom-fighter counterparts in the dust. Strength in Numbers. Social Media and (Political) Activism. How Egyptians Used Twitter During the January Crisis [INFOGRAPHIC] From Innovation to Revolution. AN ABSENCE OF EVIDENCEMalcolm Gladwell While reading Clay Shirky's "The Political Power of Social Media" (January/February 2011), I was reminded of a trip I took just over ten years ago, during the dot-com bubble. I went to the catalog clothier Lands' End in Wisconsin, determined to write about how the rise of the Internet and e-commerce was transforming retail. What I learned was that it was not. Having a Web site, I was told, was definitely an improvement over being dependent entirely on a paper catalog and a phone bank. But it was not a life-changing event. After all, taking someone's order over the phone is not that much harder than taking it over the Internet.
The innovations that companies such as Lands' End really cared about were bar codes and overnight delivery, which utterly revolutionized the back ends of their businesses and which had happened a good ten to 15 years previously. MALCOLM GLADWELL is a Staff Writer for The New Yorker. To continue reading, please log in. Register. The Political Power of Social Media. On January 17, 2001, during the impeachment trial of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted to set aside key evidence against him. Less than two hours after the decision was announced, thousands of Filipinos, angry that their corrupt president might be let off the hook, converged on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major crossroads in Manila.
The protest was arranged, in part, by forwarded text messages reading, "Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk. " The crowd quickly swelled, and in the next few days, over a million people arrived, choking traffic in downtown Manila. The public's ability to coordinate such a massive and rapid response -- close to seven million text messages were sent that week -- so alarmed the country's legislators that they reversed course and allowed the evidence to be presented. Estrada's fate was sealed; by January 20, he was gone.
The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a national leader. Register. The limits of the 'Twitter revolution' | Anne Nelson. My friends and I spent much of the past month channelling Cairo via New York. Our Facebook and Twitter feeds kept breathless pace with the events in Tahrir Square. There were plenty of fears and reservations (which remain), but our dominant emotion was awe that such change was indeed possible – and that social media could play a significant part in it. Now that the euphoria has waned, hard political realities come into view. But for my part, I'm left wondering about the nature of this new chimera, with the face of social media grafted onto the body of political action. As I ponder at recent examples from my travels, I think I perceive a pattern: social media can make an impressive contribution when there's a dose of urgency in the air, quickly translated into adrenalin.
Coincidentally for me, the events in Egypt came on the heels of the first anniversary of the Haitian earthquake. At the same time, there are a lot of worthy social media projects that have a hard time getting traction. TIC, réseaux sociaux et pouvoir/5: le cas de l’Espagne et le paradoxe de l’adrénaline - Transnets - Blog LeMonde.fr. Le côté pacifique des manifestations ayant donné lieu au printemps arabe et la force de leur impact politique constituent une référence et une émulation pour les citoyens des pays démocratiques.
Nous sommes beaucoup à nous demander comment s'en inspirer pour obtenir les changements que présidents, parlements et partis ne nous donnent pas. C'est exactement ce que les Espagnols sont en train de montrer en ce moment.Le problème c'est que tout cela ne fonctionne pas de la même façon par gros temps et par temps calme. En gros ça marche à l'adrénaline. [Ce billet s'ajoute à une série sur les médias sociaux et le pouvoir dans laquelle j'ai abordé le rôle perturbateur des réseaux sociaux , leur contribution aux printemps arabes , leurs limites et les dangers qu'ils représentent, le fait qu'ils ne semblent pas jouer un rôle déterminant dans la prise du pouvoir ] C'est un article du Guardian intitulée "Les limites de la révolution Twitter" qui m'a mis la puce à l'oreille.