This article is a lot like
the video we watched in class a week or so ago about Cairo. Most of it was firsthand
account of the use of media to set up the protests. Ramesh Srinivasan starts off
by posing a question how are networks effected and affect by culture. He talks
about these networks online do not guarantee any revolution. In terms of that
they have to have grass roots in case the network get terminated, and also people
talking about revolution online does not always transition to the real world. Both
of these obstacles where no issues for the people in Cairo. Then he begins to
talk about his actually time in Cairo. In specific he talks about instants where
there was a strong social media presence. And then from the three stories he tells
he draws some conclusions. He talks about the how the leaders of this “leaderless”
movement need strong roots to communicate. And on the flipside other people do
not need to be so connects as long as a leader can get a hold of them. Ramesh
next goes into how social networks have his “media ecology” where information
can be spread rapidly. With sharing on Facebook and retweet button on twitter
information can spread quickly and become viral quickly. On the flipside he
mentions that some things just get taken out of hand when its spread so
rabidly. Then he goes on to conclude the use of technology after the President was
gone. They created places for online conversations and they “built bridges”
between technologies and institutional networks.
This article was written
by Ramesh Srinivasan who is an Associate Professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles in Information Studies at the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies and Design/Media Art. Ramesh passion is to
examine how new media technologies can shape and are shaped by the cultures
they are in. Ramesh has been featured on Ted Talks to talk about how cultures embrace
technologies. If you still need convincing he has been published 24 times and
reviewed 9 articles for other people. This particular articles has been cited
in 6 other articles. This article was posted on January 7, 2013, by The
Information Society: An International Journal. This comes almost a year after
the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, resigned from office.
I believe
this article was written for average Americans because it was really easy to read
but also it told a story. It told us a story almost like a journalist would
with his discoveries in Cairo. And this article was well thought out as he
researched it for 2 years and it took him a year after President Mubarak resigned
to publish the article. I could not find any physical reviews of this paper but
of the 6 articles that cited his article all of them seemed to agree with him. There
was no painful review unlike the case of Daniel Bell from earlier in the
semester. And personally I really liked this article because of all of the
stories it was interesting know what happened on the ground. And because of
that this turned out to be one of my favorite reads thus far.
Srinivasan, R. (2013). Bridges between cultural and digital worlds in revolutionary Egypt. The Information Society, 29(1), 49-60.
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