Authors:

Philip N. Howard is Professor of Communication, Information, and International Studies at the University of Washington, and a Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Muzammil M. Hussain is completing his Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Washington and will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan.

The first two chapters of this book have been made available for download — please click <HERE> to access them in PDF.

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Part I

Philip N.  Howard, University of Washington:

Since the beginning of the year there have been significant changes in North Africa and the Middle East.  Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had ruled Tunisia for 20 years, and Hosni Mubarak reigned in Egypt for 30 years.  Yet their bravest challengers were 20- and 30-year-olds without ideological baggage, violent intentions, or clear leaders.  Political change in these countries inspired activists across the region.  Some tough authoritarian governments responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, others with policy concessions, welfare spending, and cabinet shuffles.  The groups that initiated and sustained protests had few meaningful experiences with public deliberation or voting, and little experience with successful protesting.  These young citizens were politically disciplined, pragmatic, and collaborative.  Where did they come from? How do young people growing up in modern, entrenched, authoritarian regimes find political inspirations and aspirations? Are digital media important parts of the contemporary recipe for democratization?

Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion offers good illustrations of the ways in which authoritarian regimes have used information technology to constrain social movements.  Doing so provides an important intellectual corrective to too much enthusiasm about the role of digital media in resistance to authoritarian rule.  But the book comes at a time when current events in North Africa and the Middle East— and the growing research consensus—suggest that for the most part, the proliferation of information technologies has provided occasions for introducing democratic practices in surprising ways and unexpected places.  Not everyone will agree that information technologies changed the opportunity structure for opposition, improved the logistics of protest organizing, or carried stories of success across North Africa and the Middle East to inspire other citizens to challenge their dictators.  But it no longer seems delusional to contemplate the political consequences of the diffusion of Internet access and mobile phones.  At the same time, Morozov’s book offers an important corrective to simplistic ways of thinking about the political effects of the new technologies, and scholars working on these issues will find his arguments well worth engaging.

Morozov makes several important points in forceful ways.  First, most Internet content, in terms of bandwidth and hard drive space, is not dedicated to politics but to porn and illegally shared movies.  Most online transactions involve shopping or entertainment, not interactions with candidates for political office.  Digital media are rarely used for political content (though we have not been able to measure how this might be changing).

Second, digital media can also be key tools for regime propaganda, political surveillance, counterinsurgency and corporate espionage.  These uses are on the rise, and only a few people (such as Ron Deibert at the University of Toronto) track their political consequences in systematic ways.  Activists are not as safe as they might think, and may even weaken their movement by being too dependent on information technology.  “The problem with most technological fixes,” Morozov writes, “is that they come with costs unknown even to their fiercest advocates” (p.  303).  Peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, mobile phones, and cloud computing all have technical limits and security vulnerabilities.

Third, efforts to craft a tech-savvy foreign policy have not gone very well.  Morozov points out the absurdity of imposing economic sanctions that prevent some U.S.- based online services from being available in authoritarian regimes (for citizens’ use) but of not regulating Silicon Alley’s export of excellent censorship software (for dictators’ use).  On its own, encouraging internet access is not a sensible foreign policy goal.  Some policymakers are just too gung-ho about technological solutions to social problems.

Yet it may be going too far to argue that having a social media strategy as part of a modern foreign policy is delusional.  Public diplomacy can mean many things with regard to specific bilateral relations.  But the Internet is now one of the primary means by which people in other countries keep in touch with family and friends living in the West, a supplementary means by which people expand their news diets with international content, and an important means by which middle-class youth develop a political identity.  So it would be delusional not to work toward some integration of digital media in the program of statecraft and give even the most seasoned foreign policy experts a better understanding of the new media environment.  Dismissing digital media altogether would be dangerous for foreign policy.

Ignoring the role of digital media in contemporary political life means being out of tune with how young people form political identity, how civil society leaders organize, and how political communication is currently structured in media systems around the developing world.  Most technology use, most of the time, does not concern politics.  But in times of military or political crisis, people do use information technologies in important ways.  They check the news reported domestically with what is reported elsewhere, and they corroborate events with family and friends.  Increasingly, people become their own media producers.  What inspired many people to take to the streets in the summer of 2009 in Iran and in the Arab Spring of 2011 was not just the fact of stolen elections, but the personal stories of police abuse and government corruption that spread through digital media over social networks that crossed the region.

