News

August 6, 2014

TASCHA researcher Jessica Beyer has a new book out, Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization, published by Oxford University Press. People use online social forums for all sorts of reasons, including political conversations, regardless of the site’s main purpose. But what leads some of these people to take their online political activity into the offline world of activism? In her book, Jessica looks at political consciousness and action in four communities, each born out of chaotic online social spaces that millions of individuals enter, spend time in, and exit moment by moment: Anonymous (4chan), IGN, World of Warcraft, and The Pirate Bay.

April 24, 2014

TASCHA Research Assistant Professor Maria Garrido has a chapter in a new book, Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web, edited by Martha McCaughey. Maria co-authored the chapter, “Twitter as the People’s Microphone: Emergence of Authorities during Protest Tweeting,” with Alexander Halavais of Arizona State University’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The chapter covers Maria and Alex’s research on over 30,000 Tweets using the #g20 hashtag, largely protest Tweets before, during, and after the 2009 G20 Meeting in Pittsburgh.

July 9, 2013

I recently presented a paper on the different roles of Facebook during the Egyptian Arab Spring at the International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries (IFIP) 2013. This conference is one of the most important spaces to critically discuss the social implications of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in developing countries. IFIP not only brings together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers from different parts of the world, but also provides a multidisciplinary and multicultural space to discuss, plan, and work on theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges that ICT for development faces. IFIP 2013 focused on outlining crucial future challenges for the area, gaps that have not been addressed sufficiently, new technological possibilities, better understanding of institutional dimensions, and critical reflection on methodological approaches and theoretical positions that may guide our future thinking.

April 16, 2013

A recent TASCHA project, in the research area of Social Movements, explored how Facebook and social media was used in Egypt before and during the Arab Spring. The Youth, ICTs, and Democracy in Egypt project drew on social movement theory and emphasizes various lines of analysis, asking the main research question, how did the use of ICTs impact the evolution of the youth movement and the trajectory of the Egyptian revolution? Findings from this research have recently been presented at multiple venues by members of the project team.

January 17, 2013

What makes a Tweet influential, particularly during a social movement? Do influential Tweets share common messaging with other Twitter users and social media outlets? TASCHA Research Faculty member Maria Garrido, along with Alexander Halavais of Arizona State University, will present on the role of Twitter and the characteristics of influential Tweets and Twitter users during the G-20 meeting protests in 2009 at next week’s meeting of University of Washington’s Change group. The meeting will be held on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 from 12-1pm in the University of Washington’s Allen Center, room CSE 203.

November 9, 2012

Along with fellow TASCHA student Luis Fernando Baron, I had the opportunity to attend the 13th Association of Internet Research conference (AoIR 13). At the beginning of the conference, we were welcomed to the University of Salford by the Internet Research President Alex Halavais. He made a special point of welcoming first-time attendees, and as one, I felt personally greeted. Then the first session started with the “ignite” talks, where each speakers gets 5 minutes—but must have 20 slides and each slide must automatically progress forward in 15 seconds.

TASCHA students Norah Abokhodair and Luis Fernando Baron participated in the 13th conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) at University of Salford in Manchester between 18 and 21 of October 2012. The conference focused on the theme of technologies, considering the impact of the Internet in a context where life is entangled with technologies of all kinds.

July 23, 2012

The diffusion and exchange of knowledge between the dissent movements of the non-democratic countries is very important for the success of their struggle. Indeed, learning from both the best practices and mistakes of others who are in the similar situations helps you both to use the most effective tools, strategies and tactics in the similar situations of your own political endeavors, and to avoid errors which you could commit without such a knowledge transfer. During the Arab Spring such transfers occurred between many oppositional movements of the region, particularly – between the Tunisian and Egyptian ones.

July 12, 2012

Mid-December 2010 witnessed the largely unnoticed beginning of the sequence of highly contentious events which eventually changed the geopolitics of the whole Middle East. On December 17th, the individual protest action in the provincial Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid sparked a surge of protest activities which, within four weeks, ousted the long-ingrained regime of President Ben Ali and started a wave of revolutions across the whole Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, known as the “Arab Spring.” All these revolutions, despite their appearing differences, share a number of important features which allow researchers to classify them similarly. Particularly, in all these attempted revolutions, modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played important roles.

July 10, 2012

Over the past few months, the research team behind the Youth, ICTs, and Democracy in Egypt project has collected and coded a series of Facebook posts, blogs, newspapers, and interviews with key actors to tease out the different roles social media played in the trajectory of the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt (A6YM). This is the first of a series of blog posts which will share the emerging findings as the analysis of the data collected through this diversity of sources progresses. The multiplicity of narratives in the sources represented in the data will help us portray a more nuanced landscape not only on the varieties and variability of uses and roles of social media, but also on the complexity of the socio-technological interactions/assemblages among different institutions, organizations, and individuals that are part of the contemporary political processes of social change.