FamousSocial

MediAEventsRewind2011

The “Arab Spring” in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Mid-East heavily relied on the Internet, social media and technologies like Twitter, TwitPic, Face-book and YouTube in the early stages to accelerate social protest. There are even allegations that the CIA was blindsided about the Egypt uprising by failing to follow developments on Twitter.

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in despair at the corruption and joblessness. He died from the burns, but his protest, despite Tunisia’s strict web censorship laws, was rapidly fanned by online Internet tools.

On January 25 2011 opposition leaders declared that day, “Day of Rage” on which protesters would take to the street against President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule. The protesters included secularists, Islamists and Communists/ultra-left-wingers–a veritable who’s who of the Egyptian opposition. These protests lasted 18 days and Internet-savvy protesters used Twitpic, Face-book and YouTube to disseminate videos and photo-graphs and called on Egyptians to protest.

LibyaIn Libya, while the revolution was ultimately successful in ousting Muammar Gaddafi, social media played a minor role. Libya’s government maintained strong control of the Internet infra-structure, and Gaddafi as an ego-maniacal au-tocrat responded only to insurgent militia, once

Tunisia

The first domino was Tunisia where the underlying source of the uprising lay in government corruption, inequality, censorship and joblessness (even among the well educated youth). The protests began in December 2010 with a college-educated street

vendor’s (Mohamed Bouazizi’s) self-immolation in the coastal town of Sidi Bouzid

Social media must work hand-in-hand with an ability to mobilize citizens. It is far too easy to simply “Friend” or “Like” a movement on Facebook and a retweet is never enough. The challenge is to put boots on the street, as pro-testers in Tunisia, Egypt or Libya know only

Arab Spring

18 December 2010 – present

Content1 Arab Spring

2 Japan Earthquake

3 Wikileaks Scandal

4 Rebecca Black

5 The Royal Wedding

6 London Riots

Pages Content

Japan’s worst previous

earthquake was of 8.3 magnitude and killed 143,000 people in Kanto in 1923. A magnitude 7.2 quake in Kobe killed 6,400 people in 1995.

Japan Earthquake

An earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale struck off Japan’s north-east coast, about 250 miles (400km) from Tokyo at a depth of 20 miles.The magnitude 9.0 earthquake happened at 2:46pm (local time) on Friday March 11, 2011. The earthquake occurred 250 miles off the North East Coast of Ja-pan’s main island Honshu. Happened from how Japan is located on the eastern edge of the Eurasian Plate. The Pacific Plate, which is an oce-anic plate, subducts (sinks un-der) the Eurasian Plate, which is a continental plate, to the east of Japan. This type of plate margin is known as a destructive plate mar-gin. The process of subduction is not smooth. Friction causes the Pacific Plate to stick. Pressure builds and is released as an earthquake. So the earthquake occured at a relatively shallow depth at 20 miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. This, combined with the high magnitude, which caused a tsunami.

The controversial anti-secrecy WikiLeaks website began releasing US military documents in July 2010. It dumped the entire archive of diplomatic documents in September 2011, caus-

A US military tribunal’s investi-gating officer earlier this month recommended that army private Bradley Manning be court-mar-tialled for allegedly funnelling hundreds of thousands of classi-fied US documents to WikiLeaks. “Frankly we always had respon-

Manning, a specialist in US in-telligence systems, served in Iraq from November 2009 until his arrest the following May. He is accused of turning over to WikiLeaks a massive trove of US military reports from

the fact that an Army private could have had access to so much sensitive infor-mation has posed a challenge for the in-telligence communi-

Clapper added that the effort aims to protect US secrets not only from outside enemies, but from actors with the system who do not have specific

Rebecca Black’s

Friday

On March 29, 2011, it surpassed Justin Bieber’s “Baby” as the most disliked YouTube video, with 1.19 million negative votes, and once had over 3 million “dislikes”, ac-counting for 87% of the total ratings of the video.The video was later removed, though it has since been officially re-uploaded. The co-writer and producer of “Friday”, Clar-ence Jey said about the song that “the concept we feel seems to have crossed a lot of boundaries, for the better or worse.” Observers have called it “bizarre,” “inept,” and “hilariously dreadful.”The song and Black herself were “savaged” on so-cial networks across the Internet, while being seen as a “YouTube laughing stock.”On YouTube, the video was met with negative comments and video responses, includ-ing comments interpreted as “violent”.Kevin Rutherford, a columnist for Billboard magazine, wrote, “Black’s video for ‘Friday’ is one of those rare occurrences where even the most seasoned critics of Internet culture don’t know where to begin. From the singing straight out of Auto-Tuned hell to lyrics such as ‘Tomorrow is Saturday / And Sunday comes afterwards / I don’t want this weekend to end’ and a hilariously bad rap about passing school buses, ‘Friday’ is something that simply must be seen and heard to be fully appreciated.” Many other reviewers also singled out the lyrics in particular for criticism, which were de-scribed as “overly simple and repetitive” by TNT Magazine.Jim Edwards of BNET and Doug Gross of CNN both noted that the rap break from the considerably older rapper was “creepy.” Time ranked it number two on a list of “Top 10 Songs with Silly Lyrics.”

The RoyalWedding

Analysis of tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts by Webtrends, which gathers data on social media, shows that 65% of all social media related to the royal wed-ding has come from the U.S. in April. The U.K. has been responsible for just 20%.Need more proof of how important a part social media is playing? Royal wedding social-network chatter has surpassed that for the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the people’s uprising in Egypt.Also from Webtrends: 911,000 wedding-related tweets were tracked in the past 30 days. That’s about 30,000 per day and ac-counts for 71% of all social media tracked by the Web analytics company.And the TV networks are taking advantage of the fact that social-media-loving Americans are all over the Internet.They’re using social media to engage readers and share minute-by-minute news, giving wedding followers countless social-media-drenched outlets to choose from, including the BBC’s royal wed-ding Facebook page, CNN’s Twitter posts from celebrities, the Today show’s Facebook page and NBC’s Twitter account @royalwedding.

London Riot

"Fuelled by social media".

In the wake of a controversial police shooting, Britain’s capi-tal city has been rocked by two straight days of widespread rioting and looting. As with previous riots — such as those in Vancouver, British Columbia following the Stanley Cup fi-nal — everyone seems to be looking for a culprit, with some blaming Twitter and Facebook, and others pinning the vio-lence on BlackBerry and its instant messaging abilities. But that’s a little like blaming individual trees for the forest fire. As we’ve pointed out before with respect to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, these are just aspects of our increasingly real-time, mobile and connected lives, and that can be an incredibly powerful force for both good and bad.

Although they are completely different in important ways, there are also some interesting similarities between the riots in London this weekend and the uprisings in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. Both were triggered by the death of a man whom some believed was unfairly targeted by the authorities. In Britain, it was Mark Duggan — a 29-year-old father of four shot dead after being stopped by the police — and in Egypt, it was Khaled Said, a 28-year-old businessman who was pulled from an Idknternet cafe and beaten to death by secu-rity forces. Both deaths also led to the creation of Facebook pages that became the focus of a social-media effort that ultimately fueled the protests.

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