See my Storify below.

Related deployments:

1. The Victim race

Until very recently, in the field I work in – social media – there was an orthodoxy. It went like this: If somebody follows you on Twitter, follow them back. Leading the charge were social media luminaries like Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse (better known as ProBlogger). Even veteran tech bloggers like Robert Scoble were you-follow-me-I follow-you-back kinda guys.

Now, many of these social media gurus don’t themselves know where this orthodoxy comes from. Many unto this day confuse it with some form of politeness. Odd though, if you think about it. It’s true that Twitter is not a strong-tie social network where Dunbar’s number – which claims that most people average about 150 strong relationships – would typically apply.

Even in Twitter’s more promiscuous interest graph (where you follow people because of what they have to say, rather than because you know them), no person can seriously pay full attention to more than a couple of hundred people. Let alone can we when we’re following 70,000 or more. People that study and immerse themselves in media should surely know that human attention is finite?

Recently Darren Rowse, who blogs about blogging, tried to articulate – just before he unfollowed everybody to start afresh –  why he was following nearly 80,000 people.

“1. to reciprocate – I’ve always felt strange about having people follow me and not following them back. Perhaps this is my ‘people pleaser’ trait in action on the web.

2. to open up DM conversations – I used to use Direct Messaging as much (if not more than) as ‘Replies’ on Twitter. Following people in large numbers opened up the opportunity for this.”

Not very convincing reasons, I have to say, but not uncommon either. To quote Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek, I suspect Rowse and many others had, when deciding to follow so many people, fallen prey to not knowing what they know. Which is to Žižek exactly what ideology is: The inability to realise that we have a belief and that what we believe in, shapes our actions.

Is there a ideology at work even when deciding who to follow on Twitter? Very much so.

So what exactly is this ideology? The Word Wide Web was barely two years old when Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron recognised it and gave it a name. The Californian Ideology was coined by them in the summer of 1995. An ideology which Barbrook and Cameron claimed was a heady and odd mix of 60’s inspired libertarianism and counter-culture on the one hand and a dogmatic belief it hitched from the Reaginite 80’s on the other. The latter being the pervasive belief of the last two decades that government should not interfere in markets or business.

“This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich.”

The part of the ideology that made people follow thousands and which we will interrogate here was rather commendable. It was the belief that through the Internet we would make for a more egalitarian world.

So this little essay is about lots of things. But primarily it’s an essay on how some of the great hopes placed on the shoulders of our new media are becoming unstuck. And in particular it’s about the credo that digital media will remake our societies to be hierarchy free. That dream may not be as default a setting as we thought it was.

So where does this belief system come from? Barbrook and Cameron points out that the roots of this ideology can be found also in the writing of the sage of modern media, Marshall McLuhan.

McLuhan claimed that new technologies would empower individuals at the expense of established hierarchies like big business and big government. We were moving into the age of the cosy global village:

‘By electricity, we everywhere resume person-to-person relations as if on the smallest village scale. It is a relation in depth, and without delegation of functions or powers… Dialogue supersedes the lecture.’

Already in McLuhan’s writing can we see some of today’s recurring themes in digital and social media take shape, ideas such as:

1. 1. Person-to-person vs One-to-many (broadcast)
   2. Small scale (think village or community) vs Big
   3. Dialogue (conversation, anyone?) vs Lecture

Many of the generation of theorists after McLuhan were, if not singing from the same sheet, at least remixing his thoughts explicitly and combining it with elements of others’ theories.

The hippie ethos of freedom, independence, respect and connectedness that rested on a foundation of a profound dislike of straight regimented society and its large and cold ossified hierarchies, these were also the values of the Internet’s first theorists and ideologues. It’s no coincidence. These pioneering thinkers of the Internet were a tight-knit community themselves who knew each other well. Often not only from their shared interest and work in computing and media, but also from the first counter-cultural hippie happenings.

One of these institutions were The WELL, a pioneering online community and arguably one of the most influential online communities in shaping ideas about what the Internet should be. The founder of The WELL was one Stewart Brand, a fascinating man who managed to combine a love for mind-altering substances with sharp business instincts. Brand was fascinated by do-it-yourself culture, and published counter-cultural magazines which were read widely by people that mattered. The best known, The Whole Earth Catalogue, tried to provide people with all the information and tools they needed to live life outside of the mainstream. Steve Jobs was later to describe it as:

“…one of the bibles of my generation…. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Brand’s Catalogue, member of The WELL and friend of Brand, said in 2008 that the Catalogue had been an Internet prototype. Media made by people for themselves. It was a precursor of social media:

“The Whole Earth Catalogue was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet…. No topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included… This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogues disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogues did, the web does better.”

But already there were indications of inherent tension in Brand’s ideas. On the one hand Brand was writing that “a realm of intimate, personal power” was developing. That was obvious. But increasingly through his environmental activism it became clear that he thought environmental solutions would have had to be communal. Neither Brand nor his fellow travellers ever explicitly addressed the fact that there might be a tension between the personal freedom he espoused and the we-are-all-in this-together solutions he sought.

Be that as it may, cherished establishment concepts, like copyright, were not safe any longer. Brand’s writing became a rally cry of the open-source software movement and beyond – “information wants to be free…”.

Other denizens of Brand’s The WELL included John Perry Barlow, lyricist of the psychedelic band The Grateful Dead, but also libertarian, anarchist and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

In 1996 Barlow wrote a dramatic document titled A Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, modelled in the assertive style of the United States’ own Independence Declaration. It remains today a very good snapshot of the world view of the Californian ideologues: Technologically determinist, anti-government and Utopian.

Where McLuhan had talked about “dialogue”, a word that would later become social media jargon like few others – “conversations” – was now in evidence when he warned governments to butt out of Cyberspace:

“You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces.”

The use of  “conversation” was no gimmick; for Barlow, like McLuhan, this term was used in opposition to one-way, top-down broadcast media (or ‘lectures’ as McLuhan called them).

The Internet was not only different, said Barlow, it was a better, more egalitarian world. A world where everybody would be heard regardless of our status in meat space:

“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.”

Brand’s Catalogue contributor Keven Kelly, who was also the first editor of Wired Magazine and a futurist who has had a more profound influence than most, deserves a closer look.

His book Out of Control: The new biology of machines has not only shaped many techies’ ideas on software development, but also the thoughts of those in business and even brand management.

An end to hierarchy was clear to Kelly. He railies against governments’ and corporations’ large mainframe computers, and believes the coming personal computing age would herald unprecedented freedom from these old authorities.

Echoing the thoughts of others like McLuhan, Kelly believes every medium had intrinsic features with wider social consequences.

“A blackboard encourages repeated modification, erasure, casual thinking, spontaneity. A quill pen on writing paper demands care, attention to grammar, tidiness, controlled thinking. A printed page solicits rewritten drafts, proofing, introspection, editing.”

The new intrinsic features of hypertext, where one text links to another, he thought, was that of cooperation. But this was not the harbinger of a intimate global village. The vision was way more radical than that.

You see, the other key metaphor for Kelly was the network. We came from a world where we were atomised individuals, but through the network, ‘the icon of the 21st century’, we were changing and literally coming together to become one being. Just like a swarm of bees acting together as if they are one organism in a collective intelligence or ‘hive mind’.

Under Kelly’s auspices Wired Magazine published many articles pushing ideas such as how the Internet advances and James’s Lovelock’s Gaia theories of the earth as an organism. And that the Internet is in fact the Earth clothing itself with a brain.

