(Week 12) Social Media and Revolution – Tweets for Freedom

Week 12 – Venezuela’s citizens tweet for freedom

Previously, I wrote how twitter attacks by dictatorships, such as those in Syria, can be used to influence a population. Now I will center on how twitter has relevance for concerned citizens attempting to report electoral fraud instantly and up to the minute.

Recently, the multi-decade rule of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez came to end. The Chavez period in Venezuela was marred with allegations of dictatorship and intense corruption. Chavez was “elected” in a series of disputed votes where many citizens reported their votes tossed out, deleted, or instances of ballot stuffing.  When Chavez was first elected, in the 1990’s, Twitter didn’t exist and neither did other forms of popularly channeled and user edited media.

Today, with Venezuela facing yet another election, we see evidence in an article on Global Voices Online (citation below) that Venezuelans (many of whom have Twitter and mobile phones) are using their accounts to tweet election irregularities they run across during the election season. If an opposition candidate in a remote province is forced to stop campaigning due to the corrupt police declaring his peaceful rally “dangerous” (this happened), then citizens in that province can spread the world globally and domestically about these issues. Many of these tweets in question reached international news networks, and gave credence to the notion the most recent Venezuelan election was an orchestrated sham.

In April 2010, the government announced the creation of the “communicational guerrilla“, a group of citizens employed to “fight the ideological battle” in independent and mainstream media and on the Internet. So today, the battle is being fought in hashtags: keyword positioning in support of and against the government is a constant, and there are, on both sides, users dedicated to monitoring specific keywords to respond, often aggressively, to those expressing controversial opinions.

http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2013/04/25/will-the-revolution-still-be-tweeted-venezuelas-netizens-face-uncertain-future/

Twitter and the Syrian Rebellion – Choice Article (#11)

As a History major, I am fascinated by the world around us and its current events. I took this class on Social Media to learn more about (in part) how these new media technologies influence world political revolutions and popular movements. In past revolutions, such as the Arab Spring last year, protestors in dozens of Arab nations used twitter to communicate their ideas, disseminate protest materials, and rant against the oppressive and brutal regimes above them. Oftentimes, the governments in such places as Tunisia and Algeria (who were deposed) attempt to crack into the social media networks to influence and squash dissent that’s fomenting on the ground. For this student choice entry, I decided to focus on the unrest currently going on in Syria. Syria is next to Israel, where I visited in the spring and though it’s not safe for Westerners to enter Syria, I am familiar with the country due to classes on the Modern Middle East. Currently, the Assad family runs Syria. They are Baathist (similar to Saddam Hussein) and not very religious. They rule Syria with an iron fist and life there is very hard for those not linked to the ruling family. If you speak out against the Assad family, even digitally on Facebook or Twitter, you run the risk of arrest or imprisonment. An article in the Los Angeles (citation below) shows recent evidence the Assad family supporters are hacking into twitter to accomplish their political goals. An extremely violent revolution, the crisis in Syria recently entered a new stage with rumors of chemical weapon use by the Assad dictatorship. The so-called “Syrian Electronic Army” spread the word that explosions rocked the White House in the United States to deter civilians from tweeting about the domestic crisis. There is also evidence the Syrian Army could use twitter to attempt and locate the names of the most followed and prolific Anti-government rebels spreading the message. This article was fascinating because it showed how social media can be used to quash rebellions (like Syria) or start them (in the case of Iran). Social media information is going to be a huge force for world leaders (especially oppressive ones) as the digital generation grows and its influence gains.

http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-hackers-ap-twitter-syrian-electronic-army-20130423,0,244289.story

