Last week Hari Sreenivasan the Director of Digital Partnerships at PBS and at PBS NewsHour correspondent appeared at a special event hosted by Seattle’s KCTS 9 public television station.  Held a stone’s throw from the Space Needle–Seattle’s iconic architectural monument to progress–at the small station’s studios, this was a special event for students in the University of Washington Master of Communication in Digital Media program and was followed by an interview and event with station donors.

A video of highlights from the conversation with MCDM students and a complete transcript are available on the KCTS 9 website.

According to Sreenivasan, who is a proponent of the growing “slow news” movement, “The value of breaking news is going down faster than you can post it.”
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If you somehow missed it, New York Congressional Representative Andrew Weiner is being paraded around as the latest exhibit in an especially lively spring sex scandal season. What I’ve found most interesting about “Weinergate” hasn’t been the scandal, but the questions it raises about certain digital media ethics.

While admitting his online indiscretions, Weiner stated that there was no prior relationship between him and Whatcom Community College student Gennette Cordova, the intended recipient of a photo of him in his boxer shorts:
“Last Friday night, I tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle…. This woman was unwittingly dragged into this and bears absolutely no responsibility. I am so sorry to have disrupted her life in this way.” (source)

Part One: Reputation Management

The BigGovernment.com site that first broke the story has since doggedly documented a number of online affairs that Weiner has admitted to. From the way publisher Andrew Breitbard has injected himself into the story it seems clear that if he had any evidence of a previous relationship between Cordova and Weiner he would happily share it. But even in the absence of evidence of a relationship, the story is frequently being reported as though Cordova and Weiner had been having an ongoing virtual affair, as in this quote from Time magazine: “…it had been intended for viewing only by a woman in Seattle with whom he’d developed an online relationship.” (source)

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Last year, in a now-infamous article titled Small Change Malcolm Gladwell used the phrase “weak ties” to describe relationships predicated on and perpetuated within social media networks. He argued that this type of activism “makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”

A few months later, I joined in on a still ongoing debate regarding social media’s role in the social and political change going on in the Arab world.

During that time, most of my research and analysis focused on social media’s role in sparking and perpetuating an uprising—how Twitter and Facebook facilitated the uprisings, if at all.

But for the past six weeks, working at a tiny international nonprofit called VE Global, my understanding of social and digital media’s role in social change has deepened. Read more…

“We talk about technology because there is nothing else to talk about if you want to sound intelligent.” Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov, author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” spoke to a large crowd in Kane Hall at the University of Washington Tuesday night with his twist on a topic that generally accepted by digital missionaries: Does Internet access and social media spread democracy? Morozov says not necessarily.

“Some people have an almost religious approach to the Internet. They hold the internet as the Great Liberator,” Morozov said.

Morozov brings up a number of examples to illustrate his main point: Internet access and social media do not automatically lead to more democracy and less oppression.

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Digital-political activism, organized around Facebook and Twitter, has gotten a lot of credit for driving the revolution in Egypt and continuing unrest in other Arab nations.

In the US and other Western countries, social networking tools have already changed the ways that most of us live our lives.

So why haven’t they driven the same kind of social protests they’re credited for spurring in the Middle East?  After all, the US and the EU are more wired than Egypt and Tunisia, and many Western democracies have  high levels of unemployment.  The US and UK are also facing dramatic cuts in social services.  Is it just a matter of time before “clicktivism” moves to the streets of London or D.C. as it did in Tunis and Cairo?

A group of digital activists calling themselves “UK Uncut” have been using Twitter and Facebook to organize protesters for sit-in demonstrations at UK banks and financial institutions that received bail-out money during the 2008 financial crisis.  These “bail-ins” have been called in protest of dramatic social service cuts to public institutions like libraries, health care and higher education subsidies.  UK Uncut can claim more than 18,000 followers on Twitter and nearly as many “likes” of its Facebook page.

An American spinoff, “US Uncut” is planning similar protests at banks and corporate headquarters on February 26^th, including the Amazon.com headquarters in Seattle.

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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…

From what I can tell so far, no — or it’s way too early to tell since January 14th, when Tunisia’s authoritarian leader fled the country in the face of a month of public protests [though please see my update at the end of this post].

I spent a lot of time reporting in the Middle East, but I haven’t been there since the rise of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, so I can’t pretend to be a first-hand expert on the use of social media there (I did give a Seattle Town Hall talk last year on Digital Media, Storytelling and the Repression of Communication and referenced Iran’s so-called “Twitter Revolution”).

So as I hear rumblings on the role of social media (and Wikileaks) in Tunisia’s recent uprising, I feel compelled to resort to those whose observations I trust on this matter: Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center), Evgeny Morozov (author, The Net Delusion) and Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Dish).

Foreign Policy published thought pieces from both Morozov and Zuckerman yesterday. Read more…

You gotta love Russian President Dimitry Medvedev (or maybe not!). He’s the world’s most powerful Deep Purple fan. And it seems as if he updates his own Twitter account — at least the Russian-language version.

Of course, it’s easy to assume that heads of state have teams of handlers who do their direct online communication for them. For instance, I’ve gone back and forth on whether Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s now-hacked blog broadcasted his personal musings direct-to-the-people. But judging by the personal voice of Medvedev’s Twitter feed (i.e. “My father taught a lot of graduate students from Vietnam. It was very nice to meet some of them today“), I’m thinking that he probably writes his own tweets, but maybe gets help uploading the photos from his SLR.

Such as this Twitpic from November 1st, replete with status update:

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