> Gladwell is a total dick. Here's my take on his technophobia: > > http://louisproyect.org/2010/10/17/revolutionary-politics-and-social-networking/
The Internet has as revolutionary a potential as the Gutenberg press had in the 1600s. Louis Proyect ------------ (I just realized the blog post on Malcolm Gladwell goes back to Oct 2010.) I could quibble, but won't. There are many other little notes that I agree with, particularly the note on Lenin and the newspaper. From Trotsky's writing, T was constantly getting a hold of a newpaper printing shop to put out essays and diatribes for the cause, and usually lasted only a few months until the authorities tracked down the shop and threw them out. Since I took printmaking and knew something about art printing, it was fun to read about these fly by night news rags. The early 20thC presses were technical marvels, but not that technical that the skills couldn't be learned on the job pretty quickly. That kind of closeness between writing and producing printed material made it a great medium for revolution. The parallel isn't to social network media, but video, on line mags, email lists, and blogs where the capacity is greater and you don't need to know someone to get the information or produce it. ``That's the position we are in today. We no longer are at the mercy of a crappy magazine like The New Yorker that propagandized relentlessly for the war in Iraq. Through the Internet we can spread the word without relying on the high priesthood of the corporate media..'' (LP) The addition of a central media source like AJE was (until it disappeared into a cable show), a real hub of distribution. I could pick up a story from them, watch a short documentary, listen to a panel, and then follow events elsewhere. It really reproduced the Egyptian revolution live, so the revolution was televised once. RT and France 24 were additional help on some levels as was Democracy Now. They all came together again for events in Europe and later in the US with OWS. The social media was good for sewing together a large crowd so it could communicate with itself and attract, report, and interact with participant families, friends, and of course be monitored by its enemies. You can bet that the NSA and Euro equivalents were working 24/7 + OT to keep up with these events, their factions, and feeding the Egyptian military, other Arab elite sectors, and Israel information---on one of those `close ties' ... as well as ploting out somekind of foreign policy response. When OWS hit the US, it took a few weeks to organize a unified national reaction through police channels on how to deal with the small but effective demos here. That's a story that hasn't been fully developed, but it was apparent there was some kind of backdoor police collusion across the country. At a guess it probably involved Homeland Security and the NSA along with whatever federal agencies supply state police with their weapons and communication infrastructure. The establishment reactions on the East coast were far more coordinated than on the West Coast. I don't want to go off the deep end conspiracy---but some kind of national coordination of responses was going on. Really that needs to be investigated as a deep background story to illuminate just how government agencies were involved. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