Site of the Week – Wikipedia

 For my class group presentation, we centered our research on Wikipedia. Though Wikipedia isn’t a social networking site, per se, it is a tremendously influential website that revolutionizes the way millions of people all the world transmit knowledge. Founded by Jimmy Wales, an Alabama computer entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “internet addict”, Wales developed a smaller site at first named NuPedia.  Wikipedia was later founded as a modification of this original idea and named after “Wiki’s” or the Hawaiian word for “learn”.  Over 240 languages are available in Wikipedia and the site has methods for editing cross-culturally and across the linguistic spectrum. Lots of controversy has enveloped Wikipedia for its citation abuse, with college students the main culprits. As such, Professors and academics frequently accuse Wikipedia of aiding in plagiarism. This is the students fault, not the website, as students should ideally still visit the cited source independently to confirm its accuracy. Students should never cite Wikipedia and refer to the source given to determine if it’s legitimate. Not all Wikipedia sources are legitimate.  The collaborative nature of the site makes this hard to enforce but it’s something Wikipedia administration is encouraging and actively developing. Wikipedia editors are all volunteers. You must register if you wish for your revisions to “stick” on popular pages. Volunteers edit one another’s work, suggest/find citations, or argue in the sites “Talk” page. Popular pages of particular interest (i.e. Barack Obama, Queen of England, Abortion, etc.) are protected by a lock icon. Due to vandalism, only accredited users may edit these pages. Individuals are added by consensus and community voting. Only notable individuals with significant secondary media mentions are eligible. No original content is permitted on Wikipedia, you must CITE! As someone who uses Wikipedia nearly daily for every class, I found this subject incredibly relevant and contextual for my academic life and research. I’m very happy I now know a great deal about a site so useful to me.

LinkedIn – Site of the Week

LinkedIn is the original professional version of Facebook. It is social media site organized around users finding jobs and distributing their resume and credentials. During UK’s Social Media week, which we visited during class, we gained a great demonstration of LinkedIn from gentlemen from a local investment corporation here in Lexington.

In addition to warning the students about Facebook and its potential disruption to our job hunt because of the lack of discretion, he gave an excellent introduction to LinkedIn and how he and other professionals utilize it on a daily basis. LinkedIn photos, unlike Facebook profile photos, must be highly professional and appropriate. Users should be careful to have a clean and neat appearance and be dressed like they would for a job interview. Dress to impress, even digitally! This is important because it’s the first item on the website that pops up when potential “connections” explore ones profile.

The heart of the LinkedIn experience is “connections”. Similar to Facebook “friendships”, this is how users connect to refer services to other and get in touch about business decisions. As a job seeker, you should only connect to people you know well or have several connections with already. Sending unsolicited connections can get one banned from the interface.

LinkedIn main pages contain ones work history, references from other LinkedIn users (if available) and contact info (such as business address, etc.) You can “set up” two users as connections that might be interested in one another if so inclined. Overall, LinkedIn doesn’t have much relevance for me still being in school, however, closer to graduation I will maintain a profile and start dusting off my portfolio with the site.

Chapter 6 – Social Media Week (April 1st 2013)

This week was social media week at UK, and we got to sit on a few lectures to learn more about what organizations on campus are doing to highlight social media issues among the student body.

On Thursday, we joined the session run by an employee at a Lexington investment firm. This gentleman’s lecture drove home what many college students have known for years  – to keep personal photos off social media! He said employers routinely stalk applicants and reject them for showing photos at parties or with alcohol or other drugs. Many college students need to clean up their social media presence because these issues are not going anywhere and will be around for a while. As a new graduate about to enter the workforce, I couldn’t have found this gentleman’s message more relevant.  I’m going to deactivate my Facebook a few months prior to beginning the job search.

I sat in on the lecture from the campus technology department about Google Docs, and this was very interesting. They explained the whole host of Google Apps that could be used for school and work collaboration. I learned about a new feature in Google Apps that allows for the creation of customized forms. I intend to use this app for a statistics class on surveys.

Lastly, I participated in Ultimate follow Friday, a twitter program that occurred entirely online. I followed a few accounts of interest around campus but overall didn’t get much out of this program. I would have appreciated a hands-on program to learn more about twitter because it was hard to keep track of all the feed activity.

Chapter 5- March 19th, 2013

Chapter 5 in Convergence Culture focuses on the Harry Potter Franchise as an example of media engaged by fan participation that can scare the corporate media forces. The chapter begins by describing participation by fans of J.K. Rowling’s literary works. When the books were first published, there was an enormous outcry by those on the Religious right to block Harry Potter books from school libraries because of the novel’s “support for witchcraft” and mysticism.

Since all sides want to control what children do and read because its the key to controlling the future, this was a big issue. Children in particular loved the Harry Potter series and consumed the associated books, movies, and video games voraciously. The books opened up massive channels for kids to express their love for fantasy and a world outside their own. Children develop cultural literacy by integrating familiar elements into their daily lives and regurgitating them in other sources to better explain it.

