The ‘spinternet’, or the use of social media by governments and special interest groups to recruit and galvanise populations to tow the party line, is a term coined by Georgetown University researcher and journalist Evegny Morozov. It’s a concise shorthand for the topic of last Wednesday night’s discussion at DigiFest, the series of digital technology events I curated this month at London’s Science Museum.
Event
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[Event] Digifest: This is Your Brain on Technology
Monday March 22, 2010 @ 03:51 PM (UTC)Tonight is the first night of DigiFest, the series of events that I’m curating for the Science Museum that looks at the real-world effects of digital media. We’re kicking off with a bang; This is your brain on technology has been sold out for two weeks already, and the waiting list is as long as your arm.
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[Lifestream] Twittersource: How should elected officials cope with inbox influx?
Thursday March 18, 2010 @ 08:50 PM (UTC)At Monday’s Parliamentary briefing, ostensibly about whether the forthcoming election would be the UK’s first digital one, the distinguished MPs and Lords and Ladies who attended did what they do best and took hold of the conversation, repeatedly sidetracking it. They needed answers not about social media, but about a truly Web 1.0 phenomenon: how should they cope with the influx of emails that they get from their constituents? As digital experts, we’re expected to offer solutions to the firehose of email traffic (bearing in mind, of course, that we also receive a preposterous number of wants, needs, demands, desires from a truly random bunch of people who have the ability to type and press ‘send’). So how do we cope? In the interests of crowdsourcing a solution for the government employees of the United Kingdom, I reached out to the Twitterverse for a solution.
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[Event] SuperPower briefing at the House of Commons
Monday March 15, 2010 @ 12:18 PM (UTC)I’ve been invited to participate in a briefing to the House of Commons tomorrow about the BBC’s SuperPower report, of which the World Service radio adaptation of the 4-film BBC2 documentary series The Virtual Revolution is part. I’ll be joining an esteemed panel, including BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, who’ll be discussing the ways politicians are expected to embrace the Web during the forthcoming election, Pooneh Ghoddoosi from BBC Persian TV will draw on her personal experience of observing user-generated content in Iran to discuss how the Web can transform lives, and Peter Barron, Director of Communication of North and Central Europe at Google, who’ll take a wider view at how politicians, corporations and the government have dealt with the Web. I’ll try to throw as many spanners in the works as possible, arguing that the Web isn’t as liberating as everyone suggests. After all, as I said in this Observer piece, the Web is only a reflection of us and we like our silos. I’ll be introducing concepts of cyberbalkanisation, propaganda, and a historical view of how governments have coped with previous technologies.
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[Event] Why Study the Web? (Royal Society)
Friday March 05, 2010 @ 08:34 AM (UTC)This Monday evening, I’ll be chairing a panel of esteemed web academics at the Royal Society, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Northwestern’s Prof Noshir Contractor, Southampton’s Prof Nigel Shadboldt and Dame Wendy Hall and – my external examiner - Oxford’s Prof Bill Dutton. We’ll be discussing Web Science, the multi-disciplinary arena of study that looks at the web holistically – from a social, economic, political, psychological point of view – rather than approaching it within a purely technical framework.
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[UKTI] SxSWi10 Digital Mission applications open!
Wednesday November 11, 2009 @ 04:03 PM (UTC)Holy guacamole, is it really time again to start thinking about the next South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas? You bet! I can already hear the twang of the fiddle at the Broken Spoke…
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[UKTI] ICT in the USA event: 2 December, London
Wednesday November 11, 2009 @ 03:46 PM (UTC)The US is the UK’s largest single market and is the leading destination for UK overseas investment. With a Fiscal Stimulus package of US$787 billion spending programme aimed at encouraging growth and jumpstarting the U.S. economy, there is significant potential for established London-based ICT and technology companies.
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