If anything, this book demonstrates why scholarly research is important.  One of the challenges of studying technology and politics is in the difficulty of adding it all up.  Morozov is most systematic in pointing out the flaws in particular tools and software.  And he assembles some of the most discouraging incidents of political debate and activism gone wrong.  Most of the evidence is anecdotal, occasionally it is testimonial, but rarely is it systematic or analogical.  In an important way, current events do the most to undermine the overall arguments in The Net Delusion.  For several years, experts and pundits were most worried about how terrorists used digital media to organize, promote hatred, and launch attacks on states and firms in the West.  These things do happen, but at this point there are much more dramatic and high-impact cases of civil society groups, mainstream political parties, and journalists using information infrastructure in innovative ways.  Digital media are part of the story of democratic entrenchment in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey.  Sometimes, as in North Africa and the Middle East, digital media are used with surprising political effectiveness in rapid regime change.

Morozov is right to point out that several key firms— among them Facebook, Twitter, Google—do not fully appreciate the way they have become fundamental infrastructure for social movements.  They cave in to government demands for filtering tools and back doors to software systems.  He makes a convincing argument that any sensible theory of democratization should not be pegged to a particular piece of software or hardware.  And he is right to point out that political scientists—and journalists—rarely have the technical literacy to be able to talk sensibly and critically about the interplay of technology trends, telecommunications policy, and politics.

Political science, as a discipline, is generally afraid of studying information technology because doing so is difficult.  We train graduate students to use statistical inference to explain variation in a sample of data, but only the smaller community of comparative and qualitative scholars have the methodological rigor to teach us about causal patterns with confidence.  Only a few social scientists have the analytical tool kit to process terabytes of log files, understand the nuances of telecommunications policy, preserve network relations in data, and think philosophically about the causal role in which software and hardware provide capacities and constraints on human action.  Studying information technology and politics requires that a researcher be good at the very least at two or three of these things.  Morozov himself has several of these skills, and so here is why this book is important: It will inspire a new wave of research on information technology and politics because it so convincingly demonstrates that, in political terms, technology matters.

There are intriguing debates developing in journals like the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and some ingenious new ways of collecting, organizing, and analyzing static, dynamic, and network data about technology and politics.  Nonetheless, there is an urgent need to move beyond a few favored examples and longer-than-sound bite punditry.  Morozov offers a string of casual examples to show how information technology can slow down group productivity or encourage self-promotion online, but does not advance our understanding of the process by which thousands of Tunisians, then Egyptians, then Algerians, Bahrianis, Jordanians, Moroccans, and so on mobilized with astounding political effect.  Given the rising number of incidents in which digital media have become part of the narrative of social movement formation, regime change, and democratic entrenchment, it no longer seems misguided to explore the possibility of causal connections between technology diffusion and political outcomes.

The Net Delusion is an important book to read because every important debate needs naysayers, and this is the best statement yet against the growing consensus that information technology opens up new supplies of information about life in democratic countries for those living in dictatorship, that such technologies improve the capacity of social movement leaders to organize even more than improve the capacity of the state to repress, and that a young generation of citizens is having—once in a while—important exchanges of ideas through which they are developing their political identities.  Morozov’s book is an impressive catalog of all the depressing examples of unexpected consequences and disturbing side effects of technology diffusion.  The subtitle is The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.  It is always possible to compose an argument about the downside of freedom, but most people would still chose to have both freedom and the Internet.  Morozov does not really convince us that we can have only one of these things.

What are the key ingredients in the modern recipe for democratization?  How could democratic states make good foreign policy interventions and promote democratization elsewhere? Morozov convincingly argues that technology is not the answer.  In the end, not many people argue that it is the only answer; most of us argue that the modern recipe for democratization is complex, with digital media one of several key ingredients.  So even after finishing the book, most readers will retain the sense that digital media can be part of the answer to several contemporary questions in political science.

