Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism 

"Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the "indignados" protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest. Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a "cyberspace" detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around "occupied" places such as Cairo's Tahrir Square or New York's Zuccotti Park."

• network cultures,
• activism,
• public space,
• participatory media,
• hybrid space,
• street protest

Jonathan Peizer

The Principal of Internaut Consulting, Jonathan Peizer, has over two decades of experience in strategic planning, and successful execution of projects employing a broad array of technologies. His forte is identifying needs and applying the appropriate strategic solutions to meet them in international, cross-cultural settings in over 75 countries.

Realizing The Promise of Open Source in the Non-Profit Sector 

Every so often, a technology or protocol emerges that is touted as a ?magic bullet? either by the company or consortium promoting it or a core group of enthusiasts using it. Examples of this are WAP, OS/2, ISDN etc? The technology is initially promoted as having ?earth-changing? significance that will revolutionize the way things are done. Eventually most of these either fall by the wayside or take their rightful place as effective [but less hyped] mainstream tools in a much larger toolbox of solutions. The problem with the magic bullet approach is that it over-promotes particular technologies and often obfuscating the real benefits they could provide if evaluated and positioned in a more realistic context. For the for-profit community investing in failed magic bullets, the fallout is typically nothing more than an unfortunate R&D decision which can be expensed before moving on to the next IT investment.

The Language of Tactical Media 

"World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation." -- motto of Tactical Media Crew, borrowed from Marshall McLuhan

• tactical media,
• theory

Graham Harwood

Graham Harwood is the artistic director of the UK artist group Mongrel.

Product Placement in Learning Environments 

Technology companies have a long history of placing their products inschools and other learning environments. The reasons vary. Placement isdone through in-kind donations, competitive grants, achievement awards,and funds earmarked for technology projects. Most of the companies seetheir products as ways to enhance education, and many will claim therevolutionary or transformative nature of their wares. All of them hopeit will be a prelude to increased market-share.

10 Basic Facts about OCLP 

"10 Basic Facts You Should Know About OCLP for Fighting [for] True Democracy"

• politics,
• street protest,
• occupy

Michael Benson

Michael Benson is a writer, film-maker, and photographer. In recent years he has authored a series of illustrated books with space themes for Abrams, the leading publisher of art books in the United States. His new book, Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle, was well in reviewed in The New York Times, The LA Times, and other publications. Benson's Beyond exhibition projects are based on his book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes, which has been published in English, French, German, Spanish, Korean and Japanese. Beyond exhibitions of varying sizes have toured Europe and North America, and limited-edition prints from the Beyond project produced by Benson's company, Kinetikon Pictures, have been acquired by museums and private collectors.

• yugoslavia,
• cultural memory

Social media activism in the Arab World and China 

One day seminar and public evening debate on social media activism in the Arab World and China, organised by the Centre for Globalisation Studies of the University of Amsterdam, Monday 21 January 2013.

• tactical media,
• globalisation,
• theory,
• media theory,
• participatory media,
• middle east

The Dangers of Co-optation with Corporations 

Over 2,000 Ogoni, including their leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa have died since they started their non-violent campaign against Shell. Many Ogoni are still imprisoned today. Their only crime was to campaign against the ecological destruction of their homeland by Shell and ask for a greater share of the oil wealth that had been drilled from under their land.

• environment,
• campaign,
• propaganda,
• globalisation

Wikileaks: The Guantanamo Files: 779 classified prisoner dossiers revealed from the world's most notorious prison 

In thousands of pages of documents dating from 2002 to early 2009 and never seen before by members of the public or the media, the cases of the majority of the prisoners held at Guantanamo - 758 out of 779 in total -  are described in detail in memoranda from JTF-GTMO, the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, to US Southern Coand in Miami, Florida.
April 25, 2011

• wikileaks

ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) 

ACT UP, AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis, started in 1987. We meet with government officials, we distribute the latest medical information, we protest and demonstrate. We are not silent.

• AIDS,
• aids activism,
• act up

CAE: Framing Tactical Media 

Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.

• art,
• tactical media

A Concise Lexicon of / for the Digital Commons 

Access / Bandwidth / Code / Data / Ensemble / Fractal / Gift / Heterogeneous / Iteration / Journal / Kernel / Liminal / Meme / Nodes / Orbit / Portability / Quotidian / Rescension / Site / Tools / Ubiquity / Vector / Web / Xenophilly / Yarn / Zone

• public space,
• public domain,
• digital commons

Wikileaks: The Syria Files 

Today, Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files - more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012.

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• wikileaks,
• middle east

 Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies

The Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies is a research initiative of the University of Amsterdam (UvA).

The ACGS is part of the Research Priority Area Cultural Transformations and Globalisation.

• politics,
• media,
• globalisation,
• theory

Solidarity With All Hacktivists 

A demonstration in solidarity with Anonymous Hacker Jeremy Hammond occurred last night (December 3, 2013) at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn where he is temporarily being held. Just two weeks ago, the 28 year old was sentenced to 10 years in federal detention for cyber crimes. Amongst other high-profile breaches, he leaked confidential intelligence data to Wikileaks from a private intelligence firm known as Stratfor. Many consider Stratfor to be a "shadow CIA" operating under even less regulation and oversight than a government entity.

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• anonymous,
• occupy,
• hacktivism

Human rights, testimony, and transnational publicity 

In the period between the end of the cold war in 1989 and the events of September 11, 2001, human rights became the dominant moral narrative by which world politics was organized. Inspired by the momentous political and cultural transformations taking place at the time, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the spread of global communications technologies, promoters of human rights discourse optimistically predicted that a transnational public sphere dedicated to democratic values would emerge (We now know, of course, that such predictions were wrong, as early post cold war hopes gave way to the harsh realities of contemporary globalization).

• feminism,
• theory