Currently browsing posts tagged: revolution.

Arabloggers 2011 – Day One, Part One

I wasn’t able to liveblog the first few panels due to limited connectivity, but we’re now fully connected, and I’ll do my best to round up each session thus far, and liveblog those to come. Session One: Rebecca MacKinnon The inimitable Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices and free expression expert in her own right, [...]

How are protestors in Egypt using social media?

Shortly after writing this, reports came in that the Internet in Egypt had become a black hole, entirely–or almost entirely–inaccessible.  Updates soon. This question has been posed to me constantly over the past two days from journalists doing their best to understand the relationship between online and offline forms of protest.  I feel their pain [...]

In Defense of Al Jazeera: A Response to Marc Ginsberg

Former Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg (during the Years of Lead, it should be noted) has penned a piece for the Huffington Post asking if Qatar-based Al Jazeera has fueled “Tunisteria” (that is, stoked the already-burning fires spreading across the Middle East toward the direction of intifada). It’s a valid question–that is, if we lived [...]

Not Twitter, Not WikiLeaks: A Human Revolution

Beginning this afternoon, shortly after (former) president Ben Ali fled Tunisia, I started getting calls about the effect of social media on the Tunisian uprising. I answered a few questions, mostly deferring reporters to friends in Tunisia for their side of the story, and then settled in for the night…only to find rantings and ravings [...]

1968

42 years ago: a revolution on the brink.  1968: the year of protests.  the year that rocked the world.  the year that Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were brutally murdered*. I was born 14 years later, too late to understand the intricacies of the time.  I showed up too late for the [...]

Poor Alternatives

Anne Applebaum, liberal-ish Washington Post and Slate correspondent, former-USSR expert, and wife of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, recently published the most ridiculous op-ed of all time, entitled “Morocco, an Alternative to Iran.”  On Slate, it was published as “Morocco Makes Peace With Its Past” (perhaps even more proposterous), and I perhaps wouldn’t have [...]