Since the Egyptian uprising began on January 25th, Flip The Media has been reporting on the role of social media, the Internet, and telecommunications in this historic moment. On Saturday, January 29, I had the chance to speak with Nathaniel Greenberg, a doctoral candidate at the UW currently living in Cairo.

When I spoke with him, the Internet had been down all day. Cell phone use had just returned but had been down for over 48 hours. Gunshots rang out the night before and the state news was advising civilians to form local brigades to protect themselves and their businesses from looting. Men from his neighborhood began gathering on the street with clubs, knives, broomsticks, bats, and other rudimentary weapons. Greenberg believes his neighborhood is one of the more stable ones, particularly because of the high concentration of ex-military members living there, but told me “there’s no authority right now.”

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Protests in Egypt exploded into violence yesterday as people took to the streets to denounce poor living conditions and the thirty-year reign of President Hosni Mubarak.

According to Al Jazeera, Egyptians began organizing protests through Twitter and Facebook on Tuesday morning. In an attempt to quell the unrest, the Egyptian government blocked Twitter around 6pm Tuesday night, but by then protests had begun in several Egyptian cities, including Cairo, Suez, and Alexandria, among others. A Facebook group garnered 80,000 members pledging to protest on January 25. Read more…

Imagine a newspaper that talks–yes, imagine a newspaper that talks to you!
Or imagine a grocery store suggesting what to cook for dinner using only products on sale. Or being part of a radio show without calling in. Or taking part in a presidential campaign by adding an electronic presidential button to your Twitter avatar.  These scenarios are all taking place today in Latin America. How? The short answer: Twitter.

Twitter has become a useful tool in Latin America in areas such as media, retail, and politics. For example, Diario Uno, a newspaper in Mendoza, Argentina, is known as the newspaper that “talks” because it interacts directly with its audience through Twitter.  “Our Twitter followers’ response in seeing that a newspaper reply to them has been enriching and has created a special loyalty to our newspaper,” said Nacho Castro, the person who is in charge of Tweeting for Diario Uno.

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During the 2008 Presidential election, the Obama campaign pushed the envelope in two significant ways: they set out to change the face of the electoral map by mobilizing new and young voters; and they took the guesswork out of their resource allocation strategy to achieve that goal.

Any real change to the political system needed a change in the electorate. Rather than fighting over the same aging, well-off, white constituents, the Obama campaign went after the young and unregistered voices–a heretofore untapped resource estimated at 55 million potential voters as of 2004 (Hayes 2008). Read more…

There has been an incredible amount of huffing about President-elect Obama’s use of social media tools during the campaign.  Much of the change that has taken place to date has been around how the country has connected around his campaign and how this will (A) be taken forward into the presidency, and (B) change the face of politics and public discourse. 

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Last week or so I was fortunate enough to get a quick email interview together with Internet personality Drew Curtis of FARK.com, which I posted to both my blog and Flip The Media. One thing Drew touched upon was, as he put it, the “bogus media creation of the ‘wisdom of crowds’.” This was also brought up again during Hanson Hosein’s latest lecture in our COM529 Research 2.0 course. The question is, essentially, is the sharing, collaboration, and collective action facilitated by social media always focused upon achieving a wise purpose? As Drew put it, crowds are “stupid, horny, and hungry”. There is an echo of this sentiment in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody; he asks the question: who decides which cause is right? As old media gives way to new, this becomes an increasingly important question. Like your mother always told you, just because everyone else is doing it, or in this case saying it, doesn’t mean it’s right. Read more…

Capitalizing on the current political climate and on the success of his HOPE poster, MoveOn.org has teamed up with artist Frank Shepard Fairey to create this commemorative “Yes We Did” sticker. This is a brillant marketing move by  MoveOn.org to vitalize their organization, gain exposure, and get a massive mailing list of politically-motivated individuals all to themselves for the love of stickering.

First sticker is free, and larger quantities are available for small donations. Similar to the phenomenon of newpaper record sales the day after the elections, these stickers are going like hot cakes.

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Google, in collaboration with the Voting Information Project, has a voting service up for the elections season at http://maps.google.com/vote. Enter your home address and get the name and directions to your voting station. You also get information on voting by mail and voting registration information relevant to your state, a voter hotline, and links to Google’s own election coverage site as well as the their election gallery map.

Happy voting to all tomorrow!