"Public is the new default"
As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It’s easy to say that privacy is dead, we all live in public now, and just deal with it.
But things are a bit more complicated. It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default. Stowe Boyd calls this new state of exposure "publicy."
Revolution.com
Can the internet really bring about political change? Optimists point to the green movement in Iran, when the reformist campaign showed the power of new technologies to organise resistance and to break the stranglehold of censors on information; but the episode also showed that technology alone is not enough to secure democratic change.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/04/iran-politics-blogging-internet/print
Tweet for service
I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.
Twitter is like plumbing
"The history of the internet suggests that there have been cool websites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing," said author and technology observer Steven Johnson. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/weekinreview/03carr.htmlA 21st Century Revolution
In 1979, Iranians introduced a new form of social revolution. In place of the guerrilla-style armed struggle that had characterized the twentieth-century revolutions in non-western countries, the Iranians modeled a spontaneous nonviolent mass movement. The methods of the early victory set a new precedent, shaping the imagination of what was possible in the Eastern European revolutions of the 1980s. Now, after thirty years, this revolution has boomeranged back to the streets and rooftops of Iran. A new generation is determined to finish the job that their parents began but could not bring to fruition: the establishment of freedom and democracy in an independent Iran.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mahmood-delkhasteh/the-21st-centurys-first-a_b_405108.html
Fatal Folly of the Online Revolutionaries
"There is no evidence that Twitter, the hot social networking site, played any role in Iran's spring revolt," writes Salon. "Twitter users could feel like they were doing something important and making themselves part of the story. That was, unfortunately, probably about all they were doing. "It's slacktivism," said Evgeny Morozov, who studies the use of new technology in democracy movements, in June 2009."
http://www.salon.com/news/bogus_stories_2009/2009/12/21/iran_twitter_revolution"Smug Twitter activists are wrong to think they are liberating Iran," writes Will Heaven in the Telegraph. "Twitter and other online networks have not improved the situation in Iran. It is deluded to think that "hashtags", "Tweets" and "Twibbons" have threatened the regime for a second. If all the internet could muster in a decade was smug armchair activists and pontificating techies, we may as well all log off in the New Year."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6903781/Iran-and-Twitter-the-fatal-folly-of-the-online-revolutionaries.htmlIran's Twitter Revolution
Forget CNN or any of the major American "news" networks. If you want to get the latest on the opposition protests in Iran, you should be reading blogs, watching YouTube or following Twitter updates from Tehran, minute-by-minute. I'm not sure what the Iranian regime expected when they fixed the election, but the outpouring of texts, tweets and video from Tehran has sparked a worldwide solidarity movement. Whatever the outcome, there is no going back.