If we are constituent parts of one being, one organism, where does that leave “me”? Kelly intimated that in the post-industrial age even egos would be put on the back burner:

‘The industrial icon of a grand central or a hidden “I am” becomes hollow. Distributed, headless, emergent wholeness becomes the social ideal.’

We were a networked organism, and egos along with hierarchy and authority were things of the past.

We can now add a few more familiar concepts to the canon of digital dogma:

1. Out of control vs Control
2. Networks (leaderless) vs Hierarchy
3. Everybody vs Central Authority
4. The Whole vs Me, me, me

Openess, equality, freedom in its architecture

This wasn’t just idle talk. These Utopian ideas had already found its way into the very fabric of the Internet, into the technical architecture of how the Internet transferred information (the protocols TCP/IP) and even its user-interface design (UX).

As many readers of this essay will already know, the absence of a central control system was the very raison d’etre of the Internet. It was built in such a way that it would not have to rely on a command-and-control hierarchy. Unlike the old telecommunications network, it was supposed to withstand parts of it taken out or going down in the event of a nuclear war.

Other tools and services built on top of the Internet protocols would follow the open, interactive, peer-to-peer, non-hierarchical design.

Email, the first Internet communications tool to become ubiquitous, was always designed to allow two-way communication. Once you sent somebody a message, they had the means to send a message back.

For those not lucky enough to be part of The WELL, the first sense of Internet community most early adopters experienced was on the service called Usenet. Usenet was a distributed discussion system, a hybrid between email and a web forum. Once you subscribed and posted, everybody else in that group would see your message. Many communities were established and nourished on this architecture.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a group chat tool still popular with hacker groups like Anonymous, to this day does not require users to register, thus making it open to all and hard to identify users.

Early instant messaging systems (the precursor to AOL’s AIM, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger and Skype), almost always required reciprocal agreement between users to become each other’s ‘contacts’ or ‘buddies’, allowing ‘contacts’ to be able to exchange instant two-way messages. This symmetrical mechanism was the forefather of the now familiar ‘friending’, widely adopted by early social networking sites, from Friends Reunited and MySpace to Orkut and later, of course, the behemoth that is Facebook.

These are profoundly trusting and open technologies, where everybody had access to everybody. These services were designed for our better selves. ‘Real’ identities were not required, and where it did go wrong exclusion of anti-social users was difficult. As such trolls were tolerated as a necessary evil and good norms of behaviour – ‘Nettiquette’ – reigned supreme.

But the open and non hierarchical tools and services were not inevitable outcomes based on the inherent nature of technologies. No. They were result of the often benign design decisions by techies beholden to the Utopian Californian Ideology.

But nobody noticed when things started to change. One important new communications service, did not have this mutual peer-to-peer feature: web-logs. With their relatively understated start as mere online diaries, few realised the power of blogs until the turn of the last century.

Blogs were different to what had gone before, in an important way. They were primarily designed for one person to share their thoughts with an audience of unlimited potential. This and complementary technologies, like RSS which allowed people to subscribe to a feed of blog updates, set in motion a chain of events. Broadcasting possibilities were now built into the functionality and UX of web services. All that was needed was talent and graft to build a following. Because of this, the Internet was set to take a different course.

Funny, because in the year 1999 when blogs started to get noticed, early bloggers like Doc Searls, supported by the likes of Dave Winer (the inventor of RSS), came up with The Cluetrain Manifesto. If blogs were to herald a change in the way we saw the net, Cluetrain was the apogee of the original way we viewed the Net. Here was the evidence of a clear link between earlier digital thinkers and today’s social media marketers. The Manifesto starts with the phrase:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.

It continued…

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Much of the buzzwords and articles of faith we recognise in social media can be found in Cluetrain: Authenticity, openness, conversations, community, trust (and loss of control), markets and, of course, one new one – sharing. Line number seven simply proclaims:

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

One of the first and most visible hierarchies to be subverted was the mainstream professional media. But until quite recently it seemed like mainstream media was oblivious to Cluetrain and the massive changes it claimed was occurring online.

Exasperated by the ignorance, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor that got the import of social media, published a bolshie essay on his blog in 2006. The People formerly known as the Audience proclaimed the arrival of everybody as media, hailed people connecting directly with each other bypassing professional gatekeepers, and asserted that the many new voices were not a problem:

“The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak – to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem – too many speakers! – is our problem.

The essay was an instant hit, and was shared widely on other blogs. Dave Winer enthused:

The brains are in what we used to call the audience. No more looking up to the ivory tower for all fulfillment. Thank god we don’t all have to be as beautiful as Farah Fawcett and Christopher Reeve. Everyone gets to sing. Users and developers party together.

Forward to (parts of) the past

More than 10 years after Cluetrain, from the glamorous Rumi Neely of Fashion Toast to pugnacious Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch), it’s obvious that some bloggers have become megastars.

It’s important at this juncture to point out that the very point of breaking the hierarchy was not a nihilistic hatred of authority. The very promise of the Internet was exactly that: That talented people and meritorious businesses would stand out and shine regardless of whether they were operating out of garages or did not have multimillion dollar advertising budgets.

So when Google claims its PageRank algorithm is a democratic system where hyperlinks from one page to another is taken as a vote for that page’s quality, the underlying idea is that the best content and services will float to the top of search rankings. A meritocracy par excellence. The same goes for services like Twitter. It has liberated the meritorious. Twittering writer Mat Johnson says it levels the playing field:

“I’ve never had a single ad for any of my novels, had a movie made or been given a big budget push by a publisher… Usually, they just throw my book out to reviewers and hope it floats. Twitter lets me hijack the promotion plane, sidestep the literary establishment and connect directly to my current and potential audience… It’s a meritocracy; if you’re interesting, you get followed.”

So a talented blogger like Arrington was bound to make a name for himself and beat mainstream publishers at their own game.

So far, so good.

But what many have been slow to realise is that this meritocracy is not only subverting the old hierarchies. The digital utopia is in fact borrowing some traits from the world the pioneering thinkers wanted us to leave behind. Is it really still true that too many speakers are not a problem as Jay Rosen said?

@wildebees A very interesting essay. Thanks. But I didn’t say too many speakers could never be a problem. It’s just not TPFKATA’s problem.

— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) January 15, 2012

Note I added this response from Jay Rosen.

Blogs were the first symptom. But it was only with the appearance of Twitter with its affordance to have people follow you without you having to follow back, that the fact that social status had gained a bridgehead online was thrown in sharp relief.

The following/follower counts sit prominently in Twitter user interfaces, impossible to ignore. And they are often the first thing people look at. In a flash, celebrities and bloggers outside the tech and social media bubble had amassed audiences of thousands while following almost no-one. These relationships weren’t peer to peer. They looked more like audiences than communities.

It was only the true believers of Cluetrain that held out.

Until 2010, when the dam wall cracked, and then middle 2011, when it burst. Ever smart and genuinely media savvy Robert Scoble was one of the first believers to realise he had been drinking the cool aid and using Twitter wrongly. He had been following over 100,000 people but had a Damascus road like conversion. Scoble realised his experience of Twitter was awful, with more spam, and many more messages in which he was simply not interested.

So he developed a new exclusive following philosophy: Only follow better people to get more (and better quality) followers.

