The arrival of Mahomad Morsi as President of Egypt is an unanticipated outcome of the convergence of digital technology with a long standing social movement. Reading between the lines of the reports from the mainstream western media over the past few days, it looks as if no one really wants to talk too much about a US educated engineer with a PhD leading the most radical political movement on the planet. No surprises there because no one knows what to do!
On July 1, Al Jazeera news carried reports suggesting that this would be a pretty normal presidency, given Mori's commitment to democracy. Al Jazeera also carried live and in full on TV the Egyptian presidential inauguration and related speeches. Long sections of sung sections of the Koran set the meaning of this event far away from US Capitol prayers by chaplains, or the fundamentalist Christian crazies who populate western democratic politics almost everywhere.
The point is that this is a major story with no end point. Plus, no country or government can invade to stop this shift.
Al Jazeera noted - actually one of their commentators noted - that Israel had not been able to stop the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. That too is a major shift. Israel as the bully of the Middle East, backed up by the US, is increasingly friendless and lacking influence. It's credibility is in tatters, with internal political opposition to its beligerant approach to the region gaining traction. Force will not resolve Israel's position in the region or the world, but some semblance of common sense diplomacy might.
Israel's will be forced to rethink it place against the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why?
The fact is that the brotherhood is the parent of Hamas. This is the big picture. Now in two cases - the West Bank of Palestine and Egypt - political parties closely associated with Islamic social movements have been elected to government. While Israel was able to literally corral Hamas on the West Bank it cannot do the same thing to Egypt.
Everyone will need to be prepared to understand what this means. In terms of my theory of proletarianization, it may mean that non-western styles of legislation, law and policy will come into play to become part of the flow of information. This will be as difficult to comprehend, just like any shift away from established patterns of knowledge.
If it involves a reworking of the Taliban's feudalism, the Internet will offer a means for exposing that backwardness for what it is. It may be impossible to comprehend: what can be done? There will be major shifts in how all manner of issues are addressed - listening to Arabic language and long sections of the Koran in a semi-theocratic copnvention removes any separation between religion and the state. That aspect of change will for example, take a lot of getting used to.
This will be transgressive knowledge.
The potential linkage between Egypt, Hamas in the West Bank and the rising tide of Islamists in Africa especially will be quick and clear. This will be due to the exhaustion of the dislocated and abandoned, the subaltern and the abject. The hopeless cases of contemporary life have nowhere else to go - unless you buy into the endless and increasingly shrill claims (some people call this Public Relations) by charities and Non Government Organizations to solve the problems of the oppressed... No wonder millions voted for the Muslim Brotherhood, which as I understand it, have some of the best social and development programs in the region. This was the same reason Hamas was elected in the West Bank.
These programs running alongside well conducted political campaigns will be mobilized by the Internet and related resources. The US Government will not be able to limit the circulation of the information from a duly elected government such as that in Egypt. The big news is that Egypt has a Muslim Brotherhood President which changes everything.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
Radio National broadcast - AEST 8-9 pm, Wednesday
Please note that Wednesday 27 June, 2012, at 8-9 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time a recent public lecture I presented will be broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Big Ideas program.
ALSO availabe on line
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/
The lecture is a selective description of Uprising: The Internet's Unintended Consequences.
The lecture was presented at The University of Queensland Centre for Cultural and Critical Studies. The center's Director, Professor Graeme Turner arranged and organized the event. My thanks to him, to the centre and all the people who attended the event.
ALSO availabe on line
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/
The lecture is a selective description of Uprising: The Internet's Unintended Consequences.
The lecture was presented at The University of Queensland Centre for Cultural and Critical Studies. The center's Director, Professor Graeme Turner arranged and organized the event. My thanks to him, to the centre and all the people who attended the event.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Digital dung heap - News Corporation vs The Guardian
It is difficult to resist the phrase in the May 26, 2012 editorial from The Guardian: DIGITAL DUNG HEAP! I didn't intend to put that in capitals as if I am exclaiming at volume, but the impression is that this is the bottom line for respectable types. (I do not know if The Guardian is respectable.)
Here is the link.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/26/jeremy-hunt-must-go-observer-editorial
Uprising's thesis is that the Internet has made it possible to not be regulated. Thus there should be no surprises about mobile phone hacking, no WTFs? about security and surveillance, not even a little blanch when we learn that our children see pornography. It is to be expected in the unregulated environment of the Internet.
