Fascinating new results on how we now consume news and what this may mean for the future of journalism (via Journalism.org): Worldwide YouTube is becoming a major platform for viewing news. In 2011 and early 2012, the most searched term of the month on YouTube was a news related event five out of 15 months,…
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My 2012 PEN Free Voices lecture on free speech and why it matters
The following is published today as the lead piece by ABC’s The Drum: The two-hour drive from Islamabad to Peshawar is along a surprisingly smooth road. Mud-brick homes sit amongst lush, green fields. Police checkpoints are set up routinely to stop unwanted visitors. I am asked why I want to see the troubled Pakistani town…
Our web future is censored unless we fight our own government’s secret demands
The sooner we adjust our thinking to understand that growing number of so-called democracies rather like the idea of censoring the internet, the better (via the Guardian): There has been an alarming rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor the… internet… in last six months, according to a report from Google. Since the search…
Blogging our way to freedom isn’t so easy in 21st century
The following interview appears in the Australian online legal and human rights journal Right Now: Samaya Chanthaphavong spoke to Antony Loewenstein, author of… The Blogging Revolution… about the use of the internet, in particular blogging, as a communicative tool to promote self-representation, democracy and human rights in areas where excessive regimes impose strict censorship over most forms…
The Blogging Revolution gets endorsement in Calcutta
The Indian edition of my book The Blogging Revolution was recently released. Here’s a just published review in The Telegraph from Calcutta: The Blogging Revolution: How the newest media is changing politics, business and culture in India, China, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Cuba and Saudi Arabia By Antony Loewenstein, Jaico, Rs 350 Antony Loewenstein’s book is…
Google head, fond of Chinese censorship, worries about Arab repression
His comments are fair and yet I can’t help but wonder about Google’s complicity with a range of autocratic regimes to censor some of its content, from search returns to YouTube clips: The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google’s chairman says.…
The Net Delusion is alive and well
My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald: THE NET DELUSION Evgeny Morozov Allen Lane, 408pp, $29.95 As people in the Middle East have been protesting in the streets against Western-backed dictators and using social media to connect and circumvent state repression, it would be easy to dismiss The Net Delusion as almost…
Our Western leaders must be so proud of backing Egyptian brutality
The West backed three decades of Egyptian-government depravity, all in the name of “stability”. But what did this mean for the people? Here’s Sarah Carr, a freelance journalist and a senior researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, writing about entering the Nasr City State Security Investigations (SSI) headquarters recently: State Security Investigations combined…
Not a Twitter revolution but social tools surely helped
Another fascinating Al-Jazeera feature on Empire about the role of the internet in the Arab uprisings: Carl Bernstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist; Amy Goodman, the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!; Professor Emily Bell, the director of digital journalism at Columbia University; Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side…