It’s a big job to unfollow that many people on Twitter and Scoble had a script written to do it for him. So impressed was he with the result and his new experience of Twitter that he told Chris Brogan in a blog post that he was doing Twitter wrong.

Brogan famously spent 80% of his time replying to every Tweet he got because it was, he said – with reference to the Zulu greeting Sawubona (literally: I see you) – “a way of recognising or seeing” another person. Brogan countered Scoble with the standard social media dogma: in this “seeing” of a person, social media was magically different to one-way top-down mainstream media and very different from traditional advertising (See video below). But Scoble did not let up; the “conversations” where getting in the way:

“I can’t find his [Brogan´s] good blogs and videos. Why? Because he does so many conversations. Look at his Twitter home page. All you see is @replies. This is what makes Brogan Brogan, because he’s going to answer you no matter how popular he gets.”

Not for long, though. After a couple of months, Brogan shocked many when he announced Operation Unfollow. Many of those following him reacted emotionally. Others like the Sales Lion – who had been dumped by Brogan himself – blogged a half-hearted defence:

“Excuse me? At what point does a blogger/social media icon lose his/her rights to be normal, experiment, and possibly be wrong on occasion? If ‘John the Farmer’ unfollows 20 people to shake up his stream, does anyone say anything? Nope, nada. But let an ‘A-lister’ hurt a few feelings and then everyone wants to make a judgement.”

As the storm raged, Brogan, seemingly oblivious to his previous pronouncements on “seeing” people, tried to make sense of the furore:

“I think it’s because they somehow see me following them as some kind of endorsement. I don’t know. Maybe a validation? “If @chrisbrogan thinks my tweets are worth following…” but that’s just it. When you follow 131,000 people, you don’t see any tweets.”

Too many voices had become a problem.

After Brogan’s Operation Unfollow, Darren Rowse and many more social media big shots followed suit and mass-unfollowed people on their networks. Interestingly though, none of them suffered a significant drop in their follower numbers. What was obvious for some time was now reflected in the follow/follower numbers. There was a new hierarchy in town.

So is this the end of the story? A merely amusing tale of how our beliefs blind even smart people to obvious truths?

No, it goes deeper than that. Digital media is genuinely disruptive. It is different from media that has gone before. It has lowered barriers to entry, and it is incontrovertible that everybody can now be a publisher.

Leaderless revolutions and hierarchies of the future

Much have been made about the leaderless nature of 2011’s uprisings across the world. Intellectuals and pundits from the BBC’s Paul Mason to former diplomats like Carne Ross, to John Perry Barlow himself, have commented on how this success was partly due to the networked non-hierarchical nature of social media. This made it harder to combat protestors by taking out their leaders.

Famously and fiercely leaderless, from Tunisia to San Francisco the hacker group Anonymous was in on the action all over the globe.

Even the mighty News Corp was bought to heel when people used social media to vent and to agitate against it’s advertisers. Something politicians on their own had been unable to do. Said Paul Mason:

“Six months ago, in the context of Tunisia and Egypt, I wrote that the social media networks had made “all propaganda instantly flammable”. It was an understatement: complex and multifaceted media empires that do much more than propaganda, and which command the respect and loyalty of millions of readers, are now also flammable…

But the most important fact is: not for the first time in 2011, the network has defeated the hierarchy.”

So is this not proof that McLuhan, Brand,  Barlow and Kelly were right? Partly I think the answer is yes. But it’s more complicated than that.

Earlier this year in response to the Egyptian revolt, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci had written a piece where she warned against over-optimism and simplistic Utopian wishful thinking. It does not follow that because of the use of digital media in the revolt, hierarchy is a thing of the past for the Egyptian revolutionaries.

“A fact little understood but pertinent to this discussion, however, is that relatively flat networks can quickly generate hierarchical structures even without any attempt at a power grab by emergent leaders or by any organizational, coordinated action. In fact, this often occurs through a perfectly natural process, known as preferential attachment, which is very common to social and other kinds of networks...”

Tufekci goes on to explain with reference to Twitter how the meritocratic nature of social media is actually the basis of new hierarchies:

“Meritorious growth: In this model, the better, the more relevant, the more informative your tweets, the more followers you get. Surely, there is a lot of this going on. While this sounds good, it brings us to the next question: how will people know your tweets are so good? One mechanism, of course, is retweets. The number of retweets, however, may depend on how many followers you have to catch and retweet your posts in the first place. This means that those who have a large number of followers end up with an advantage even in terms of being recognized as meritorious.”

In other words it is possible that even those without merit could get higher follower numbers if they already have an installed base.

“In almost all human processes, already having a high status makes it easier to claim and re-entrench that high status. Thus, not only will more people see your tweets, they will see you as having the mark of approval of the community as expressed in your follower count.”

The Egyptian Influence Network just after the February uprising. Notice that the larger dots, users with more followers, even then were generally grouped closer together. A new elite.

Interestingly, Robert Scoble recently complained of preferential attachment framed in a different way – the Unearned Follow. Since the rise of Twitter, a plethora of services (Soundcloud, Instagram, Quora) has sprung up allowing users to publish media easily to an audience who follows them without having to follow back.

Importantly, these services are also using existing networks like Twitter as a basis to recommend whom a user should follow, often based on popularity on Twitter and, in some cases, even do it for you, building preferential attachment into the very fabric of our new user experiences. And Scoble laments the passing of meritocracy with it.

“Did I really earn your follow on these new services like I did on the older services like Twitter or Facebook? Yeah, you could say that I didn’t earn them there, either, since I had hundreds of thousands of readers on my blog before I started tweeting, but on Twitter you needed to manually “follow” me and other people on the system. On the newer systems they automatically follow people based on their Twitter popularity.

This presents a distorted picture of who is putting the most effort into the system.

Do you see the problems this causes?”

Do you?

The future is what we make it

Hierarchy was not part of the original vision for the Net. If there is a new hierarchy forming, then how many of the other dearly held beliefs of the digital set are on less sure ground? So to conclude a few thoughts from me on shibboleths that are now on less firmer ground:

Person to person

Broadcasting is not going away. In fact stats show that social media is boosting in particular live TV viewing. Services like Klout that purport to measure influence in media are flourishing. It makes sense. If some people are more equal than others, knowing who they are is a valuable resource. This week social media thought leader Brian Solis wrote in a post titled - 2012: The Year for Digital Darwinism:

Digital influence is becoming prominent in social networks, turning everyday consumers into new influentials. As a result, a new customer hierarchy is developing forcing businesses to identify and engage to those who rank higher than others.

Small is limited. Brands have realised they still need massive reach (a large audience) to flog their products. So in social media new techniques are developing in the marketing playbook that are not person to person. Techniques like getting celebrities to market your wares: So called marketing to an audience with an audience.

And some old techniques are migrating to social networks. Facebook advertising is widely popular and successful.

Openness and Out of Control

Not only is the wildly popular iOS a closed platform, Google negotiated a particularly pernicious deal killing off mobile Net Neutrality in the US – whereby mobile networks can exclude services, usually competitors traffic across their networks. Similarly mobile users in Europe cant access services like Skype. As mobile networks strain to cope with the increase in data watch these networks increasingly campaign against Net Neutrality as a way to protect profit margins.

People like Cory Doctorow cry that there’s a war on general purpose computing coming – without which he thinks we loose the DIY freedom and power Brand spoke of. And Cloud based services are contributing to the shift in power from us to service providers, making it easier for central authorities to control the Net. And let’s not even mention China.