The question is whether "digital dung heap" explains anything? Apart from corporate behaviour at a global firm like News International, there is no need to characterize everything as excrement, although it is tempting to seek to claw back the certainties of the past. As if there was a time when we were not swimming in it...
A somewhat semiotic reading of the digital dung heap accusation leads to the conclusion that The Guardian believes it is the defender of values that reflect pre-internet moral certainties. It is as if The Guardian editorial writers want to back track up the lower intenstine to a place where all nutrients are structured according to known categories: proteins, carbohydrates, fats. Somewhere a long way down the intestine a sphincter occassionally lets out the shit.
Enough of semiotics. The intestine analogy as a controlled space does not work in the Internet era. There is no clarity, even though that is what we have been led to believe and frankly still want to believe: that life is a series of controlled procedures. The Levenson Inquiry in the UK in response to the phone hacking scandal shows that if there's a shit place to go in civil society there are always willing candidates, criminalized minds ready to operate without the bourgeois rule book.
There is no digital dung heap. There is unhinged, deconstructed society.
Here is the link.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/26/jeremy-hunt-must-go-observer-editorial
Uprising's thesis is that the Internet has made it possible to not be regulated. Thus there should be no surprises about mobile phone hacking, no WTFs? about security and surveillance, not even a little blanch when we learn that our children see pornography. It is to be expected in the unregulated environment of the Internet.
The question is whether "digital dung heap" explains anything? Apart from corporate behaviour at a global firm like News International, there is no need to characterize everything as excrement, although it is tempting to seek to claw back the certainties of the past. As if there was a time when we were not swimming in it...
A somewhat semiotic reading of the digital dung heap accusation leads to the conclusion that The Guardian believes it is the defender of values that reflect pre-internet moral certainties. It is as if The Guardian editorial writers want to back track up the lower intenstine to a place where all nutrients are structured according to known categories: proteins, carbohydrates, fats. Somewhere a long way down the intestine a sphincter occassionally lets out the shit.
Enough of semiotics. The intestine analogy as a controlled space does not work in the Internet era. There is no clarity, even though that is what we have been led to believe and frankly still want to believe: that life is a series of controlled procedures. The Levenson Inquiry in the UK in response to the phone hacking scandal shows that if there's a shit place to go in civil society there are always willing candidates, criminalized minds ready to operate without the bourgeois rule book.
There is no digital dung heap. There is unhinged, deconstructed society.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Sunday, April 1, 2012
News Corporation hacking for pay TV business benefit
The story from Neil Chenoworth in the Australian Financial Review and also played on UK television late in March suggested major computer hacking of codes to undermine pay TV competitors of News Corp. Denials all round from News, including an extraordinary front page article in The Weekend Australian's opinion section denying pretty well everything. It brings to mind Shakespeare's Hamlet maxim about "protesting too much methinks" (and too early).
The pertinence of this to things digital is that the case has been made by Chenoworth and others that in the 1990s when hacking was used by News hackers it was not illegal. Here is another instance where digital technology was well ahead of the law. Writing in the AFR Laura Pringle suggested that there was nothing illegal at the time, in the practice of hacking cable and satellite pay TV video. I happen to disagree strongly with that view. From a civil society perspective, there should be some self-regulation, otherwise we start from the level of barbarity. I suspect that News Corporation would prefer not to be measured at that level.
More importantly, Pringle makes the point that there has been no strong response from the Australian Government to the AFR allegations.
"...have you noticed a slight difference in approach to the one the government took last year in the midst of the News of the World phone hacking scandal?
That was enough to prompt an inquiry into the regulation of the media, the Finkelstein inquiry.
Now, allegations that a major media player may have skewed the competitiveness of the pay television industry are something the government will rely on regulators to investigate. In fact, it was hard to see anyone from the government through the large dust cloud on the horizon when this story broke on Wednesday.
One also sensed a certain sluggishness among government lawyers, who seemed to be of the view that it was all probably OK since some of the emails had featured in unsuccessful court cases in the past.
Sluggishness, or a lack of political will to further provoke a media giant from a government in deep political trouble? Take your pick." http://afr.com/p/national/gillard_government_conspicious_in_ac8wuOAU99VDnfGwod9XsM
This is serious. It must be assumed that there's silence about these latest allegations because they are so serious that some things are not talked about and acted upon. Then of course there is the small ocean of News lawyers working at the push back against the allegations. See a letters that the AFR has published from NDS the company that News set up that did the hacking.
