person:james harkin

The incredible story behind the Syrian protest singer everyone thought was dead
▻http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/syria-civil-war

Vous avez aimé la Gay Girl of Damascus ? Voici maintenant Qashoush, le faux poète de la révolution égorgé par le régime ? (Il y a des travaux universitaires sur son oeuvre, en France !) Bientôt peut-être on connaîtra l’histoire de la petite Twitteuse (anglophone) d’Alep, et même peut-être celle des enfants aux ongles arrachés de Deraa. Ca nous rappellera les bébés dans les couveuses de Koweït City, entre autres. #propagande #syrie

So how come a blatantly false story went around Syria and the world? “I don’t know who spread the rumour,” Farhood told me, with uncharacteristic irritation. “I hope I find him.” But it was someone from the Local Coordinating Committees, the new- media-friendly opposition outfits receiving ad hoc support from the US and other western governments, who was quoted in newspaper articles in support of the story.

The Syrian conflict was the first real YouTube war, where much of what we see comes via the grainy lens of a smartphone. Early on in the uprising some of Syria’s activists had put their faith in it to get their message out. They were encouraged to do so by foreign governments and well-meaning NGOs. As the vogue for “media activism” in western capitals developed, scores of young Syrians were invited to Turkey and paid up to ten times the Syrian national wage to make new media against the Syrian regime. None of it did their revolt any good. The resulting wall of made-for-YouTube agitprop compromised many young politicos and distracted them from the hard work of persuading their fellow Syrians away from the devil they knew. And in the end, when faced with the might of the Syrian regime and war-hardened Islamists, it turned out to be a very weak weapon anyway.

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Good media, bad politics? New media and the Syrian conflict
▻https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/news/item/article/good-media-bad-politics-new-media.html

‘Good media, bad politics? New media and the Syrian conflict’ : un long article de James Harkin sur l’utilisation des réseaux sociaux et des nouveaux médias dans le conflit syrien.

On n’est pas obligé de le suivre sur tout mais on est tout de même content de lire - enfin - des choses de ce genre. A l’exemple de ce passage près de la conclusion :
Even though they still rely on it, many of the media activists I talk to are disenchanted with the world of new media. Like the other light weapons afforded young Syrians by interested outsiders, it wasn’t enough to finish their revolution just enough to distract them, compromise them or get them killed.

LRB · James Harkin · Cyber-Con: Tweet for the CIA!
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n23/james-harkin/cyber-con

The Iranian protesters had every reason to be paranoid about the internet. While some demonstrators were busy drumming up virtual support from the outside world, the police were scanning social networking sites to round them up. According to Evgeny Morozov, the Iranian authorities and their allies were quick to get into the swing, and were soon flooding mobile networks and the internet with false information and videos of dubious authenticity as a way of intimidating, dividing or demoralising the opposition. ‘Dear citizen,’ one cheery text sent to known protesters began, ‘according to received information, you have been influenced by the destabilising propaganda which the media affiliated with foreign countries have been disseminating.’ Morozov, an alumnus of George Soros’s Open Society Institute who blogs for Foreign Policy magazine, knows from his native Belarus that electronic activism doesn’t necessarily blow the doors off repressive regimes.

#pdlt #cyberwar #activism