Copyright

The entertainment industry are doing their utmost to introduce laws that will make Internet companies liable to police the Internet for any copyright infringement. Clay Shirkey warns that this requirement to police will push up the price for providing user generating content services to the extent that they will become uneconomical.

Community and Conversation

While it would be an oversimplification to call what businesses are doing in social media to be just broadcasting, it’s not for the most part, community either. Some are spotting trends where brands and bloggers are switching off the comments on websites due to the volume and quality of what they have to deal with. Big is in fact the death of community, even for individuals. As Gina Trapini points out in an excellent post. A large following creates all kinds of problems not least of which is remembering to share with the people you care about. For brands selling fast moving consumer goods (like toothpaste), and business to business brands, creating real communities using social media is very hard. Repeated studies show that most people Like brands on Facebook in order to get discounts.

Authenticity and Meritocracy

Once some people and brands have huge audiences, the pressure not only to promote good stuff will fade. Watch for people to promote things not because they are best, but because they are close to them, or worse, have received money for it. Watch for social media services promoting mediocre celebrities to follow in order to attract users. With the development of Personalised Search Results preferential attachment could migrate even into Google Search results. There are already signs of this.

And how’s this for a thought experiment. Should you employ a SEO expert or a person – who might be clueless about SEO – but is followed by thousands on Google Plus? Bear in mind that every page this person Plus Ones, will feature higher in Google search rankings for their thousands of followers.

Identity

In John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace he assertively claims that online we choose our own identities and implies that they are probably different to our ‘real’ identity. The idea that who we are in the nooks and crannies of the Net is not tied to our ‘real world’ identity and that we may have a few of them is indeed yet another article of faith of the Californian Ideologues.  Yet more and more services are turning to Facebook as an identity service provider. That’s because Facebook’s insistence on the use of real identities combat anti-social behaviour. Not only that but Zeynep Tufekci has argued convincingly that people using their everyday identities on Facebook was a powerful force in helping revolutions against autocrats last year. And that it would not be so if they stayed anonymous. The idea of a bunch of ordinary people together, in the open, being more effective than the lone anonymous hacker is not only a bitter pill to swallow, but should make us rethink many assumptions.

The wisdom of markets

Our Californian Ideologues always seemed to forget one simple fact. The Internet was founded on tax payers money. The explosion of information technology and deregulation of the 80’s has not lead to massive improvements in productivity in the US or high quality jobs. In fact the US has experienced relative decline. And inequality is at unprecedented levels.

In a startling post just this week Rick Bookstaber points out why the middle-classes are disappearing and inequality increasing, not because their are no jobs. The jobs are being outsourced – to us! But we are not being paid for them:

“The jobs are moving from the producer to the consumer side of the ledger. And some of that work comes as the guise of entertainment. How much of your work is being done as you do your e-mails and surf the web, keep yourselves busy with your apps as you commute to work? So it is not only that computers are replacing workers, they are turning consumers into unpaid workers.”

We sure are not all hip and rich in the digital Utopia.

So all of these digital credos have to be more critically re-examined. They don’t all currently apply, or apply evenly in all circumstances. So what to do?

We need to realise that these ideals and norms won’t necessarily result from technology by themselves. If we indeed think some of these are preferable to how our industrial age worked, we will need to argue, design, program and perhaps even fight for them.

No related posts.

Round these trendy parts it’s the magazine that any thinking progressive person, with an interest in digital media, must have on their shelves. That way, everybody knows your both left, smart and cutting edge. I have bought some copies myself.

But them I read the blurb on the back page. It’s a good a summary of everything that’s wrong with Mute and its hangers on as you could hope to find IMHO:

In late 1994, back in the days of dial-up modems and Netscape Navigator 1.0, Mute magazine announced its timely arrival. Dedicated to an analysis of culture and politics ‘after the net’, Mute has consistently challenged the grandiose claims of the communications revolution, debunking its utopian rhetoric and offering more critical perspectives.

Fifteen years on, Mute Publishing and Autonomedia are delighted to announce the publication of Proud to be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics after the Net. The anthology selects representative articles from the magazine’s hugely diverse content to reprise some of its recurring themes. This expansive collection charts the perilous journey from Web 1.0 to 2.0, contesting the democratisation this transition implied and laying bare our incorporeal expectations; it exposes the ways in which the logic of technology intersects with that of art and music and, in turn and inevitably, with the logic of business; it heralds the rise of neoliberalism and condemns the human cost; it amplifies the murmurs of dissent and revels in the first signs of collapse.

In other words, a bunch of middle-class, navel gazing, pessimistic Europeans that love nothing more than intellectual masturbation, and that has only a passing acquaintance with the real impact of digital media, especially on the unwashed masses and the developing world.

A better title would have been Proud to be a snob.

It’s safe to say that the readers of Mute frown on Facebook and even Twitter. And many of them will loudly proclaim that neither had any role in the Arab spring or in empowering individuals in general.

I’m all for a critical appraisal of digital tech and especially the role of laissez faire economics. The world is in crisis precisely because neo liberal politics. This week’s changes to Facebook has indeed set off a few alarm bells.

But the Mute set seem to be predisposed to be against anything as banal as the social media status update.

The odd thing is except for a brief period before 1998 this group has been down on the potential of digital media. The more social and wide spread its adoption became, the more the ‘champions’ of digital democracy hated and slated it.

No related posts.

But on what basis could this be? If rights are basic and inalienable, how can we suddenly get a new one? As someone I follow on Twitter – Grondwerk – asked:

“What is it about the internet that every human should have?”

Indeed, we have the right information, the right to free speech, the right of free association. That cover’s it no? If I was a Constitutional Justice in a state that recognized a bill of rights, and that state cut off or restricted part of the Internet, I would probably rule it a breach of rights in terms of the aforementioned rights. Done.

Or is it? To answer question properly it might be necessary to consider how the internet is different – if at all – from previous communications technologies. The internet is of course the child of the marriage, no the menage a trois, of the convergence of telecommunications with two other industries, namely media and computing. The result of this union is I would argue different from anything that has come before it, and not merely a sum of those industries’ parts.

In what way is it different? While we previously relied on a free press to disseminate information, anybody can now publish and potentially have a global audience. This is such an incredible thing that we struggle to fully appreciate it. In fact our very speech (Tweets for example) can become published in such a way.

In South Africa at present the government is trying to push a Secrecy Bill through parliament. Any state agency, government department, even a parastatal and your local municipality, would be able to classify public information as secret. Over 1000 institutions would be granted this power. Big sanctions will fall on anybody revealing classified information.

A campaign has been launched – The Right 2 Know Campaign – to counter the Bill. A campaign I support (see the previous link). Except the name is a bit of a misnomer to me. The campaign should have been called the Right to Know and Speak. This law is aimed as much against ordinary whistle blowers, bloggers and citizens – an ever growing threat to states’ ability to control information – as against the media.

Alan Rusbriger, editor of the Guardian, has talked about how the equilibrium of power between states and citizens with regards to information has shifted. This is evidenced by net tools like Wikileaks he says. I agree.

Thus, I’d argue that the right to freedom of speech has become something altogether different. It is now something more powerful – the freedom of the individual to publish.

Some have taken this further and argued that this new world of internet speech is a type of a true Habermasian Public Sphere. From Wikipedia:

The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.” The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk” and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.

