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Tag: social media

In the eye of the storm

Photo: Navy/ NRL Monterey

By Dimetri Whitfield

It is the morning of Wednesday, September 6, 2017. My eyes are only open through trepidation. I was barely able to get more than an hour of sleep the night before. Hurricane Irma, the second strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin, is barrelling through the North-Eastern Caribbean. The core of her 185 mile-per-hour winds sweep across Saba, St. Maarten, Anguilla, St. Kitts, among many other places. Places where I have numerous acquaintances, friends, and family members.

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Glocalising Social Media

Image: UCL Press
Image: UCL Press

By Jordi Bok            As anthropologist Daniel Miller takes place behind the microphone to start his lecture, a whistle blows through the lecture room. It is not a starting signal, but the noise of a WhatsApp-notification. Some people laugh, some look annoyed and others just ignore it. Slightly embarrassed, the girl sitting next to me quickly checks her phone to see who contacted her at this inconvenient moment. This perfectly sets the stage for what prof. Daniel Miller is going to talk about today, 12 February 2016, as part of the Amsterdam Anthropology Lectures at VU University: social media.

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Yemen’s broken youth

Break the Silence #SupportYemen March 2011
#SupportYemen March 2011

By Marina de Regt     “Aunt, if you know any way to migrate to Europe plz just tell me, I wanna run away from this world”. Said, the son of one of my Yemeni friends, sent me this Facebook message some time ago. I was shocked and first did not know what to answer him. While I got used to phonecalls from my friend Noura, who I support financially (see blog), the desperate situation in Yemen had never reached me through chat messages on Facebook.

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The death of the “twitter rev­o­lu­tion” and the struggle over internet narratives

By Donya Alinejad In her latest speech on internet freedom, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the internet the “town square” of the 21st cen­tury. Clinton seized on the wide­spread atten­tion for Facebook during the Egyptian rev­o­lu­tion and used the oppor­tu­nity to reit­erate internet-oriented US for­eign policy. Just days ear­lier the Egyptian people had ousted Hosni Mubarak, their dic­tator of 30 years. Cairo’s Tahrir Square had been occu­pied by pro­testers, stained with the blood of the revolution’s mar­tyrs, and gained iconic status as the center of the 21st century’s most pop­u­lous rev­o­lu­tionary move­ment. Soon after, pro­testers in Libya named the Northern Court in Benghazi “Tahrir Square Two.” If these events show us any­thing, it is that the town square of the 21st cen­tury is still, simply, the town square.

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