NDS letter to the AFR
http://afr.com/rw/2009-2014/AFR/2012/03/30/Photos/98f25b2e-7a15-11e1-ad2b-f7cbe133cf3e_NDS%20Letter%20to%20the%20Editor%20of%20The%20Australian%20Financial%20Review.pdf
Perhaps "the public" as observed in the Leveson Inquiry in the UK will shine some sunlight on this grubby matter.
Here is The Financial Times
"[Allegations made by The Australian Financial Review, BBC and PBS] come at a sensitive time, when Mr Murdoch’s company faces police investigations and an assessment of whether it is a “fit and proper” media owner in the UK; inquiries by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other US agencies; and an Australian review of a bid for Austar by Foxtel, in which News Corp owns a stake."
Talk about piling on!
The pertinence of this to things digital is that the case has been made by Chenoworth and others that in the 1990s when hacking was used by News hackers it was not illegal. Here is another instance where digital technology was well ahead of the law. Writing in the AFR Laura Pringle suggested that there was nothing illegal at the time, in the practice of hacking cable and satellite pay TV video. I happen to disagree strongly with that view. From a civil society perspective, there should be some self-regulation, otherwise we start from the level of barbarity. I suspect that News Corporation would prefer not to be measured at that level.
More importantly, Pringle makes the point that there has been no strong response from the Australian Government to the AFR allegations.
"...have you noticed a slight difference in approach to the one the government took last year in the midst of the News of the World phone hacking scandal?
That was enough to prompt an inquiry into the regulation of the media, the Finkelstein inquiry.
Now, allegations that a major media player may have skewed the competitiveness of the pay television industry are something the government will rely on regulators to investigate. In fact, it was hard to see anyone from the government through the large dust cloud on the horizon when this story broke on Wednesday.
One also sensed a certain sluggishness among government lawyers, who seemed to be of the view that it was all probably OK since some of the emails had featured in unsuccessful court cases in the past.
Sluggishness, or a lack of political will to further provoke a media giant from a government in deep political trouble? Take your pick." http://afr.com/p/national/gillard_government_conspicious_in_ac8wuOAU99VDnfGwod9XsM
This is serious. It must be assumed that there's silence about these latest allegations because they are so serious that some things are not talked about and acted upon. Then of course there is the small ocean of News lawyers working at the push back against the allegations. See a letters that the AFR has published from NDS the company that News set up that did the hacking.
NDS letter to the AFR
http://afr.com/rw/2009-2014/AFR/2012/03/30/Photos/98f25b2e-7a15-11e1-ad2b-f7cbe133cf3e_NDS%20Letter%20to%20the%20Editor%20of%20The%20Australian%20Financial%20Review.pdf
Perhaps "the public" as observed in the Leveson Inquiry in the UK will shine some sunlight on this grubby matter.
Here is The Financial Times
"[Allegations made by The Australian Financial Review, BBC and PBS] come at a sensitive time, when Mr Murdoch’s company faces police investigations and an assessment of whether it is a “fit and proper” media owner in the UK; inquiries by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other US agencies; and an Australian review of a bid for Austar by Foxtel, in which News Corp owns a stake."
Talk about piling on!
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Internet and hate crimes - continued redefinition of social life
Here is more in the continuing realignment of social life due to the Internet.
New York Times report headline:
"Jury Finds Spying in Rutgers Dorm Was a Hate Crime"
First paragraph:
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — A former Rutgers University student was convicted on Friday on all 15 charges he had faced for using a webcam to spy on his roommate having sex with another man, a verdict poised to broaden the definition of hate crimes in an era when laws have not kept up with evolving technology.
Please read the rest here:
This was a closely watched event after the story emerged in 2010-2011. It is more evidence of the changes due to the emergence of the everyday surveillance society. It shows the redefinition of actions associated with everyday invasions of privacy and bullying due to the Internet.
It is possible to see proletariainzation as I have redefined it: the Internet made it possible to surveil and "broadcast" someone's private behaviour. It is also possible to see the push back against the Internet's unregulated space of proletarianization. Theories that explore this territory are necessary now as the claw back to pre-Internet or civil society Enlightenment standards moves ahead in the US courts, as this case suggests.
The irony here is that an Indian student - as a member of a community frequently subjected to racist prejudice - has been successfully prosecuted for prejudice against a gay student for a hate crime.
