News

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 11, 2012

This is not digital advocacy in the abstract: Bassel and I have friends in common. Please take a moment to sign the letter to support his release. And if you can think of other ways to help you can let me know. From FreeBassel.org: On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained in a wave of […]

In the last post on public access venue user findings, we discussed that while many of the users are young and male, that is not the complete picture. Public access venues serve people of all ages, and women frequent public access venues as well. Let’s take a look at their occupation status.

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.

July 6, 2012

Final reports from the in-depth studies will be released soon. In the meantime, we wanted to share a quick update from the Mobile Internet study. The Mobile Internet study explored the interplay between mobile phones, particularly mobile Internet, and public access venues in South Africa. Are mobile phones and mobile Internet making public access venues obsolete? Are they competition for public access venues? Or do users use their mobile phones and Internet in conjunction with public access venues?

July 4, 2012

The open-source, maker/hacker, DIY ethic is a driver of innovation and civic engagement. To hack is to engage with something and figure out how to make it work for you. It involves pushing boundaries, breaking a few rules, trying out something new, remixing, modifying, creating. Underlying this is a sense of agency: of people learning […]

July 3, 2012

To understand the role of social networking sites in social activism, this paper examines the April 6th youth movement’s Facebook presence and its evolution from a “Facebook group,” co-founded by two young Egyptians Ahmed Maher and Esraa Abdel Fattah, to a social movement mobilizing and coordinating protests on the street via skillful utilization of a “Facebook page” with technical features to gain the followers who would eventually take to the streets on January 25, 2011. To this end, we coded an archive of posts from the movement’s Facebook page and group in Arabic and the Facebook group in English from March 2008 through April 2011. This data set captures the movement’s Facebook activity from its inception to the consolidation of it as a mobilizing and organizing force garnering a broad level of support that crystalized in the first months of 2011.

June 28, 2012

We all know that providing information does not equal change. But it’s part of the process. As researchers, we can chunk and package and share our findings and recommendations in ways that make them more accessible. I like to call this edible evidence. And, if we’re really good (i.e., we’ve done some thinking about what we […]

June 27, 2012

As discussed in a previous post, communications & leisure tops the list of uses for public access ICT. While this is not surprising, use of public access venues for communications & leisure is often frowned upon, especially if the venue is publicly funded or has a development mission. Funders, governments, and non-governmental organizations of public access venues would often like to see lower use in the communications domain and higher use in other “development” domains such as government, health, and employment & income. The reality, however, is that communication activities, such as the use of social networking sites and emailing with family and friends, remain high across all types of venues. But does this mean other public access venue objectives, such as developing ICT skills and filling information gaps, aren’t being met? How do communications & leisure activities contribute to other objectives of public access initiatives?

TASCHA research on the role of public libraries and telecenters during a disaster was presented on June 23 at the 2012 American Library Association (ALA) conference as part of the panel, “Expecting the Unexpected: Libraries Respond to Profound Change.” iSchool PhD candidate, Beth Patin, participated on the panel on behalf of the research team behind the Libraries, Telecenters, and the 2010 Chile Earthquake research project.