You may have noticed that sooner or later, every Internet discussion that turns ugly (and what of them don’t?). And once they turn ugly, it seems that before long one of the people arguing will compare the other person to the Nazis.
NOTE: This is a re-post of the 2009 blog entry. All of the videos linked to here contain disturbing, violent imagery.The news out of Iran about the violent suppression of people protesting the results of the recent Iranian election has been chilling.
No where has this been more dramatic than with the news about the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old woman who was studying philosophy and vocal music. Though accurate details about Agha-Soltan are scarce, the New York Times reports that was engaged, valued freedom, and was shot while stopping to get some fresh air after driving home from a singing lesson.
When she got out of the car, she was shot by a sniper. Her death was captured on cell phone video. The person who captured the video then e-mailed it to a friend, who then forwarded it to the Voice of America, the British newspaper The Guardian,and several friends. One of those friends, who lives in the Netherlands, posted the video to Facebook. From there, it moved on to a report Sunday night on CNN.
A second person at the scene captured a shorter bit of video as well:
All of this allowed the person who shot the video to bypass the official Iranian censorship effortsto block Internet, cell phone, and text message traffic, and some have charged that Western technology companies have assisted with this censorship – though the companies deny it.
Citizen video has been used in a wide range of ways.Here is a collection of images and videos set to the music of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday:
As I’ve written about many times in the past, I’m not a big believer in the idea of the press having some kind of overarching uniform liberal or conservative bias. I do think, that as Herbert Ganshas written, that the American press does hold a set of shared values, both liberal and conservative, the resonate with Americans. These values laid out by Gans include: ethnocentrism, altruistic democracy, responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, individualism, moderatism, social order, and leadership. We can see these values playing out, especially that of individualism, with the story of Neda Agha-Soltan from Iran.
ARPANet was the joint military/academic computer network that would eventually give birth to the Internet. Here are a series of maps that show how ARPANet slowly grew in size and complexity from its founding in 1969 until 1977.
Zhao Jing, who writes under the pen name “Michael Anti” was one of the first Chinese bloggers to come to world attention when Microsoft took his blog down from their servers following complaints from the Chinese government:
UbuWeb has collections of avant-garde films, music, and audio recordings. Please note that this site can contain material some people would find offensive. This may contain some of the longest of the long-tail media….
Photographers Tim Hetherington and Chis Hondros were killed in an attack in the city of Misrata while they covering the rebellion there. Hetherington was known for his photographs and for serving as co-director of the Oscar-nominated war documentary Restrepo.
