I have been lucky enough to spend this week at the Sundance Film Festival.  One of my favorite films so far has been “The Green Wave,” a documentary about the the 2009 post-election uprising in Iran.  It was wonderful and deeply affecting and, even as someone who watched events closely at the time and read [...]

In a world of insta-analysis that demands predictions, many commentators looked at the Tunisian revolution and argued that it was an isolated affair, and that structural factors would prevent the rest of the Arab states from suffering similar fates. In a particularly incoherent article containing some gobbledygook about the Roman Empire in the New York [...]

Today’s web is social, we all know that.  But it may be more social than we think.  Some platforms, like Facebook, are obviously social: we see the group of peers who are creating our experience through content creation or recommendations.  Other platforms, like Google search, are “phantom social” – you don’t see the group of [...]

Patrick Meier, a fellow at Stanford, has shared a draft the literature review for his doctoral thesis, “Do ‘Liberation Technologies’ Change the Balance of Power Between Repressive Regimes and Civil Society?”.  Though the loaded term “liberation technology” implies a certain bias in how that question will be answered, it is an important one: do information [...]

The political situation in Tunisia is still very much in flux. Even though Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s dictator for the past 23 years, has left the country, a peaceful democratic transition is still far from assured. Still, the “Jasmine Revolution” is a subject of study in and of itself, especially by those like [...]

So far the events in Tunisia have not been dubbed a “Twitter revolution,” even though, of course, Tunisians are using digital tools to document and discuss the protests and riots that have brought down their government. In many ways this is a welcome development, which has placed the focus properly on popular mobilization, where Arabs [...]

“All roads lead to Rome”: in antiquity centrality was a measure of power. The power of Rome, the global empire of its time, was both revealed and reinforced by its ability to make itself the center of that world. But the new infrastructure of the digital age flouts centrality. On the Internet, which has no [...]