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Part II

Morozov Responds To Howard:

I’m grateful to Professor Howard for writing a thoughtful review of my book.  I agree with some of his charges but find the policy agenda that follows from his critique to be somewhat naïve.

I concede that The Net Delusion “does not advance our understanding of the process by which millions of thousands of [people in the Middle East] mobilized with astounding political effect.” But, to borrow a phrase from software developers, I think that this is a feature, not a bug.  My initial assumption in writing The Net Delusion had been that both journalists and academics spend too much time extolling the positive (i.e.  democratization enhancing) uses of social media and technology, leaving their more repressive uses almost invisible, both to the general public and to policy-makers (Internet use by terrorists is one exception; Howard is right to suggest that most such accounts are overblown.) As such, I didn’t want to produce yet another Kumbaya account of the Internet’s impact on democratization, for I feel that that side of the story is already well-covered elsewhere.  I also agree with Howard that “…it may go too far to argue that having a social media strategy as part of a modern foreign policy is delusional.” As Howard himself acknowledges, part of my overall project has been to show that technology matters—and it matters in ways than most Western policy-makers don’t even anticipate.  But simply acknowledging technology’s importance is not enough to turn it into a potent tool of promoting democracy.

Politically, the Internet is not a neutral space and America’s foreign policy carries all of its historical baggage to cyberspace with it.We need to think much harder about the costs of having an explicit “Internet freedom agenda.” The same goes for the costs of designing that agenda in a certain way—both factually and rhetorically—for any strategy to use the Internet to promote democracy is bound to have effects on other strategies and domains (including non-digital ones).  So while Washington’s intent in promoting an “Internet freedom agenda” might be pure and noble and in touch with the times, I can’t complement it on its nuance so far.

Moreover, I am much less sanguine than Howard about Washington’s ability to avoid charges of hypocrisy— which may undermine the rest of their democracy agenda— that are bound to arise, as Western governments try to control the Internet in similar ways than their authoritarian counterparts (Britain’s attempts to control social media to thwart any future riots and San Francisco’s decision to shut down mobile networks to disrupt protests are cases in point.)

Translating Howard’s main research finding—i.e.  that information technology has a positive effect on democratization—into a set of Western policy objectives would be far more challenging than he seems to realize.  This is so because Western governments have their own domestic concerns about the Internet, while Western companies are eager to abet most repressive governments in their push to keep in the Internet in check.  The “delusion” that I am attacking in the title of my book refers not only to our tendency to view the Internet as the “ultimate liberator” but also to our false belief that the Internet is a tool that Western policy-makers can wield at will and without consequences.

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Part III

Howard Responds to Morozov:

Morozov is absolutely right to point out that other countries—not in the set analyzed in Digital Origins— might reveal different paths toward or away from democratic government.  But a quick look at some of the examples shows that they do not directly conflict with my argument that the proliferation of consumer electronics in countries with an active civil society and limited resource wealth seems to come with democratic consequences.  China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are often offered as examples of how a tough regime can use digital media to oppress their citizens.

Understanding political trends in these countries is an important project on its own.  But as cases, they do not contribute much to our understanding of how technology proliferation advances democratic norms and practices because they are not directly relevant.  They are important in that large numbers of people suffer under their authoritarian rule.  China has effectively built its own Internet, with choke points, “joint ventures” that constrain private technology partners, and peculiar telecommunications standards that privilege domestic firms and allow easy access by national security agencies.  The Chinese use hobbled search engines, and Chinese youth do not use Facebook; they use QQ.  Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela have prominent civil society groups, but are countries where ruling elites built distinct cultures of technology use.  Iran and Saudi Arabia have created a culture of fear and self-censorship around technology use, while Russia and Venezuela have effectively redesigned how all media works domestically.  If anything, these cases reveal that the best way for an authoritarian government to maintain control is to not connect to global networks, import consumer electronics, or work on raising the informational sophistication of their citizenry.  Russia and Venezuela are countries that over the last decade have worked to unplug their domestic media system from global information networks: the nationalization of media services, the assassination of journalists, and active surveillance will discourage the political uses of digital media.  These cases do not contradict the finding that once a country’s information infrastructure—and political culture—is wired up, there are political consequences.

