Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The University of North Carolina’s Zeynep Tufekci is one of my favorite scholars working at the intersection of social media and democratic action. (You also might remember her from the longest and possibly greatest headline in Nieman Lab history.)
On Tuesday, she spoke at Harvard’s Berkman Center (where she’s a faculty associate) on what we’ve learned from the Arab Spring and later political movements influenced (to at least some degree) by social media and other forms of distributed online publishing. Here’s her description of the talk:
What can we learn from the protest wave of the last years? How does social media impact the capacity for collective action? Does social media contribute to blunting movement impacts by facilitating horizontal, non-institutional and “leaderless” movements? How do these movements compare with their predecessors like the civil-rights or anti-colonial movements? I discuss these questions by drawing from research on a variety of social movements including the “Arab Spring”, European indignados movements, Occupy and Turkey’s Gezi protests.
If you’re in Cambridge, she’ll be speaking on similar matters at MIT Thursday.
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