Today’s LikeMind/Social Media Chat centered on the role social media has played in the current upheavals in the Middle East. Jabril Faraj led the discussion and it touched on a number of different topics and the hour went by very quickly.
–Mona Sief was mentioned as an important organizer in the Egypt revolution, and Nick Kristof as an important journalist (tweeting from Egypt, and now from Bahrain)
-SocMed is very effective from a journalism standpoint, as FBook and Twitter entries provide a “time-stamp” on the entries, so readers get a sense of happenings, as they occur, in real-time.
-With the Middle East uprisings, SocMed through its “immediate-ness” managed to get a greater portion of the world interested, informed, and involved in a way that might have not been possible before.
-Even when the Egyptian government limited access to the Internet, people and organizations found different ways to continue releasing information to the “outside” world.
-Another “break0ut” from the uprisings was the legitimization of Al Jazeera English, the Mideast-based news organization. In days following the Egyptian uprising, the AJ website saw a 2500% increase in traffic, with around 50% of it coming from the United States alone.
-International news used to be filtered through governments and large news corporations, all who had their own biases. Now, information can come from pretty much anyone with a mobile device (but it’s all the more important to accept that those people too, have biases).
-This accessibility to the web demands that people, in addition to consuming information, need to equally seek to understand the context of the situations.
-Next LikeMind is April 15th, with presenter Sara Santiago of Roll Mobile.
T* Jamey Shiels
T* Colin Deval
T* Sharif Renno
T* Chris Taylor
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