Morozov is also correct to point out that there is a political economy to the technology services provided by YouTube, Facebook, and blogging applications.  In interesting ways, the behavior of these firms demonstrates that they don’t fully appreciate the ways in which their technology services are treated as public information infrastructure by many citizens.  These large technology companies design tools for their “users” or “clients.” Yet, in times of crisis, it is “citizens” who put political content into these tools for distribution across their social networks.  Technology firms sometimes act constructively to either serve the public or capture market share.  For example, Google rushed its launch of Speak2Tweet, an application that bypassed Mubarak’s attempt to block Twitter use by translating phone messages into text messages.  Several tech firms built dedicated portals to allow in-country users to share content.  But as Morozov points out, information technologies—and the businesses designing them—do not always do things to support democratization movements.

Opposition leaders in countries where political parties are illegal sometimes use pseudonyms to avoid government harassment.  But doing so on Facebook is a violation of the company’s user agreement, and so the company actually shut down one of the protest-group pages in December.  Supporters eventually advocated to have the page reinstated, but the incident demonstrated the way in which businesses such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter may not fully appreciate the way in which their users treat these tools as public information infrastructure, and not just as a cool new application.  Whereas Google has signed the Global Network Initiative—a compact for preventing web censorship by authoritarian governments—Facebook has refused.  It might be technically possible to require Facebook users in Western countries to use real identities but then to also offer levels of anonymity to people living in dictatorships, but no such feature exists.

Half a Century of Communication Research in Egypt and Internationally: Current and Future Trends
December 13-15, 2011
Contemporary communication research has been heavily affected by the ongoing transformation of information and communication technologies and convergence between new and traditional media. Perhaps this is why research studies have failed to follow coherent programs or build on each other.  As one communication scholar observed, studies published in scholarly journals of mass communication too often seem to have no relationship to each other and very limited links with previous studies.

At the same time, Arab media and communication research seems fragmented. Studies appear isolated from each other, lacking a comparative perspective and lagging behind western scholarship in the field. Even though Arab media and communication research dates back to the Second World War, it is rare to find an Arab communication research program that outlines past experience, analyzes current research issues or predicts future trends.

This conference seeks to provide an international forum in which research into ongoing and dynamic changes in the era of globalized communication can be better understood. Scholars from different cultural backgrounds are invited to explore the nature of existing communication research and to discern significant patterns and trends in this body of literature. The conference aims to present theoretical and methodological reviews of selected areas of communication research through a critical assessment research or thematic meta-analysis of recent research publications. The conference welcomes group and individual papers that identify main research trends, highlight themes, trace methods and theories, and identify gaps in analysis.

The overall purpose is to identify general research trends occurring within a number of specific subfields of communication, to summarize a body of findings, to identify weaknesses within a body of research, and to suggest new directions for research. We hope the findings of this conference help achieve the following:
1-      Present global syntheses and critical assessments of studies and publications on media and communication research during the five decades from January 1960 to December 2010.
2-      Provide an overview of the major theories, hypotheses and findings of the research studies carried out in selected areas of media and communication research.
3-      Analyze the gap between the global trends in media and communication research and major research areas in the Arab region.
4-      Provide new insights for future research directions regarding all sub-fields under investigation.

Subfields of research to be investigated by conference papers may include, but are not limited to, the following:
1-      History of the press
2-      Media policy and law
3-      Audiences
4-      Political Communication&  Public opinion
5-      International communication
6-      Persuasive communication
7-      Gender and media
8-      Media management
9-      Development communication
10-     Advertising
11-     Agenda-setting
12-     Uses and gratifications
13-     New media
14-     Public relations
15-     Interpersonal communication
16-     Organizational communication
17-     Television violence&  cultivation research
18-     Print media layout and design
19-     Media literacy
20-     Media ethics
21-     Specialised press
22-     Integrated marketing communications
23-     Journalism education systems in Arab world
24-     Film and broadcast media discourse analysis
25-     Media framing

The main questions to be answered are:

1-      What broad themes and trends of research have been investigated?
2-      What theories, methods and techniques have been used?
3-      What have been the findings and conclusions?
4-       What has changed over time?
5-      What gaps have been discovered that would lead to recommendations for the future?

