Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action Taken as a whole, Anonymous resists straightforward definition as it is a name currently called into being to coordinate a range of disconnected actions, from trolling to political protests. Originally a name used to coordinate Internet pranks, in the winter of 2008 some wings of Anonymous also became political, focusing on protesting the abuses of the Church of Scientology. By September 2010 another distinct political arm emerged as Operation Payback and did so to protest the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and a few months later this arm shifted its energies to Wikileaks, as did much of the world's attention. It was this manifestation of Anonymous that garnered substantial media coverage due the spectacular waves of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks they launched (against PayPal and Mastercard in support of Wikileaks). This difficulty follows from the fact that Anonymous is, like its name suggests, shrouded in some degree of deliberate mystery.
crystal cox, $25 million libel A few days ago, I posted a piece about the Pepper Spray incident at UC Davis. When people saw the original video clip, they overwhelmingly supported students and felt the police had acted harshly and without justification. When I posted a longer video clip, those who commented on my blog, on Twitter and Facebook were about evenly divided on whether police actions were justified or not. The point of my post seems to have gotten a little lost. Yesterday, an Oregon Judge ruled that Crystal L. Social media and traditional media is all media. So while I think Cox deserves to be called a journalist, protected by Shield Laws, I don’t think she is a very good one. In reading the Cox blog post, I am unsure whether or not what she wrote is true, and truth is the ultimate defense of libel. In short, while I absolutely defend Cox’s right to be a journalist, I do not defend a blogger’s right to slander someone. To me this case and the Pepper Spray Videos are two closely related issues.
Social Media and the UK Riots: “Twitter Mobs”, “Facebook Mobs”, “Blackberry Mobs” and the Structural Violence of Neoliberalism Social Media and the UK Riots: “Twitter Mobs”, “Blackberry Mobs” and the Structural Violence of Neoliberalism “One formula [...] can be that of the mob: gullible, fickle, herdlike, low in taste and habit. [...] If [...] our purpsoe is manipulation – the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, known in certain ways – the convenient formula will be that of the masses”. — Raymond Williams “What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together”.
Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop About Pepper Spray Cop (also known as “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop”) is a photoshop meme based on a photograph of a police officer offhandedly pepper spraying a group of Occupy protesters at the University of California Davis in November 2011. Origin UC Davis Occupy Protest On November 18th, 2011, a group of students at the University of California Davis gathered on campus for an Occupy protest, during which they formed a human chain by linking their arms together. A photo of Lieutenant John Pike pepper spraying seated students at the UC Davis protest was taken by Louise Macabitas and posted to Reddit on November 19th, 2011. Photoshop Meme Two photoshopped versions of Macabitas’ photo surfaced on Reddit on November 20th. Spread Compilations of the images began appearing on Facebook community Occupy Lulz and BoingBoing on November 20th. Over the next month, Pepper Spray Cop images were shared and discussed on CBS News, CNet, The Week and Scientific American. Notable Examples
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. 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? This pattern shows up again and again.
Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism | Micah White A battle is raging for the soul of activism. It is a struggle between digital activists, who have adopted the logic of the marketplace, and those organisers who vehemently oppose the marketisation of social change. At stake is the possibility of an emancipatory revolution in our lifetimes. The conflict can be traced back to 1997 when a quirky Berkeley, California-based software company known for its iconic flying toaster screensaver was purchased for $13.8m (£8.8m). The trouble is that this model of activism uncritically embraces the ideology of marketing. Clicktivists utilise sophisticated email marketing software that brags of its "extensive tracking" including "opens, clicks, actions, sign-ups, unsubscribes, bounces and referrals, in total and by source". Gone is faith in the power of ideas, or the poetry of deeds, to enact social change. Digital activists hide behind gloried stories of viral campaigns and inflated figures of how many millions signed their petition in 24 hours.
Mr. Washington Goes to Anonymous - Alexis Madrigal - Technology Welcome to one of the inner rings of The Establishment. We're near Dupont Circle, a short distance to the various centers of power in Washington, DC. The Capitol Building is not so far. The White House, too. Here we find The Brookings Institution, one of DC's oldest think tanks. Today's order of business was a panel about Anonymous, about hacktivism, about... the lulz. The speaker charged with explaining Anonymous' idiosyncrasies was Biella Coleman, an anthropologist who has been studying the group and its affiliates for months and months. This is the challenge Anonymous poses to the establishment. So, when Coleman came to the microphone before the Brookings-blue logos of the stage, I was curious to see how her presentation of the social dynamics of Anonymous might be perceived. She covered several other notable Anonymous and AnonOps (separate group) exploits. That style is also a strategy. The last speaker was Paul Rosenzweig. These distinctions matter.
