Networked revolts


Saturday, 7 May 2011
18:00-21:00

Benaki Museum
138 Pireos street

The continuing uprisings spreading across North Africa and the Middle East have been inherently associated with the increasing entanglement of social media, or digital networks in general, with everyday life. The multiple uses of technologies –cell phones, Facebook, twitter, the Internet– by local participants and by global supporters and observers and the counter-measures of blocking access and shutting down communication channels by the toppled or still surviving governments have gained global attention.

The aim of the event is to address questions on the forms, the organisational structures of the revolts and new political possibilities that they have opened up.

Presentations:

- Lina Ben Mhenni Tunisia http://atunisiangirl.blogspot.com/ Awarded the Best Blog by Deutsche Welle

- Tarek Amr Egypt http://twitter.com/#!/gr33ndata

-M.Malek Khadhraoui Tunisia http://nawaat.org/portai

- Akis Gavriilidis Greece

Live streaming of the event at the web site of Konteiner magazine.

Organisation:
Konteiner magazine http://www.konteiner.gr/
and Re-public http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=4218

Less is More: The Tweeted revolution

This is not a post. These are 140 words or fewer, tweets. Collected in laziness …I repeat.. in laziness..

…a research study conducted by Harvard. Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite the hype surrounding it.

…the study also discovered that just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content that is small compared to other social networks, where 10% of users generate 30% of the content. “This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Twitter is a financial play – it has raised $55 million over the past two years. The investors are looking for a 10x on their money or $550 million and above. There are only a few players that can pay those dollars. You guessed it Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc – and one thing that might get their attention is disruption of their business model (or Google’s business model in the case of Microsoft). So, Twitter needs all the noise to get users so that it has critical mass to get an exit.

Twitter seems to be proud of the fact that it has no profit model. I’m imagining that the company will want to keep the hype building long enough to sell the company for a few billion dollars…

New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets

As the world becomes more and more prone to mass information intake in smaller doses, Twitter has been the shoe-in fit; simplistic posting in rapid succession. And although this has proved vital to victims of the Mumbai attacks, it has been overused — the main stream media has been forced to adapt to its one line story summarization. And thus, the media’s one time lust for perfectionistic reporting has disintegrated into a demand for an expeditious spring of answers — all in 140 characters.

Twitter, twitter, twitter that’s all I hear. I am told how great it is and that it would be the end of civilization without it.

What might democracy become in the age of Social Media?

All in all, while it's probably too early to tell whether Moldova's Twitter revolution will be successful…

..all about Twitter - Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online..