Written on July 8, 2008 – 9:37 am
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Young activists are organizing rallies, strikes, and protests using Facebook in Egypt. Others are using YouTube to distribute videos showing torture and oppression.
For over 27 years, President Mubarak has ruled Egypt with an iron fist. Now amidst threats of imprisonment, activists are risking their liberty to fight the regime using high tech applications which the despot politicians haven’t quite worked out how to control (like they do the national media).
A growing swell of dissent is rising in the country, with more and more people willing to risk their liberty in order to get their voices heard. Many, however, are too scared to speak freely as protests are illegal and many fear being ‘disappeared’. The following short documentary outlines the struggles that those fighting for democracy in Egypt are facing and the new tools they are using to organize themselves. Click on the image to watch the documentary provided by Journeyman.tv.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on April 6, 2008 – 12:45 pm
Tessa Sterkenburg,
On Friday afternoon The Next Web Conference hosted the world premiere of the documentary The truth according to Wikipedia from IJsbrand van Veelen. The leading questions in the documentary were: Should we let just anyone state his or her opinion or should we leave the publishing of information to the experts? Could the openness of the web be dangerous? Who has the right to establish truth?
The people being interviewed are amongst others Jimmy Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia), Larry Sanger (the since-fired (Correction: Larry was not fired but laid off when Bomis needed to scale down from 12 to 4 employees.) co-founder of Wikipedia) and Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy).
Andrew Keen is against the openness on the web, and argues that we should give the right to publish back to the experts, so that we know that what we read on the web is actually the truth.
That is an interesting statement. If we draw a parallel to the description of World War II in the Netherlands then Andrew Keen wants us to read Lou de Jong only, even though many people want to hear the opinion of the famous 14-year old ‘blogger’ of those days: Anne Frank.
(Lou de Jong was the official Dutch historian during World War II and author of “The History of the Netherlands in the Second World War”. Later, this book series received a lot of criticism, as Lou de Jong was accused of misrepresenting the truth by being too favorable towards the role of the Dutch resistance during the German occupation.)
Rita Verdonk is a Dutch politician who recently set up a new political party in the Netherlands. During the launch of her party on April 3, she had lots of one-liners, but…no program! Rita is going to set up a Wiki and let the people, collectively, determine the program. Power to The People!
When I came home from The Next Web Conference and saw her on TV, my first reaction was: “Oh my God, we should really leave this to the experts”. I want someone who knows what he or she is talking about, studied it, balanced all the pros and cons of the problem, takes informed decisions. I want experts to do this! Not a crowd of uninformed civilians!
Similarly I have many American friends who are disgusted with the politics in their own country, and seem almost embarrassed about the fact that most people vote without really understanding the issues and the consequences.
In 1995, a poll on capital punishment in the UK showed us that 76% of British respondents supported the death penalty the UK. Yet, I am very glad that the British government then decided not to re-instate capital punishment.
At the same time I am very much in favor of democracy and freedom of speech. In 1994, I spent some time in Malaysia, a country that officially embraces democracy but didn’t always seemed to practice what they preach and, at the time heavily censored the media. I concluded after 5 months that I could never live there, because of the political system and their views on freedom of speech. However, my Malaysian colleagues insisted that you could just not let everyone say what they wanted. The government knows what’s best for you and you should let the government determine the truth… Hmm, doesn’t that sound like Andrew Keen?
Democracy is what everyone wants, but that doesn’t mean that every single decision should be made by the majority. A democracy means that we vote for someone who makes those balanced and informed decisions for us based on expert analysis. So when actual decisions are made we don’t want the people to be directly involved, but when it comes to information we do. What does this mean for our valuation of information? Do we take our information seriously enough?
Where do we draw the line? Obviously we value democracy highly. Wikipedia is a great resource as an instant and reasonably reliable reference. But do we want The People to determine our economic policies? Do we re-inforce the death penalty when the majority of people want this? Is the majority always right? And who are the Experts? The Malaysian government or the 14-year old blogger?
Considering that even scientific authors have to continuously revise what has been written: What is The Truth?
You can meet Andrew Keen personally during his European book promotion tour in April. Email him (ak@ajkeen.com) if you want to meet him in either Brussels, Amsterdam or Helsinki.
Written on December 24, 2007 – 6:13 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
At last years Le Web conference in Paris a large part of the audience was not amused about the sudden appearance of first one, then two and finally three politicians on stage. Worse, they were French politicians. My main memory is one of them saying ‘Le Web est très importante’ which translates to ‘The Web is very important’. I remember thinking ‘I didn’t travel to Paris, and paid good money, to hear a politician telling ME that the web is important!’. And it seemed that more people felt this way judging from the hundreds of blogpost following that conference.
One big concern that was voiced was that these politicians were mainly interesting (if at all) to French people. For an organisation that aims to have a worldwide audience it is kind of strange to focus on local politics. Of-course the French consider France the center of the world so that explains that.
Now Techcrunch has moved into politics too. They want to ‘provide a voice for digital policy and technology issues’ which is a noble effort. They are obviously doing a very good job at it and have gained a lot of mainstream press too.
But just as at LeWeb in Paris, as an international citizen, I feel awkwardly left out. Sure, in the end, the US elections will influence my life too. But as a non US citizen I don’t don’t find it an interestingly enough subject for an international technology blog, or conference. In a way TechCrunch appears to say ‘We focus on American readers’ and this message is not very welcoming to people not from America.
It isn’t that I blame Techcrunch about their interest in the elections. They do have a large and influential following and can have an effect. And politics is a rich subject that can generate a lot of content fast. As Will Rogers said “There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you”. Exchange ‘humorist’ for ‘blogger’ and you get the point.
Coincidentally Techcrunch is getting mixed up in a whole different sort of politics: copyright politics. It seems that Micah L. Sifry is not amused by Techcrunch choice of words when they picked ‘Tech President Primaries’ as a subtitle for their primaries. Sifry is Executive Editor and co-Founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a website that writes about the changing democracy in America, and he claims they started the ‘TechPresident Primaries‘ before Techcrunch came up with the idea. In a (now published) letter to Michael Arrington he insists Techcrunch rename the ‘Techcrunch Tech President Primaries’ and ‘acknowledge techPresident.com and the work we’ve been doing to get the presidential campaigns to be more internet-savvy’.
Sounds like a serious issue?
Not really.
As often happens in politics Sifry retracted his words the next day and claimed he had no choice but to ‘make our concerns public’ and ‘meant the phrase as a metaphor, not a formal legal accusation’.
I wouldn’t mind if the old saying ‘In Polite Company People Never Talk about Religion, Politics, Sex, or Money’ could be aplied a bit more to technology blogs and conferences.
Except for the Money & Sex part.
No, forget the Sex part too because as Ronald Reagan said:
“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”
I’m sure that the day after Reagan said this he also said ‘ I just wanted to make our concerns public and meant the phrase as a metaphor’.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