Maybe you’re better off not holding hands and singing We Shall Overcome By Francesca Polletta Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport wade into the debate over the role of the Internet in contemporary social movements with a provocative claim: the Internet is ushering in a new repertoire of protest. In this repertoire, mobilizations are sporadic rather than deep-rooted and enduring. Protests flare up, gather huge numbers to the cause, and then fade away—sometimes to reemerge, other times not. What makes this picture so compelling is not only that it is grounded in extensive and meticulous data on activists’ use of new digital media, but also that it builds on three decades of social movement theory and research. Earl and Kimport’s data is from 2006, and, as they point out, predates the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. How about the two most recent movements to occupy the international center stage—the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements? On the other hand, new digital media have been vital to both movements. [i] Bakardjieva, M. 2009. [ii] Lea, M. 2007.
independentmedia.ca: a directory of non-corporate journalism 7 Citizen Journalism Websites For Crowdsourced News Citizen journalism in the simple sense is news collected and published online by people like you and me. We aren’t reporters by any stretch, but citizen journalism websites gives us an opportunity to speak as interested observers. It is freedom of speech without any censorship in its unadulterated sense. Citizen journalism as first witness accounts or even as second hand reporting has gained credibility thanks to many media channels. Now Public A multimedia news site with 5 million readers puts it in the top bracket of citizen journalism news coverage. CNN iReport CNN iReport is an example of a mainstream news media company that’s also tapping into the power of citizen journalism. Digital Journal You will be known as a Digital Journalist and you will be paid (by way of a share in ad revenues) for your contributions. All Voices Allvoices.com is probably the only crowdsourced news with a cartoon section. Newsvine Newsvine is a collaborative crowdsourced news website that’s owned by MSNBC.
For Archivists, ‘Occupy’ Movement Presents New Challenges - Wired Campus Baltimore – Howard Besser, a New York University archivist, recently got into a shouting match at an Occupy protest, making a case for why the activists should preserve records of their activities. “Within the Occupy movement there’s a huge suspicion of traditional organizations, including libraries and universities,” Mr. Besser explained Monday at the spring meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information. The shouting match was an extreme moment, but Mr. Mr. Even Occupy protesters who become convinced of the value of such archiving have rejected traditional relationships with the archivists, however. As a compromise, many protesters are releasing videos and photos they have taken at the protests under a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to store them and use them for research purposes. That means that the materials are unusually public, however, sitting on the Web for anyone to see rather than in a box in a library storage room. Return to Top
Liking Social Justice - Politics The whole Kony 2012 debate has gotten me thinking about how activism has changed over the past few years, especially with the explosion of social media use. Back in 2010, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a much-read piece in The New Yorker about the so-called “Twitter Revolutions” in Moldova and Iran the previous year. Many observers had jumped to the conclusion that social media had reinvented grassroots activism, that, of all things, Facebook and Twitter were now powerful tools for populist change. A lot of things have happened since then, most importantly the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. But, in spite of those developments, Gladwell’s argument still has a lot of validity today. And yet there are many activists and groups that still seek to address very real issues entirely through social media. This brings us to the now-ubiquitous Kony 2012 campaign, a movement that has generated quite a bit of awareness and controversy over the past few days.
UNICEF says Facebook 'likes' won't save children's lives UNICEF has launched a bold advertising campaign that takes direct aim at perhaps the most ubiquitous form of online activism — the Facebook "like." Late last month, UNICEF Sweden released three commercials that urge viewers to support humanitarian aid not through posts or shares on social media, but monetary donations. The Swedish-language spots each present different variations on this theme, but by far the most harrowing stars a 10-year-old orphan speaking directly to the camera from inside a dark and decrepit room. "Sometimes I worry that I will get sick, like my mom got sick," the child says in the captioned ad, his brother playing in the background. "But I think everything will be alright. The other two ads, also in Swedish, take a relatively more lighthearted approach to the question of online activism, though they underscore the same point: Facebook likes aren't treated as currency in other commercial venues, so they shouldn't be equated with charitable donations.
Upworthy: I Thought This Website Was Crazy, but What Happened Next Changed Everything - Derek Thompson The Internet's latest viral wizard matches smart technology and lily-white earnestness to market "stuff that matters" online, and the Gates Foundation is buying. The first blockbuster hit came from an unlikely source: Irish talk radio. In 2010, Michael D. Higgins, then a foreign-policy spokesperson for Ireland (and now its president), went on the radio in Galway and excoriated a conservative American talk show host for opposing President Obama's plan to enact universal health care. For a long time, the audio file of the berating lingered in Internet purgatory. Then, in August 2012, Mansur Gidfar uploaded the audio to the new, rapidly growing site Upworthy.com in August 2012. Today, Upworthy is a million-hit machine for heartfelt, progressive content, and it is trying to use this alchemy—spinning hearty fiber into viral gold—on behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Upworthy has mastered the dark viral arts with a unique blend of A/B technology and lily-white earnestness. ...