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Upcoming Events: Post Arab Revolutions: What Social Media is telling us (5/27)

Upcoming Events / Digital Media
May 21, 2014
berkman luncheon series

Post Arab Revolutions: What Social Media is telling us

Tuesday, May 27, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

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Since that fateful Youtube video of Mohamed Bouazizi started circulating in Tunisia, people started labeling the 2011 revolutions that sparked across the Arab World as the Facebook and Twitter revolutions. While that is not the case, it is undeniable the role that social media played in those and other revolutions that are emerging across the world. Taking a social networked analysis approach, I will talk about the initial findings of ongoing research being conducted on the Arab Blogosphere and Twitter maps from various countries in the region. This analysis has helped identify key actors in the region (and in some cases the absence of certain actors) in addition to the links between them. It is a fundamental step and a foundational one that will support building a knowledge base and that will help understand the flow of information and conversations -if any- between different activists in the region, while offering a position to study the tactics used by activists in the region to support their cause.

Dalia Othman is a Berkman Fellow and Visiting Scholar at MIT's Center for Civic Media. At Berkman, Dalia has been looking at online civic engagement in the Arab World, focusing on analyzing the Arab Blogosphere and Twitter maps of various countries within the region. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

video/audio

Malavika Jayaram: Does Size Matter? A Tale of Performing Welfare, Producing Bodies, and Faking Identity

berkman

India’s identity project is the the world’s largest biometric database -- currently consisting of almost 600 million enrolled. By locating this techno-utopian vision within the larger surveillance state that a unique identifier facilitates, Malavika Jayaram -- lawyer, Berkman Fellow, and Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore -- describes the ‘welfare industrial complex’ that imagines the poor as the next emerging market. She highlights the risks of the body as password, of implementing e-governance in a legal vacuum, and of digitization reinforcing existing inequalities. By offering a perspective that is somewhat different from the traditional western focus of privacy, she hopes to generate a more inclusive discourse about what it means to be autonomous and empowered in the face of paternalistic development projects. video/audio on our website>

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