Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
‘This is about social networks that are beyond the reach of Mubarak’
Cross-posted from Technolog: read in context
Large parts of the Internet essentially went dark about midnight Egypt time after the government of President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of Washington, ordered service providers and cell phone companies to shut down.
While it looks like Egypt has been cut off — attempts to get to pretty much any Web site in Egypt are unsuccessful, and Twitter.com is unavailable inside the country — protesters and sympathizers have been able to get their message out through a variety of means because “what the government does is very effective for stopping the most basic users, meaning average users, the folks who probably aren’t Twitter users,” says Philip N. Howard, director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington and author of “The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam.”
“Most of the folks who are tweeting are kind of the digital elite who can set up proxy servers and Twitter clients and get their message out,” he says. “It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what’s going on.”
Here’s the text of our full conversation with Howard:
The Twitter Snowball Effect, the Zodiac and NPR
(Commons.Wikimedia.org)
Update, Saturday, Jan. 15, 1:40 p.m. ET: At the bottom, I’ve appended a response from a Minnesota Planetarium Society board member.
Twitter has resounded with the news this week that there’s now a 13th sign of the Zodiac, called Ophiuchus. Regardless how you feel about astrology itself, it’s easy to demonstrate that the “news” is bunkum — a textbook product of what I call the Twitter Snowball Effect.
Tracing the story back, we find that the excitement was sparked Thursday by items in Time.com’s NewsFeed and the Huffington Post, which reported that “astronomers from the Minnesota Planetarium Society” had found that because of the moon’s gravitational pull on Earth, the alignment of the stars was pushed by about a month.
With the Minnesota Planetarium Society as the only attribution, the items printed the new Zodiac, which slotted Ophiuchus into late autumn between Scorpio and Sagittarius (and transformed me from a Cancer into a Gemini).
In fact, the Minnesota Planetarium Society said no such thing.
Cat scratch fever
Jim Davis wants you to know that he really, really — really — regrets yesterday’s “Garfield” strip, which some people thought might be offensive to veterans.
That’s “Garfield” — representative of all that’s safe and bland in the comics world — and “offensive to veterans” in the same sentence.
If that seems unlikely, there’s a reason. It turns out the strip offended nearly no one, veterans included. All it did was create a manufactured mini-controversy based on journalists’ assumptions that it would — substantiating my hypothesis that we’re frequently skipping basic reporting steps in our eagerness to stay up to Web speed.
But … but … where do I tweet this?
If Twitter is down, is there anyone to tweet it?
Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine
Why I’m leaving Facebook
Goodbye, Facebook. I’ll miss the updates from my friends, but I won’t miss you or your always-changing, let’s-see-if-we-can-trick-users-into-divulging-all-their-info privacy shenanigans.
I won’t miss the flood of useless Farmville/Mafia Wars/You’ve-Earned-A-Star!/Support-My-Cause autogenerated spam.
I won’t miss your lockbox Terms of Service (which neither you nor I ever read all the way through) and their declaration that you own and can license all my content.
I won’t miss dreadfully misleading “delete account” process, which seeks to trick users into thinking they’ve deleted their accounts when they’ve actually only “deactivated” them — thereby leaving all their content on your servers to use as you wish.
It was fun for a while, Facebook, but now you’ve grown too big for your britches. I’m casting my lot with Twitter, instead (I’m at @MAlexJohnson).
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 