| | |
|
HarryLaymanSecondPaper 3 - 28 Jul 2009 - Main.HarryLayman
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Who killed Trellis Photonics and is Verizon next? | | | This Phone Kills Fascists | |
<
< | June 13, 2009 saw millions take to the streets of Iran in protest of rigged elections. The events that followed were leaked to the rest of the world via Twitter, an otherwise asinine social media site designed for many-to-many communication in 144 characters or less. This was not the first revolution to be tweeted, but it was probably the most significant in its impact on the world to date. Its beauty was that it allowed everyone with a cellular phone to become reporters, and its strength in the numbers of followers who, blessed in their naivete, expected fair elections. While the diffuse and polymorphic information topology created by a mix of cellular phones, satellite uplinks, and pseudonymous social media proved difficult for censors to navigate, it was [http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/the-choke-point.html][not impossible]]. The Iranian state deliberately crafted their communications network to all route through a single point, where they could (theoretically, at least) micromanage the flow of information through the country. | >
> | June 13, 2009 saw millions take to the streets of Iran in protest of rigged elections. The events that followed were leaked to the rest of the world via Twitter, an otherwise asinine social media site designed for many-to-many communication in 144 characters or less. This was not the first revolution to be tweeted, but it was probably the most significant in its impact on the world to date. Its beauty was that it allowed everyone with a cellular phone to become reporters, and its strength in the numbers of followers who, blessed in their naivete, expected fair elections. While the diffuse and polymorphic information topology created by a mix of cellular phones, satellite uplinks, and pseudonymous social media proved difficult for censors to navigate, it was not impossible. The Iranian state deliberately crafted their communications network to all route through a single point, where they could (theoretically, at least) micromanage the flow of information through the country.
Residents of most Western countries don't view their government and its control of telecommunications in the same light as Iran. Even when they read about warrantless wiretapping in the New York Times and its use to exert influence on key members of congress, they remain happy to pay seventy dollars a month for wireless phones whose workings they don't begin to understand. People trust that nobody is listening to their calls (because they're not important enough, because they have nothing to hide) if they think about the subject at all, which they probably don't. |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |