BEIRUT: Lebanon still lags behind in terms of digital activism,
despite the fact that elsewhere in the region social media has gone from a
convenient way to socialize to a powerful tool for organizing, promulgating and
disseminating information, social media expert Andy Carvin said Monday.
Carvin has used his extensive contacts across the Middle East to
aggregate and verify on-the-ground content – photos, videos and observations –
of the popular uprisings on his Twitter feed. Currently a senior strategist at
National Public Radio, based in Washington, D.C., Carvin is in Beirut for a
conference on digital and media literacy at the American University of Beirut
and sat down with The Daily Star to discuss his experiences covering the
uprisings and Lebanon’s digital activism.
“Though there are reporting aspects of my work, my purpose was
to see how the events of the Arab uprisings played out in social media,” said
Carvin. “I had never before been in the position where people I knew were
raising the barricades and looking to take a down a government.”
The personal stake Carvin felt in the uprisings through the
contacts he maintained in the region motivated him to document the events
through an original kind of digital and oral history.
Information from social media tends to face a level of scrutiny
and wariness not given to traditional forms of media, but Carvin said he found
ways of vetting information and sources.
“The information is solid – Twitter seems to be naturally
self-correcting, with other users keeping you in line,” said Carvin. “You also
learn which accounts are consistently supplying reliably trustworthy content.”
The issue, he said, is more often with sources who are deeply
invested in one side of current events and propagate false information that
they wish were true.
While Lebanon is regarded in the region as having a relatively
vibrant civil society and a strong press, it has one of the region’s weakest
digitally aware activist communities, according to Carvin.
“Lebanon seems to have a Casablanca quality, where political
refugees come to settle, but there’s a lack of an equivalent native class of
activists,” said Carvin. “My connections within Lebanon are mostly political
refugees: Syrians or Yemenis.”
Explaining this absence, Carvin proffered observations on how a
country’s digital, citizen-created content can develop into something substantive.
“An example of this would be Tunisia,” began Carvin. “When I
first visited a few years ago for a conference, there were a number of blogs
centered around technology, but a lack of political blogs.”
According to Carvin, political blogs by Tunisians were all run
by political refugees living abroad. However, “by the time the revolution came
around, the blogosphere had matured, and there were a number of political blogs
whose authors resided in the country.”
Carvin
expects that a formidable Lebanese digital activist presence will be born of a
similar process.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2011/Nov-01/152749-lebanon-lags-behind-in-digital-activism-expert.ashx#axzz1cM0MwuVp
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