This claim that online is the public sphere alludes to one other attribute of the internet that is missing from our original conception of rights – discussion and action working together in tandem. In his book Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirkey catalogues the many ways in which the internet allows people to interact, collaborate and create things together. Often things that were impossible to do – because of economic costs – previously. Wikipedia, Ushahidi, Flickr, Couchsurfing and Lol Cats are but a few examples.

This activity is I think more wide reaching than a right to freely associate. There are many countries where one could freely associate and form groups for a long time, but lacking the net, could not produce ‘public’ goods like Linux, WordPress, Kickstarter, Bribe Spot or Ride Share. And even organising, discussion and action does not describe what we as humans put into and get out of the Internet fully. Often it driven by and is a form of self expression and collective creation, sometimes rolled into one. Do we perhaps need a new right, a right to creation to be added to existing ones?

I am not sure we know yet exactly what it is that the internet is doing to our society and we won’t get a handle for time to come. What we do know is that it is the most significant and empowering force for society, perhaps since the advent of the printing press. It is not only worth protecting. It is worth nurturing.

Related deployments:

1. Impressions from SA – no alien human interspecies sex

…a news agency for stuff nobody wants to know. “Dave is playing on Facebook. Dave is a bit annoyed. Dave is going for a drink. Dave has found a toothsome bit of cheese under the nail on his big toe.”

What readers might find odd is that this is perhaps simultaneously a fitting description, and at the same time could point to why Facebook is so useful as a tool for organising dissent.

In case you don’t know, last week Malcolm Gladwell once again entered the fray about the role of social media in fundamental and high stakes social activism. The much shorter piece titled, Does Egypt need Twitter is much weaker than his original piece.

A protestor on Tahrir square, Cairo

As sociology prof Zeynep Tufekci (remember that name, you will still hear allot about her) points out, shamelessly contradictory.

The case of Gafsa

Prof Tufeckci makes many salient points about how a movement organising through a tool like Facebook would operate and what impact it could have – which I would highly recommend you read – but for the purpose of this post I would just like to focus on her synthesis – a what if, what if the revolutionaries did not organize using social media?

Thus, our word-of-mouth movement would struggle to grow person-by-person and would be easily outmatched by the state security apparatus. It might be able to put together brave and small demonstrations here and there—the news of which would likely never travel beyond the lonely corner in which they were staged. Even if they managed to get some critical traction in a locality, the state could more easily counter, encircle and repress because unlike the current protests in Egypt and Tunisia, which started rapidly and emerged through a broad-base all at once, authoritarian regimes have a pretty advanced-arsenal against old-fashioned political organizing.

She proposes to compare what has happened now to what happened before – the riots in the Gafsa region from April to June 2008. If you do a Google search, you will find very little information on these riots. Here is one of the few reports in the English:

Tunisian police opened fire against rioters on Friday (June 6th) in Redeyef, 350km from Tunis, leaving a 22-year-old man dead and some 22 wounded, local press reported. Unrest in the phosphate mining region of Gafsa has continued for two months, with hundreds of youths rioting over unemployment and rising living costs in the region.

Note the lone desperate comment underneath it.

Tufeckci asks the key question -

In 2008, protests led by the local trade-union broke out in the Tunisian mining-town of Gafsa over corruption, unemployment and nepotism. Did you know about them? Neither did I, until recently. However, the story is familiar. Tunisian government forces encircled the town, brought in the army when the police proved unable to contain the unrest, kicked out and jailed the journalists trying to cover the story. Isolated and censored, the protests dissipated.

Is the spread and integration of social media into everyday rhythms of Tunisian (and global) populace between 2008 and 2011 a factor in why the world has barely heard of Gafsa while Sidi Bouzid is nearly a household name around the globe? Obviously, there cannot be a definitive answer. However, this is surely worth exploring and a striking example of the “how” of social movements has such profound consequences beyond being fodder for contrarian missives about their irrelevance.

We can answer her. Thanks to the founder of RWW France Fabrice Epelboin who sent me this link on Quora, we know that although Tunisia had almost two million internet users in September 2008, it only had 28,000 Facebook users.

Wow. So Tunisia went from 28 thousand to nearly two million Facebook users in two years (December 2010) adding more than 2000 users per day for two years. Since Ben Ali has been ousted three weeks ago the number of Facebook users have risen by more than 100,000.

Backstory – during and after the Gafsa protests many Tunisian blogs were blocked, and so was Facebook on the 18th of August 2008. Ben Ali himself intervened to unban Facebook on the 3rd of September, precipitating a rise in the spread of the technology that would be called, in the advertising world – viral – or perhaps – off the charts. In other words it would appear to have been a big mistake. It laid the foundation from where information age gorillas could hide in the digital undergrowth (Unfortunately not my metaphor), inserting their messages into newsfeeds for the population at large.

Unlike Tufeckci’s cautious academic approach – I’d say the role of social media and Facebook in particular as a tool for insurrection has been under-egged.

The fog of insurrection is only now starting to lift over the situation in Egypt, but there too the case for role of Facebook as a tool for activism seems to be becoming more compelling, the more information sees the light of day.

A few more thoughts then.

• Publicness matters – many digital activists are fixated with privacy. But taking risks in public was key. It’s the equivalent of a public protest.
• Language matters – As this blog points out, language translation was key to an adoption spike in Facebook use around 2008. Facebook was translated into French (Tunisia’s colonial language) on the 10th of March 2008. Just before the period of massive growth.
• You need everybody – or at least not just the usual suspects. Blogs and Twitter are important – they are for Thought Leaders – but they wont light a fire by themselves. They need the distribution mechanism into people’s ordinary lives. Tufeckci:
  “These protests were first kindled through Facebook and other social media which are integrated into rhythms of mundane sociality. This means that rather than being directed at first by a well-defined group of activists who were able to reach only other politically-motivated compatriots, the dissent and the protests propagated through ordinary social networks which, in turn, ensures that the movement is broad-based.”
  …
  “Evgeny Morozov repeatedly highlights how social media increases state capacity for state to surveillance. That is certainly worth considering. However, as I argued here, surveillance is not that useful when the opposition activity is completely entangled with everyday sociality of millions of people and when dissent is widespread.”
• With digital tools small design decisions are crucial. UX and functionality decisions by Zuckerburg that has proven to be fundamental. As has been pointed out by many people including Jeff Jarvis, Facebook made two key decisions. The first was that users would use their own names – a real identity. This allowed for Facebook to be more integrated in people’s lives in general. The second was the later innovation of the personal newsfeed, the news of your crowd, or what Sam Leith has dubbed the Reuters of Inanity.

  Never before has the mundane and the everyday been such a ticket for utopian dreams.

  Related deployments:

  1. Tunisia & the technologies of freedom
  2. Wael Ghonim was admin of Khaled Said Facebook page
  ]]> http://mhambi.com/2011/02/tunisia-was-hit-by-a-tsunami-of-the-mundane/feed/ 3 http://mhambi.com/2011/01/tunisia-social-media-uprising/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tunisia-social-media-uprising http://mhambi.com/2011/01/tunisia-social-media-uprising/#comments Sun, 16 Jan 2011 21:13:14 +0000 Kameraad Mhambi http://mhambi.com/?p=1416
• Tunisia was hit by a Facebook Tsunami
]]> “Most movements that are self-described as radical are highly urbanistic, or nationalistic, or oriented to obsolete class structures, or to central bureaucratic planning. The changes that we can see on the horizon are much more drastic than that . . . People who think about social change in traditional political terms cannot begin to imagine the changes that lie ahead. Conventional reformers cast their programs in terms of national policies, or in terms of laws and central planning. But in the end, what will shape the future is a creative potential that inheres in the new technologies . . .”

