Media studies notes

"Occupy Wall Street has become a lens through which more and more issues are being viewed, debated and rethought. This week, debates about the future of journalism and technology intersected with Occupy Wall Street in fascinating and productive ways. The journalist arrests and press suppression in New York and the SOPA debate in DC came just as Occupy Wall Street recognized its two month anniversary with events across the nation. Here are a few of the best things I read this week that use OWS as a lens to catalyze new thinking about journalism and technology. Read together they create a productive discussion."

"Today marks the first anniversary of the day WikiLeaks started to become a household name in the US—when Julian Assange released the video he had titled “Collateral Murder.” It showed a 2007 incident in Baghdad when a US Apache copter crew gunned down more than a dozen Iraqis, most likely civilians, on the streets below, including two Reuters staffers. After a flurry of publicity, the episode soon faded from the media, although three major WikiLeaks releases followed last year, all allegedly coming via Private Bradley Manning, now sitting in near-solitary confinement in the brig at Quantico. About the Author Greg Mitchell
Greg Mitchell writes the Media Fix blog for TheNation.com. A new edition of his book The Campaign of the Century: Upton…
Also by The Author [ Click for More ]
The Wikileaks News & Views Blog for Tuesday, Day 129
Greg Mitchell 5 comments
When ‘The Age of Wikileaks’ Began, One Year Ago, With ‘Collateral Murder’ in Iraq (Government, Media, World)
The first hint of what was to come came early in the year, when WikiLeaks at its Twitter feed made a public request for help in decrypting a video it described as “US bomb strikes on civilians.” For some reason, it suggested March 21 as a possible release date. Greg Mitchell
But largely thanks to one soldier who was in the thick of things on that day in 2007, the incident is far from over. He is Ethan McCord, who spoke out after the release of the video to testify that he was on the scene that day and helped rescue two badly injured children (who were riding in a van driven by their father who had tried to helped the wounded only to be killed himself) and carry them to a vehicle that took them to a hospita"

"It is irrefutable that social media have had a part in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, as well as in ongoing protests in other Arab and Muslim nations, particularly those with sizable online and urban populations, such as Morocco and Bahrain. Facebook and other digital networks can speed political communication and provide efficient tools for organizing protests. In combination with satellite broadcasters such as al-Jazeera, online networks can document government abuses quickly and spread awareness of them. Even more, the promises of free speech, modernization, generational change, and global inclusion that these media offer—their very newness, and the way they connect people and ideas across borders—may also foster an incipient form of political identity for some in the fed-up urban classes in Arab societies and Iran. Ghonim’s own sudden political charisma was surely a consequence, in part, of the popular and modern commercial brands, Google and Facebook, with which he was associated. Advertisement None of this is quite the same as accepting, as Ghonim evidently believes, that Internet use makes the liberation of oppressed societies more likely. That claim has been a subject of intense debate over the last several years among scholars, media executives, writers, Internet activists, and government officeholders. The latter include an influential network of younger thinkers who have collected around Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, helping her to define and advance “Internet freedom” as a prominent goal of American foreign policy."

"Journalists are not elected officials and they cannot be political representatives or advocates but they can represent people in a variety of other ways, for example by turning their experiences and problems into news, and by asking politicians and other authoritative sources questions to which unrepresented and poorly represented citizens need answers."