MAKE UP – Online Participation In Society

Thank You Dr.B for the makeup opportunity!

Flashing back to Rhiengold, we learn of the concept of Social Capital, which is directly related to the way people evaluate recommendations and reviews online. In a crowded marketplace like the one we live in, I find myself seeking reviews from the internet when searching for new products to buy or even where to go for dinner.
I asked my roommates girlfriend about a restaurant in Lexington called Doodles. This restaurant has great reviews online yet she said she didn’t have a great experience. I went to Yelp and trusted the 100+ glowing reviews over someone I have known for years! The meal was indeed fantastic and it looks like her experience was an isolated one.

Me trusting the wisdom of crowds online over a personal friend is an example of the enormous social capital emphasizes in this reading. Fowler says that friends of friends form a third of as much influence as direct contacts have! If I assume I have 150 close friends multiplied by several hundred – that’s a ton of contacts!

Week 7 – Jenkins Chapters 3 and 4

Chapter 3, entitled “Searching for the Origami Unicorn” focuses on Trans-media storytelling and in particular, its relation to the hit movie, The Matrix. A pioneering film for the way it meshed reality and fantasy, the film franchise (there were many Matrix sequels) was fantastically lucrative. With an enormously complex plotline and character base, the Matrix was far to large an idea to be contained to one medium. Rather it was explored again and again in video games, books, and several film sequels. Detailing the attempted takeover of the human race by nefarious alien agents on earth, The Matrix was and is, mind numbingly complex.

By requiring consumers to buy into multiple mediums simply to understand the single movie premier, the promoters and directors of the franchise were highly profitable. Full of hidden messages and codes in the movie, fans had to make sure to get the latest video game or next sequel that premiered. Jenkins uses the example of the Matrix and later, the Star Wars franchise to explore how co-creation, or co-ownership of content could function. In this way, developers and creators of different media types could collaborate from the very origin of the medias infancy and avoid costly and damaging protectionist lawsuits later on. 

The site of the week is Storify, a content generator that finds information from many sources and compiles them into an easy to read feed that draws from multiple content sources to deafen the “noise” that is claims is encountered by anyone trying to browse the web and catch up on the current voices at that instant.

Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative.

In the Storify editor, you can search social media networks to find media elements about the topic you want to Storify. Look through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram and more to gather material for your stories.

Link of the week: http://readwrite.com/2013/03/01/businesses-finally-get-social-media

http://storify.com/tour

Introduction – Convergence Technologies

Starting off Jenkin’s text, we learn of the theme for the book as a whole, titled “Convergence Culture”. This book centers on the concept of media and technological convergence, or collaboration. Media convergence can be described as messages that combine to form a unified idea to a media consumer (people like average citizens). Most of the time, these messages have their origin in different technologies and devices. Jenkin’s “tangled cord” analogy of all the unique black boxes he has in his own home exemplify this confusion.

This text’s Introduction poses questions that will be explored at greater length later on. The public/private culture gap will be the lens by which we analyze new media participation in a global marketplace of consumers. We are given an example of a teenager who created images of the character Bert from the children’s show Sesame Street became a celebrity when his images were later exploited by propagandists from Al-Queda. Just like in the “Net Smart” text, we are learning ways by which a new global world is forming and ideas are being transmitted instantaneously across borders.

 

Chapter 6

This chapter began with a discussion and general review of data privacy issues that everyone needs to be aware of. Rhinegold terms this as “data-veillance”. The issues of privacy is also raised when discussing Napster, the free music website that was subject to legal challenges from the recording industry. When the recording studios sued napster, they actually hurt their own revenue stream by “criminalizing an emerging culture”, in Rhiengold’s words.

The main section of the chapter includes a detailed description of the five examples of literacy in a digital context.

– Attention

-Crap Detection

-Participation

-Network Smarts

– Literacy as Lever, as Divide

For my response to this chapter, I consider the Arab Twitter Revolutions that swept the Arab world in the past two years. These revolutions all took place in societies that were heavily blocked from the web by the dictator. Twitter came out before the authorities could censor it. In addition, twitters user dominated interface makes it possible to rapidly communicate ideas, meeting places, and other goals a revolution would involve. The effect of technology on governments and people and how those two bodies interact formed the basis for my understanding for this chapter.