Ithiel de Sola Pool

The above might strike you as a tad neo-liberal. But bare with me. (De Sola Pool’s anti-statism and corporatism actually also comes from his Trotskyist youth. But we digress.)

Along with science fiction writers like William Gibson, de Sola Pool had an uncanny ability to predict the future. He did not coin the phrase cyberspace, no, but he did describe it.

“Networked computers will be the printing presses of the twenty-first century,” he argued in 1983 in his remarkably prescient chapter on electronic publishing in the book Technologies of Freedom. “Soon most published information will disseminated electronically.”

De Sola Pool, a jew, started making a name for himself as a social scientist when tried to make sense of Nazi propaganda. He wanted to decode the destructive influence of words. And so he became one of the fathers of the quantitative analysis of communications content. He later started the social sciences faculty at MIT, and is credited with the concept of 6 degrees of separation.

But as his career progressed he veered not in the direction of words and content – the message, but rather focused on the medium. To him the medium was indeed the message.

Samir Labidi, Tunisia’s ex communications minister, said the protests had been hijacked by ‘extremists’ [AFP] – now replaced

It is fitting that we keep this in mind now that a debate is raging about the contribution or not, of social media to revolutions. Malcolm Gladwell recently poured cold water on the idea. Social media did not require commitment and its unlikely to have a real impact on the “real world” he said:

Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.

The Tunisian uprising has focussed minds once again on the issue.

But why is it important?

Well for simply for this reason: If social media is playing a role and since it is a relatively new phenomena and growing at an stupendous rate, then we should expect more and more uprisings.

Now its arrogant to presume one could make such a call, that social media did make a significant difference, without being in thick of things. I have only been watching from the sidelines. From social media that is. Because western media – unlike in the Iranian case – have been very late in covering events in Tunisia.

But this is what I have learned thus far, and why I think the role of interactive people media has been significant.

First off its important to define what we mean when we say social media. Social media to me includes letter writing, telephone calls, mobile video and texting or any other media with a low barrier to entry. Ie. not institutional professional media, which is by and large one way broadcast media.

It is of course only recently that these inexpensive forms of people media acquired the ability to reach audiences of thousands.

Of all the Arab countries, Tunisia has the highest penetration of internet users. The BBC reports that more than 34% of Tunisia’s 10 million people are online. Nearly two million people, or more than 18% of the population, use Facebook. Mobile penetration exceeds both these numbers.

I don’t want to sound like a technological determinist. But once that many people have the power to self publish it must have consequences. I concur Zeynep Tufekci when she remarks in an excellent post:

I find it hard to believe that the ability to disseminate news, videos, tidbits, information, links, outside messages that easily, transparently and without censorship reached one in five persons (and thus their immediate social networks) within a country that otherwise suffered from heavy censorship was without a significant impact.

And it would seem the Tunisian regime agrees with us. It went to great lenghts not only to try and cencor and control the mainstream media, but in particular social media.

That brings me to a second piece of evidence. Shortly before the riots began Wikileaks published damning cables of the extent of government corruption in Tunisia. Many commentators have poo poohed this revelation. Surely the Tunisians were well aware of the corruption. I agree. They must have been. But that does not follow that the detailed cables did not contribute to the rage.

For a start. It cast doubt that the governments supposed ally – the US – were firmly behind it.

Secondly, the detail of the revelations might have been news to some. Remember, were talking about a country where no such criticism of government gets published in any official form.

Thirdly, what matters is not only the message, but the authority of the messenger. If an opposition newspaper carries a damning story about government, depending on the partisan nature of the politics of the country and the independence of the media, one could expect various degrees of denial and agreement from different sectors of the political devide.

Tunisia has no independent or opposition papers.

If the US government (or even Amnesty Inyernational) had accused Tunisia outright, it would have had some impact, but it would have been tempered by years of experience and perception of Western colonial dominance.

But Wikileaks’ content has a strange authenticity. Before the Tunisian uprising Ghaddafi was singing its praises. The US government was gunning for Assange. The Arab world was lampooning US hypocrisy.

In short, the detail revelations in the leaks carried authority.

Nawaat, one of the main organizations fighting the regime included a Wikileaks section on their website. Tagged for easy navigation.

One Tunisian blogger opinioned:

“Wikileaks played a major role in fueling the anger / determination of Tunisians. However, the Wikileaks reports only put further light on what we already knew. They confirmed our doubts and detailed the different events.”

The attempted blocking of access to the Wikileaks cables by the Tunisian authorities added more fuel to the fire. And it brought unexpected allies of its own.

Anonymous, the hacking group that had recently sought to attack enemies of Wikileaks trained their resources on the Tunisian regime.

Reports Al Jazeera:

The group’s DDoS attacks, which began on Sunday night, local time, succeeded in taking at least eight websites, including those for the president, prime minister, the ministry of industry, the ministry of foreign affairs, and the stock exchange.

Now this did not register in the West. But inside Tunisia, to its beleaguered middleclasses, this must have seemed a big deal. Anonymous launched Ops Tunisia. Al Jazeera again:

It is hard to generalise the Anons’ diverse range of motivations and ever-changing targets, but most appear to share an outrage over the Tunisian government’s censorship and phishing activities, and a sense of solidarity with Tunisian web users.

Attacking government-linked websites is much more dangerous for those living within Tunisia, they noted, who risk arrest if they are identitied by the authorities.

“Although many Tunisians understandably do not feel comfortable participating in this operation out of precaution, I estimate there [were] about 50 Tunisians participating, to whom we provide the means and knowledge to properly secure their online behaviour from exposure to their government,” one Anon activist wrote via email.

Anonymous’s Ops Tunisia video of 5 January

Rage against the machine

The last and most important reason I think social media has played a huge part is the incredible act of self immolation by a jobless university educated Mohamed Bouaziz.

Street vending is illegal in Tunisia, and city authorities regularly confiscated Mohamed’s small wheelbarrow of fruit. But Mohamed had no other option to try to make a living, and he bought his merchandise by getting into debt. It was a vicious circle.

That Friday morning, he had contracted roughly $200 in debt for his goods. Police spotted him, confiscated his cart and reportedly slapped him in the face in the process.

Mohamed was desperate and angry. So he went to regional government headquarters to try to plead his case with the governor.

Nobody would listen to him and he was thrown out. Mohamed, enraged, bought two bottles of paint thinner and set himself alight in front of the building. He was rushed to hospital, but died Jan. 4.

Local protests erupted as soon as Mohamed was taken away.

Reported Al Jazeera on the 5th of January just before his death.

This act of self-immolation ignited simmering anger at policies that the government’s critics say favour an elite minority. Demonstrations across the country have continued unabated since December 17.

Most video-sharing sites face blanket censorship in Tunisia, as do news websites like Nawaat, Al Jazeera Arabic, and, most recently, Al Jazeera English.

Yet many Tunisians share videos on Facebook, via email or use proxies to break through the media blackout.

A video of his funeral posted on Facebook can be found here.



Social media is not programmed. There is no editor. It is what marketeers calls earned media or word of mouth. It’s the most valuable and effective media because it requires people to take action to spread it. For this reason it’s also the hardest media to create, because it should be remarkable – people don’t share duds.

Anybody that has spent any time on the internet knows that remarkable content finds you. Even when your not looking for it.

