Tweets and the Streets

Author: Paolo Gerbaudo
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745332482
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
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. An exciting and invigorating journey through the new politics of dissent, Tweets and the Streets points both to the creative possibilities and to the risks of political evanescence which new media brings to the contemporary protest experience.

Reclaiming Our Space

Author: Feminista Jones
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807055379
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
A treatise of Black women’s transformative influence in media and society, placing them front and center in a new chapter of mainstream resistance and political engagement In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women’s innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new, interactive way. Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular—one pithy tweet at a time. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them. Hard-hitting, intelligent, incisive, yet bursting with humor and pop-culture savvy, Reclaiming Our Space is a survey of Black feminism’s past, present, and future, and it explains why intersectional movement building will save us all.

Twitter and Tear Gas

Author: Zeynep Tufekci
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300228171
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
A firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements’ greatest strengths and frequent challenges To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti–Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today’s social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests—how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change. Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture—and offer essential insights into the future of governance.

#HashtagActivism

Author: Sarah J. Jackson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262356511
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
This “well-researched, nuanced” study of the rise of social media activism explores how marginalized groups use Twitter to advance counter-narratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent (Ms.) The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags, including #JusticeForTrayvon, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people. They show how marginalized groups, long excluded from elite media spaces, have used Twitter hashtags to advance counternarratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent. The authors describe how such hashtags as #MeToo, #SurvivorPrivilege, and #WhyIStayed have challenged the conventional understanding of gendered violence; examine the voices and narratives of Black feminism enabled by #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName; and explore the creation and use of #GirlsLikeUs, a network of transgender women. They investigate the digital signatures of the “new civil rights movement”—the online activism, storytelling, and strategy-building that set the stage for #BlackLivesMatter—and recount the spread of racial justice hashtags after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high-profile incidents of killings by police. Finally, they consider hashtag created by allies, including #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.

The Twittering Machine

Author: Richard Seymour
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788739310
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!

Author: Sasha Costanza-Chock
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262322811
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
An exploration of social movement media practices in an increasingly complex media ecology, through richly detailed cases of immigrant rights activism. For decades, social movements have vied for attention from the mainstream mass media—newspapers, radio, and television. Today, many argue that social media power social movements, from the Egyptian revolution to Occupy Wall Street. Yet, as Sasha Costanza-Chock reports, community organizers know that social media enhance, rather than replace, face-to-face organizing. The revolution will be tweeted, but tweets alone do not the revolution make. In Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Costanza-Chock traces a much broader social movement media ecology. Through a richly detailed account of daily media practices in the immigrant rights movement, the book argues that there is a new paradigm of social movement media making: transmedia organizing. Despite the current spotlight on digital media, Costanza-Chock finds, social movement media practices tend to be cross-platform, participatory, and linked to action. Immigrant rights organizers leverage social media creatively, even as they create media ranging from posters and street theater to Spanish-language radio, print, and television. Drawing on extensive interviews, workshops, and media organizing projects, Costanza-Chock presents case studies of transmedia organizing in the immigrant rights movement over the last decade. Chapters focus on the historic mass protests against the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner Bill; coverage of police brutality against peaceful activists; efforts to widen access to digital media tools and skills for low-wage immigrant workers; paths to participation in DREAM activism; and the implications of professionalism for transmedia organizing. These cases show us how savvy transmedia organizers work to strengthen movement identity, win political and economic victories, and transform public consciousness forever.

Networks of Outrage and Hope

Author: Manuel Castells
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745695795
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Book Description
Networks of Outrage and Hope is an exploration of the new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting in the world today, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas movement in Spain, from the Occupy Wall Street movement to the social protests in Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere. While these and similar social movements differ in many important ways, there is one thing they share in common: they are all interwoven inextricably with the creation of autonomous communication networks supported by the Internet and wireless communication. In this new edition of his timely and important book, Manuel Castells examines the social, cultural and political roots of these new social movements, studies their innovative forms of self-organization, assesses the precise role of technology in the dynamics of the movements, suggests the reasons for the support they have found in large segments of society, and probes their capacity to induce political change by influencing people’s minds. Two new chapters bring the analysis up-to-date and draw out the implications of these social movements and protests for understanding the new forms of social change and political democracy in the global network society.

The Story of The Streets

Author: Mike Skinner
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593068084
Category : Rap musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
In 2001, at the age of only 22, the virtually unknown Mike Skinner was signed for a five album record deal. Since then, Mike Skinner has won a worldwide reputation for fusing home-grown hip-hop with the proud British tradition of observational song writing, which stretches from The Beatles and The Kinks to Blur and the Arctic Monkeys. In the multi-faceted guise of The Streets he, along with the likes of his friend and peer Dizzy Rascal, has been largely responsible for giving British rap its own identity, distinct from that of its American influences. Alternating between spells of reckless indulgence and sardonic commentary on his own excesses, Mike Skinner has established the kind of instantly accessible pop persona which only comes along once or twice a generation. Now he brings us The Story of the Streets. Moving chronologically through five albums, and the different phases of his life that they represent, Mike shares personal details of his modest upbringing in Birmingham, as well as the wild extravagances of life in the showbiz fast lane. Personal, shocking and funny; but deeply intelligent, insightful, opinionated and searingly honest - this is a lesson in the making of pop history, narrated by a voice that has informed a generation.

The Great Post Office Scandal

Author: Nick Wallis
Publisher: Bath Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1838439056
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 511

Book Description
The Great Post Office Scandal is the extraordinary story behind the recent ITV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office. This gripping page-turner recounts how thousands of subpostmasters were accused of theft and false accounting on the back of evidence from Horizon, the flawed computer system designed by Fujitsu, and how a group of them, led by Alan Bates, took their fight to the High Court. Their eventual victory in court vindicated their claims about the defects of the software and exposed the heavy handed attempts by the Post Office to suppress them. The book also chronicles how successive senior managers, business leaders, lawyers, civil servants and Government ministers, at best failed to expose the injustice or, even worse, sought to cover it up, resulting in one of the largest miscarriages of justice in UK history. The author, Nick Wallis, is a journalist and broadcaster who has been reporting on the scandal for over ten years and who acted as script consultant on Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama that brought the affair into the national consciousness. As the public inquiry reaches its climax, and senior figures such as Paula Vennells come to be questioned, The Great Post Office Scandal reveals the full scale of what happened and will leave you enraged at how so many of our trusted institutions allowed the saga to go on for nearly a quarter of a century, shattering the lives of thousands of innocent people.

Twitter

Author: Dhiraj Murthy
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745665101
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
Twitter has become a household name, discussed both for its role in prominent national elections, natural disasters, and political movements, as well as for what some malign as narcissistic “chatter.” This book takes a critical step back from popular discourse and media coverage of Twitter, to present the first balanced, scholarly engagement of this popular medium. In this timely and comprehensive introduction, Murthy not only discusses Twitter’s role in our political, economic, and social lives, but also draws a historical line between the telegraph and Twitter to reflect on changes in social communication over time. The book thoughtfully examines Twitter as an emergent global communications medium and provides a theoretical framework for students, scholars, and tweeters to reflect critically on the impact of Twitter and the contemporary media environment. The book uses case studies including citizen journalism, health, and national disasters to provide empirically rich insights and to help decipher some of the ways in which Twitter and social media more broadly may be shaping contemporary life.