August 30, 2012
The Global Impact Study has recently updated the public access venue inventory web database. Access to the inventory database is easy and free – just sign up and sign in below to explore the different types of venues, number of venues, location of venues, and much more in six countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Lithuania, and the Philippines.
August 2, 2012
TASCHA Talk: Sara Vannini August 9, 2012 Social representations are systems of ideas, values, and practices people adopt to interact with their reality. Starting from this construct, this research investigates community multimedia centres in Mozambique and their perceptions by the local communities. Community multimedia centres are a particular kind of public access to ICTs…
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 16, 2012
TASCHA Talk: Buhle Mbambo-Thata August 1, 2012 The 21st century could be dubbed the “century of connections.” It is a century characterized by networks, digital content, cyber space and “internationalized spaces.” The information and library world has lived out these connections in several arenas. Dr. Mbambo-Thata discussed international librarianship as an energizing concept in a…
The Global Impact Study is pleased to announce the release of our user survey data. Over 5,000 public access ICT users were surveyed in libraries, telecenters, and cybercafes in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, and the Philippines. The data collected through these surveys is now publicly available in both SPSS/SAV and CSV formats. Accompanying the data at this time are two documents: a “readme” file that provides information on the complexities of the data, including survey skip patterns, and a document that explains new variables that have been added to the data to aid in data analysis.
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
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 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.