Wikipedia says that Mohamed left a message for his mother on his Facebook page asking her to forgive him after losing hope in everything.

Regardless if that is true It has been confirmed. See image below:

Mohammad Bouazizi’s last Status update

Translation “I will be traveling my mom, forgive me, Reproach is not helpful, i am lost in my way it is not in my hand, for give me if disobeyed words of my mom, blame our times and do not blame me, i am going and not coming back, look i did not cry and tears did not fall from my eyes, Reproach is not helpful in time of Treachery in the land of people, i am sick and not in my mind all what happened, i am traveling and i am asking who leads the travel to forget.”

The news of the actions of the young trader undoubtedly shot across the mobile and computer networks of Tunisia. The fact that the government media ignored this event at first would have only heightened the specialness of the message appearing in their personal Newsfeeds. The news would have spread like wildfire.

Going to the capital


Fabrice Epelboin claims (see comments) that then flashmob (below) was instrumental in spreading the insurrection to the capital:

“that flash mob was the event that spread the protest into Tunis (it was limited to small cities before that), it was definitely organized via Facebook.”

A Tunisian Flashmob – not possible without social media and mobile phones

Not a Twitter revolution

Even a cursory digg into the Tunisian social media world shows that there has been considerable information sharing around the uprising (not surprising really). But it wasn’t on Twitter where the main action took place. It was on Facebook.

What is the extent of the information sharing on Facebook? One popular blog by Nawaat, features hundreds of mobile and other videos of protests and fighting. Here’s just one rough comparison of the levels of activity. Nearly every post on this blog has more than 14,000 Facebook Likes. For comparison, Lady Gaga, who has over 25 million followers on her Facebook page gets about 60,000 likes on her updates. If Lady Gaga had as many followers as Tunisia had Facebook users (lets assume all of Tunisia is members of one Facebook fan page), namely two million people, she would be getting less than 5,000 Likes per update. Three times less than the Nawaat blog posts.

This begs the question. Why did the Tunisian government not block Facebook like they did with other sites like YouTube? I posted the question on Quora and here is a reply from Fabrice Epelboin:

They tried to censor Facebook (somewhere in 2008 I think) and some big protest begun, so Ben Ali quickly stopped censoring FB and instead, setup a massive ‘community management’ team to do some police on Facebook, to monitor conversations, filter specific pages, and eventually, during the revolution, block some specific functions like video uploading (the video sharing was a key element in helping spreading the revolution in the country).

They also did phising attack to steal password. As far as we know, two (probably more got unnoticed). First one was outed by Slim Amamou in ReadWriteWeb France in june 2010, second one was outed during the revolution, in early 2011 by TechRepublic.

Details & links


Yip indeed. It was blocked on the 18th of August 2008, but then unblocked after a huge outcry (see some of the comments on this site) and the president Ben Ali’s intervention.

It would seem the social media horse had bolted and Tunisia was struggling to put the Genie back into the bottle.

There are other pointers to the impact of social media. According to an answer on Quora even Foursquare played a role.

When Slim Amamou (newly appointed minister for youth) was arrested on the 6th of january, again the first information about him missing was over the location based social media platform foursquare (It seems this was in fact Google Latitude – see comment below), where he posted his whereabouts (The Ministry of Interiors) so that his friends (and followers) immediately took action and, as he was internationally known, could again be able to put pressure on the national government.

Our blogger again:

Twitter and Facebook played a very important role in our revolution, and I am confident that if we were not using social media we wouldn’t have accomplished our goals.
Social media empowered our communication infrastructure.
It countered the traditional media, the propaganda machine of our government. It allowed us to detect patterns that one would not notice if left alone, such as noticing that all the presidential police cars are rented (rented cars in tunisia have blue license plates). Social media fostered crowdwisdom, by sharing thoughts, feedbacks, and opinions. And finally on the battle field, we even used in the final hours of our government to share snipers’ positions. Then, the final demonstration was an event on facebook that everybody shared.
And now we are using it to find the militias, and share their positions. There are volunteers working on developing web 2.0 applications to place events on maps.”

Meanwhile Reuters reports that returning bloggers are being received as national heros.

“I feel proud to return to Tunisia after the dictator left. The Internet played a big role and was the basic motor in getting rid of the tyrant,” Tarek Mekki told Reuters at the airport where he was received by around 500 fans.

“It’s amazing that we participated via the Internet in ousting him, via uploading videos. What we did on the Internet had credibility and that’s why is was successful.”

Mekki become known for posting himself on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter offering commentaries on Ben Ali’s speeches that ridiculed the leader of 23 years.

…

Another man was holding up a picture of Mekki. “We only knew him through Facebook but now we see him in person. We welcome him and call on him to run in elections,” he said.

A picture taken of Tunisian police looting a shop at night, posted on this blog 68 Twitter mentions, over 10,000 Facebook likes.


One of the most consistent and considered critiques of the power of social media and why it could not deliver a revolution is by Evgeny Morozov:

“I don’t deny that the Internet may have played a role in publicizing the protests in Tunisia; it’s just that the conditions in which the protests took place do not strike me as those where the leaders of the protest movement had to post updates on where to meet and when. Maybe I am wrong, but it all seemed to be somewhat chaotic and decentralized.”

Perhaps echoing the ideas of de Sola Pool that new communications technolgies do not rely on large hierachies John Perry Barlow Tweeted yesterday:

“The most striking thing about the Tunisian Revolution is that, like the Internet, no one’s in charge.”

Perhaps Mr Morozov is right thats its a bit chaotic and decentralised, but wrong to think that the decentralisation could not deliver an uprising. De Sola Pool anyone?

Below is a list of the Tweets I have curated from Twitter thus far re the Tunisian uprising. Find the ones referencing Col Ghadaffi. They are quite a laugh. And he blames Facebook. And Leakyleaks.

Update – OK, so the new Tunisian leadership have just attended Davos, and here is some feedback on the Question of the role of social media:




Related deployments:

1. Tunisia was hit by a Facebook Tsunami
]]> http://mhambi.com/2011/01/tunisia-social-media-uprising/feed/ 10 http://mhambi.com/2010/08/call-for-programmers-an-apology/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=call-for-programmers-an-apology http://mhambi.com/2010/08/call-for-programmers-an-apology/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:21:27 +0000 Kameraad Mhambi http://mhambi.com/?p=1341
• Making sense of South African corruption
• They call me freedom
]]> First, today my blog sent you an email test by mistake. Apologies for that.

Update on Meerkat

We have made a more complete set of wireframes for the Meerkat project. If you know any developers that would like to work on a corruption reporting tool, point them our way.

Related deployments:

1. Making sense of South African corruption
2. They call me freedom
]]> http://mhambi.com/2010/08/call-for-programmers-an-apology/feed/ 0 http://mhambi.com/2010/07/making-sense-of-south-african-corruption/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=making-sense-of-south-african-corruption http://mhambi.com/2010/07/making-sense-of-south-african-corruption/#comments Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:15:46 +0000 Kameraad Mhambi http://mhambi.com/?p=1330
• Call for programmers & an apology
• South African society & institutions are holding up so far
]]> A few weeks ago Murray Hunter emailed me. How hard would it be to set up a tool to combat corruption he asked. Well I said, lets meet. It is something I have been thinking about for some time.

