https://twentysix.fibreculturejournal.org/wp-content/themes/fcjissue19/images/headers/default.jpg
// archives

networks

This tag is associated with 5 posts

Issue 26: Entanglements – Activism and Technology

By ⋅ December 22, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

During the 2009 post-election protests in Iran, YouTube proved useful for raising awareness and mobilising people; but later, the Iranian government used these videos to crowd-source the identification of protesters. Activists used Skype to communicate during the Egyptian uprising thinking it was safer than the terrestrial telephone system; however, when they examined files from the intelligence agency in the chaos after Mubarak’s fall they learnt their Skype calls were being closely monitored by Egypt’s security service . One of the most circulated images appealing for public sympathy and money following the 2015 catastrophic Nepal earthquake turned out to be a ruse—an old image from North Vietnam—its circulation initiated by unknown people with unknown motivations. These examples serve to remind us that while digital technologies are now deeply entangled with activist practices that are focused on contributing to social change, the philosophies and capacities embedded within these technologies often contradict, counteract, […]

FCJ-193 Harbouring Dissent: Greek Independent and Social Media and the Antifascist Movement

By ⋅ December 17, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Sky Croeser Curtin University Tim Highfield Queensland University of Technology Introduction Activists’ uses of digital technologies are complex, and technologies are not only shaping the available possibilities for social change but are also being changed themselves through activists’ work. In this article we look at Greek activists’ use of a range of communication technologies, including social media like Twitter and Facebook, blogs, citizen journalism sites, Web radio, anonymous networks, and email. We use Anna Tsing’s (2005) model of friction to understand how frictions might productively influence or slow the use of particular digital technologies, examining the intersections between human and non-human actors, ideologies and experiences, in influencing the choices made by activists. Our analysis focuses on the Greek antifascist movement, primarily in Athens, noting that ‘the antifascist movement’ is largely a constructed object. We see Greek anarchist and anti-authoritarian organising as a key element of this movement, and note that […]

FCJ-192 Sand in the Information Society Machine: How Digital Technologies Change and Challenge the Paradigms of Civil Disobedience

By ⋅ December 17, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Theresa Züger Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society Stefania Milan University of Amsterdam Leonie Maria Tanczer Queen’s University Belfast Introduction Oscar Wilde (1909) once wrote that ‘[d]isobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.’ In that sense, civil disobedience, which is a dissident form of political protest (Hahn, 2008: 1365), is embedded in a historical context and enables societal advancement while also leading to public friction. As society faces inequality, global mass surveillance and unequal power dynamics, civil disobedience has certainly not lost its importance in the twenty-first century. However, due to the development of the Internet and its broad use and deployment, the tactics and tools of civil disobedience have changed. We are witnessing acts of disobedience in both an offline and online context, which highlight the diversity of mechanisms […]

FCJ-191 Mirroring the Videos of Anonymous: Cloud Activism, Living Networks, and Political Mimesis

By ⋅ December 17, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Adam Fish Lancaster University Introduction In August 2012, Wikileaks was hit with a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from a mysterious group appropriately titled Antileaks. DDoS assaults occur when multiple computers simultaneously ‘refresh’ a website causing it to overload and shutdown. A shaken-up Wikileaks tweeted: ‘The range of IPs used is huge. Whoever is running it controls thousands of machines or is able to simulate them’ (Kerr, 2012). This is a constant problem for Wikileaks. Their website reads: ‘WikiLeaks is currently under heavy attack. In order to fully protect the CableGate archives, we ask you to mirror it again’ (Wikileaks.org). Eventually repelling the Antileaks attack, Wikileaks again took to Twitter to boast: ‘DDoS proof, financially & geographically diverse. We’re ready to rumble’ (Kerr, 2012). For Wikileaks, mirroring means copying and pasting the CableGate archives in resilient servers so that the content remains visible. Infamous for Guy Fawkes masks, […]

FCJ-190 Building a Better Twitter: A Study of the Twitter Alternatives GNU social, Quitter, rstat.us, and Twister

By ⋅ December 17, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Robert W. Gehl The University of Utah Introduction: Universalised Twitter Meets Its Alternatives Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) explores the moments when a universalised practice (for example, global capitalism) gets a grip on a local context (for example, in an Indonesian rain forest). When the slippery universal, which in some circles might be lauded as ‘frictionless’ (as in ‘frictionless capitalism’), meets local contexts, frictions occur. Friction traces the move from the desire for frictionless ideals to its awkward and messy contact with situated realities. Friction is resistance, but it is also productive and necessary for any energetic system. Taking up this idea, this paper traces the friction between Twitter and Twitter alternatives. In this sense, Twitter is situated as ‘universalised’ (Koopman, 2013: 19), which is to say that it is now an idealised form of online communication. Twitter has established a format of online communication—microblogging—that is […]

—