Tweeting Tyrants Out of Tunisia: Global Internet at Its Best | Threat Level | Wired.com#iframe_height=300#iframe_height=300#iframe_height=300#iframe_height=300
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Look people - No one's saying that the internet brought down the Tunisian Government all by it's self. What this wired piece is trying to say is that the internet can be a useful tool in bringing about dialogue, peaceful change, agreement, information and the truth all of which can help prevent bloody warfare it is hoped. Of course there is also disinformation on the internet but like any tool (example: an Axe) it can be used for good purpose or bad purpose! - It's up to you!
Now we just need to make it work in the US.
Governments already know what's going on. They have intelligence agencies dedicated to this. A few street level pictures being shared on blogs and twitter accounts is just a joke. What you do is nothing more than public masturbation. Twitter and Facebook did not topple anything and never will. They are just a soapbox for the masses of idiots with nothing else to do. The internet is what facilitates citizen level dispersion of information, not social media sites. All of this info could just as easily be emailed to CNN, the BBC or whoever.
Just because these sites allow more people to easily access the information is meaningless when 99.999999999999999% of those people have no way or intention to use that information outside of satisfying their own curiosity and wasting some time while at work.
the CIA didn't even know that the "evil empire" (USSR for you youngsters) was on the verge of collapse until it had, in fact, collapsed.so much for your notion of omniscient governments and their grossly misnamed "intelligence" agencies.
I think virtually every subsection of this article strives to show, and mostly succeeds in doing so, that the people on these websites were doing something much more substantive than just "public masturbation." Particularly the DDoS attacks by anonymous... how, exactly, should they have got "on the street" when the vast majority of them were neither in the country, nor (likely) within a thousand miles of it?
But then again, you probably didn't mean too much by the masturbation comment. It just slipped out, because your thoughts were already on the next sentence about facebook.
To all of you self-pleasuring tweeters, I hope you are enjoying the fantasy that you have created social change in Tunisia. I also hope that you are willing to accept some responsibility when then whole thing devolves into mass violence, death, destruction and the imposition of a dictatorship.
Ben Ali was not brought down by twitter, facebook or wikileaks. He was brought down by lower class demonstrators from the hinterlands who burned themselves alive and threw themselves at the guns of the army and police. The yuppies and middle class people didn't start demonstrating until he was already finished. The people in Tunis and the big developed coastal cities didn't start demonstrating until the last week, after a month of savage violence and protests in the underdeveloped parts of the country. When the people from the poor neighborhoods of Tunis finally started rioting and sacking the villas of the rich in Hammammat last week, that's when the Army decided it was over for Ben Ali.
And these people don't use Twitter.
Please stop with the solipsistic twitter revolution stories, Wired. You're supposed to be smarter than this. The whole world does not operate on the same premises as middle class hipster tweeters from San Francisco and New York.
This revolution was built on blood and pain, not social network utilities.
See Facebook Karen Yukie Yamada
See twitter.com/FernSpoke
I haven't been following this story as closely as I should have, so I didn't know about the anonymous connection. Nice article.
SuperSecretWikileak: I'm betting over 2/3 of Americans do not know or care about this. This story is horrendously under-covered by news agencies. Wow Wired, this article really
*sunglasses*
shocked me
too bad President OilPhRMA wants to make "twitter" an arm of US intelligencewhen will we be rid of our own tyrants?
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