Over a few beers we discussed the issue with Adriaan Pelzer. I was very much in the frame of mind of first hand corruption reporting, via a tool like Ushahidi, the Kenyan incident crowd-sourcing tool.

But after some thought I agreed that starting off with a tool where existing information is sorted tagged, and made sense of is very doable and valuable.

Below is your first draft wireframes. Please do contribute and give us your opinion on our Project blog. We have also set up a Facebook group.

It’s time to stop moaning and make a positive difference.

Meerkats draft wireframe
View more presentations from RAAK.

Related deployments:

1. Call for programmers & an apology
2. South African society & institutions are holding up so far
]]> http://mhambi.com/2010/07/making-sense-of-south-african-corruption/feed/ 1 http://mhambi.com/2009/08/district-9-and-the-politics-of-xenophobia-and-racism/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=district-9-and-the-politics-of-xenophobia-and-racism http://mhambi.com/2009/08/district-9-and-the-politics-of-xenophobia-and-racism/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:08:51 +0000 Kameraad Mhambi http://mhambi.com/?p=313
• District 9 – transformation from African to Alien
• Frenzy of consumerism in the new SA due to apartheid racism
]]>

Kameraad Mhambi is so excited by the prospect of watching Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 movie.

Ever since I first saw his short Alive in Joburg I thought it would make a brilliant and topical subject of a feature length film. And I love Johannesburg. It´s a city with some much energy, so much pathos and such a dramatic skyline – that it deserves more attention. And this will make people sit up and take notice.

Blomkamp feels the same. He was quoted in the Guardian saying:

“In my opinion, the film doesn’t exist without Jo’burg,” he told journalists last month. “It’s not like I had a story, and then I was trying to pick a city. It’s totally the other way around. I actually think Johannesburg represents the future. What I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg.”

Since Alive in Joburg Blomkamp has been asked to direct a feature version of Halo, the popular X-box video game.

At the same time South Africa’s xenophobic violence spilled into the mainstream media when 60 foreigners were butchered last year by rampaging mobs.

But this had been going on for years in post apartheid SA, where foreigners go under the moniker of Makwerekwere. An onomatopoeic and derogatory reference to the unintelligible (to South Africans) foreign languages spoken by African migrants to the city of Gold. If a sci-fi movie were to be made with xenophobia as backdrop then Joburg with its history and present is clearly as good a location as any.

In 2006 the World values survey found that more than 20% of South Africans wanted all foreigners barred from entering the country on any grounds, compared with 13% holding this view in Britain, 11% in China, 4% in the US and 4% in Mozambique.

The SA Times also reported that an unpublished survey showed more evidence of South African xenophobia:

“…conducted 18 months ago, (it) found that this intense xenophobia persists in South Africa — and has grown worse in some cases.

One-third of South Africans “(would) support the government deporting all foreigners living in South Africa, even if they are there legally”, according to the survey of 3600 respondents of both genders and all races and income levels.
Other nasty attitudes exposed include a belief among most South Africans that all HIV-positive foreigners should be deported — and the conviction held by three-quarters of the respondents that the border fence should be electrified.”

Other highlights the Times pointed out from this survey are:

66% of South Africans thought a major reason for foreigners to come to the country was “to commit crimes”; one in five believed it was the sole reason. Only 11% felt they came to “have a better life”;

62% said people from other African countries “take jobs from South Africans” — although only 17% said they actually knew of somebody who had lost out to a foreigner;

South Africans have virtually the same negative view of legal immigrants from Nigeria, Angola, Congo and Somalia as they have of illegal aliens;

16% said it was “likely” they would round up a group of individuals to force the (foreigner) to leave; 9% said they were likely to take physical action; and 4% said they were “very likely” to do so; and

Although much greater sympathy was shown towards migrants with refugee status, 53% of South Africans believed all refugees should be housed in camps near the border.

So when The Guardian tells its readers that the movie is set in 1980´s Johannesburg, they are wrong. It is set in Johannesburg.

Shaun de Waal in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian saw contemporary echoes of the Red Ants and the like. He says:

“District 9′s references to apartheid are obvious, from the title echoing District Six onwards. The signs declaring certain spaces “for humans only” are clever — as well as a key part of the film’s highly successful marketing campaign.

The forced removals that are now in process are, too, an echo of apartheid, though the presence of what look suspiciously like Red Ants is very contemporary. What’s also very contemporary is that the removals are being conducted by a huge multinational rather than the state. In fact, the state is conspicuous by its absence here.”

But Blomkamp does say that his upbringing in Johannesburg and the racial tensions then inspired him to make the movie.

The choice of the name “District 9″ is no coincidence either. District 6 is the name of an area claimed from coloreds for whites in Cape Town by the apartheid government. The existing colored community was forcibly removed out of the posh city center.

Kameraad Mhambi is quite a fan of sci-fi. And currently the genre is buzzing. I recently watched the excellently acted and atmospheric Moon. And now there is District 9.

Both films are besides good drama, political statements. Even if Moon is a more subtle dig at corporate abuse of workers than District 9′s head on reference to xenophobia.

Blomkamp’s movie was made on a relatively small budget – allowing according to Peter Jackson – Lord of the Rings director and this film’s producer – for more freedom from Hollywood’s demands. Still they received a request from the studios to replace the South African accent of the main character – played by Shelto Copely – with that of Tom Cruise.

What damage that would have done to the authenticity of the film!

Shelto is a school friend of Neill, who has not had an acting role before. A lot of his acting was improvised. That’s very hard to do.

Related deployments:

1. District 9 – transformation from African to Alien
2. Frenzy of consumerism in the new SA due to apartheid racism
]]> http://mhambi.com/2009/08/district-9-and-the-politics-of-xenophobia-and-racism/feed/ 8 http://mhambi.com/2009/07/social-media-monitoring-zuma-vs-mbeki/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=social-media-monitoring-zuma-vs-mbeki http://mhambi.com/2009/07/social-media-monitoring-zuma-vs-mbeki/#comments Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:48:26 +0000 Kameraad Mhambi http://mhambi.com/?p=234
• Rain follows Zuma – the end of the dry Mbeki season?
• Kgalema Motlanthe’s elevation signal divided coalition against Mbeki
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Kameraad Mhambi has been playing around with a wonderful piece of software called Radian6. It’s used to monitor ‘conversations’ or what is being said by whom on services like Twitter, Blogs, Youtube comments, Forums etc.

Using Radian6 is fantastic, but expensive. Entry level comes out at $600 a pop per month. I tested a few keywords on it for the last month, and here’s a few graphs I exported. I thought I tried it on familiar themes for the benefit of Mhambi readers. Hence a Zuma vs Mbeki match-up.



This cloud shows keywords associated and found in references to Zuma online. And here is the same for Mbeki…



Note the keywords that do and don’t figure for both.

Here is the keyword cloud for mentions of them both.



Note Zuma is larger and words like ‘rival’ appear. To be sure Zuma’s name is much more prevalent than Mbekis at present in social media.





This graph shows mentions of the keywords ‘service delivery‘, ‘crime‘ and ‘corruption‘ in conjunction with either Zuma or Mbeki. No surprises here.

Unfortunately I only have access to a months data on Radian6, while you could have a couple of years to play with if your a fully paid up user.

They even archive Tweets and blogs posts related to a topic. Pretty impressive stuff with Orwellian possibilities.



Related deployments:

1. Rain follows Zuma – the end of the dry Mbeki season?
2. Kgalema Motlanthe’s elevation signal divided coalition against Mbeki
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