Cyber dissidents, you know I love ‘em

I'm currently working on an update for both my semester projects. They are coming together nicely. While I don't have too much time, I had promised myself I would try to blog more. And I have failed to keep that promise as well as I would have liked. But I did come across something today that I thought was absolutely fabulous, perhaps for me and not the Egyptian government though.

In my International News Communication class, we're exploring different online publications in various regions of the world. It's often difficult to judge the publications because ultimately I'm American, and more often than not, the journalistic practice differs from mine. I have quite the fascination with Al Jazeera, though. My intrigue began the Iraq war and has only grown since I saw Control Room over a year ago. I often play clips for some of my classes, to give them a sense of how the journalists who work for the organization feel about their roles as journalists. This opens a whole other discussion on cultural variance and the role of journalism.

My point was simply to illustrate what Tomlinson called the "complex connectivity", a term that I think he might have borrowed from Hannerz. Tomlinson argued cultural practices are at the heart of globalization, and I tend to agree. I have begun to see the organization of political or economic life as forms of cultural exchange, for we organize both symbolically. Our choice between capitalism and communism is predicated on how we organize our understanding of the world, how we make sense of life and everything around us. This is why I think die hard capitalists who give nothing back to world are complete assholes.

Tomlinson also talked about disembedding, the idea of cultural artifacts removed from their original context, and the compression of time and space. I believe the idea of both time and space is very pertinent to the point that I want to make today. Without this compression, it would be difficult to show my students this:

Without it, we would need to rely on what many U.S. critics of Al Jazeera say about the news organization, being unfortunately bound to available news sources and historians to help us sort out the "facts". Rather we have a multidimensional world that facilitates a prism of varying perspectives on current events. The one I point out today is the story on the protests in Egypt. The story topped the homepage of Al Jazeera's website, of course coupled with a dramatic photo of an overturned car. There were many elements of the story that I found fascinating. Low wages and little access to staple food items would piss me off, and apparently these men and women in Egypt feel the same way. They are frustrated. The opinion poll, which is highlighted like a pull quote, can be seen in the screen shot below. But the most peculiar item, the coolest thing about this story, was the apparent online organization of the protests. I would not have believed it myself unless I saw it. The government is upset with a group identified only as "cyber dissidents" who are organizing protests in where of all places? The social networking site, Facebook. What better illustration of "complex connectivity" and "hybridity" is there?