The people bleating in protest about the Nanny State should think hard about what it means to not be able to resort to the courts or public institutions for restitution in cases such as this.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Academics and journalism
Having spent 15 years in and around US universities where journalism is taught I have some thoughts on the so-called split between academic training and in-j-house training. (This follows my blog March 12 about News Corporation's opposition to the recommendation of the Australian Media Inquiry, aka Finkelstein Inquiry for a News Media Council and News's arguments that there is a split between media studies academics and working journalists. The writer stifles a yawn, then perks up on realizing that this is serious stuff! After all I am Head of School that includes a successful journalism program.
http://www.bond.edu.au/degrees-and-courses/undergraduate-degrees/list/bachelor-of-journalism/index.htm?&fos=Journalism&cl=Your%20Degree
My experience in the academy from the US perspective is geographically grounded: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication was across the quadrangle from my office at UNC, the JSchool at Northeastern University in Boston was in the same building I was in in Communication Studies.
1. US journalists are better educated than Australian and UK journalists. This is surprising to me. After 20-30 years of university level education in journalism in Australia, News Corporation journalists still wheel out the old claim that education generates ignorance about how to do journalism. Only journalists educated on the job are to be either trusted or considered capable of real journalism. (How about another beer then?)
As a graduate of the University of Queensland Journalism program (1979 no less) this is a spurious claim by the uneducated intentionally slanted towards an ideological perspective.
Journalism education needs to be taught in the broadest possible terms, not only as technical craft. It needs to incorporate all the nuances, challenges and variety of a top quality liberal arts education so that its practitioners practice the investigation of the range of human experience. This approach will also incorporate the key concerns of critical thinking and creative problem solving.
Furthermore, journalism education needs to be incorporated into progressive institutional contexts, because journalism is probably one of the bastions of progressivism - the perspective that includes the values of equity, tolerance and fraternity, liberalism by any other name - and involves a forward thinking commitment. The antonym is backwards looking ill-liberalism.
Both the US institutions I taught at expected their students to embody these kinds of values and approaches. To argue that there is a split between the academy and journalism is to argue for the wrong thing.
2. On the question of journalism education and politics I have some comments.
The sense that education incorporates left or progressive politics should be neither here or there. In liberal democracies, social democracies or their derivations the purpose opf the media is to reflect on and influence the democratic opportunities available to citizens. This should be an open ended commitment, reflected through the lens of journalists educated to make decisions and judgements about what is socially good in civil society. It may be a surprise for some journalists to realize that educated people do not think of money and wealth as an end in itself.
http://www.bond.edu.au/degrees-and-courses/undergraduate-degrees/list/bachelor-of-journalism/index.htm?&fos=Journalism&cl=Your%20Degree
My experience in the academy from the US perspective is geographically grounded: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication was across the quadrangle from my office at UNC, the JSchool at Northeastern University in Boston was in the same building I was in in Communication Studies.
1. US journalists are better educated than Australian and UK journalists. This is surprising to me. After 20-30 years of university level education in journalism in Australia, News Corporation journalists still wheel out the old claim that education generates ignorance about how to do journalism. Only journalists educated on the job are to be either trusted or considered capable of real journalism. (How about another beer then?)
As a graduate of the University of Queensland Journalism program (1979 no less) this is a spurious claim by the uneducated intentionally slanted towards an ideological perspective.
Journalism education needs to be taught in the broadest possible terms, not only as technical craft. It needs to incorporate all the nuances, challenges and variety of a top quality liberal arts education so that its practitioners practice the investigation of the range of human experience. This approach will also incorporate the key concerns of critical thinking and creative problem solving.
Furthermore, journalism education needs to be incorporated into progressive institutional contexts, because journalism is probably one of the bastions of progressivism - the perspective that includes the values of equity, tolerance and fraternity, liberalism by any other name - and involves a forward thinking commitment. The antonym is backwards looking ill-liberalism.
Both the US institutions I taught at expected their students to embody these kinds of values and approaches. To argue that there is a split between the academy and journalism is to argue for the wrong thing.
2. On the question of journalism education and politics I have some comments.
The sense that education incorporates left or progressive politics should be neither here or there. In liberal democracies, social democracies or their derivations the purpose opf the media is to reflect on and influence the democratic opportunities available to citizens. This should be an open ended commitment, reflected through the lens of journalists educated to make decisions and judgements about what is socially good in civil society. It may be a surprise for some journalists to realize that educated people do not think of money and wealth as an end in itself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)