Deadlines:
Deadline for submission of abstracts is October 10, 2011. The deadline for submission of the full text of papers is December 1, 2011.  Abstracts should be 300 words long and include: the title of the paper, name of the author/s, institutional affiliation, country, contact information, and three key words. The academic committee will release letters of papers’ acceptance 10 days after submission of abstracts. Acceptance letters will include detailed information on accommodation, registration, and any other necessary information.

Important:

•       All Arabic and English Abstracts should be together addressed to both: Prof. Basyouni Hamada of Cairo University at: basyouni.hamada@gmail.com, and Prof. Naomi Sakr of University of Westminster at: sakrn@wmin.ac.uk

•       The International Academic Committee of the conference represents most of the regions of the world. Prominent scholars of media and communication serve as members of this committee.

•       Simultaneous translation will be given.

•       The conference includes several plenary sessions as forums for open and free discussions.

We are delighted to invite you to the Arab Women, Media, and Sexuality one-day conference at the University of York, to be held on the 26th of May 2012. The conference is hosted by the Centre for Women’s Studies and focuses on the interdisciplinary study of sexuality, media, and gender from an Arab perspective and the intersection between all three. It aims to provide grounds for discussion and analysis of these three disciplines and to encourage debate, research and networking in these fields. Scholars, early career researchers, and practitioners are encouraged to submit 250-300 word abstracts to Ebtihal Mahadeen (im544@york.ac.uk) byNovember 30th, 2011 on or around the following themes:

- Representations of Arab women’s sexuality in Western and/or Arabic media (media as an umbrella term encompassing traditional, online, new media, and so on). How are Arab women’s sexualities represented in various forms of media? Do these representations differ between Western and Arabic media? Are women active agents in these representations or passive images? What do these representations reveal about Arab and Western societies’ perceptions of Arab women’s sexualities? What do they reveal about gender and power relations inside and outside Arab cultures, and where do Arab women fit in this picture?

- Approaches to sexuality in Arabic media. How does media content like home-grown talk shows and foreign series present sexuality to Arabic audiences? What can we make of the ubiquity of provocative music video channels alongside conservative Islamic channels beamed to Arab homes? What sexualities are socially acceptable and what, on the other hand, are some of the unacceptable sexualities as presented by the media? How are these sexualities reinforced or challenged by media?

- Arab women’s perceptions of their sexuality vis-à-vis the media. How do Arab women claim their sexuality in light of media emphasis on certain sexual images and certain sexualities? What meanings do sexual symbols such as the veil and virginity hold to contemporary Arab women? How do Arab women navigate the images, expectations, and stereotypes of their sexuality as portrayed in different media?

We welcome papers and posters for this interdisciplinary conference and we may be able to arrange long-distance conferencing services for participants who are not be able to travel to York. Invitation to this conference is open to all and the registration fee is £25 (to cover lunch, tea, coffee, water, and programme copies and payable by all attendees and presenters). Accepted presenters will be notified by January 10th, 2012.

**There may be an opportunity for publication of selected papers presented at the conference in a special edition of the Graduate Journal of Social Science (GJSS), an open-access, student-run journal published by EBSCO. Deadlines and other details of this opportunity will be published once available.

Important details:

Conference page: http://awmsconference.wordpress.com/

Abstract submission deadline: November 30th, 2011

Abstracts of 250-300 words should be submitted to Ebtihal Mahadeen (im544@york.ac.uk) containing the following information and in this order: name(s), email address, affiliation, abstract title, abstract body.

Notification of accepted papers: January 10th, 2012

Registration deadline: March 1^st 2012

If you have any queries or comments please contact Ebtihal Mahadeen: im544@york.ac.uk

From Veiling to Blogging: Women and Media in the Middle East

Edited by Nahed Eltantawy
Vol. 13, No.5, November 2013

Middle Eastern women have traditionally been viewed as weak and submissive,
passively accepting male authority and leadership rather than seeking
leadership for themselves. From Edward Said¹s Orientalism to Lila
Abu-Lughod¹s ³Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?² women of the Middle East
have been portrayed as helpless creatures who are often hidden behind the
veil, quietly waiting to be liberated.

Recent democratic movements in the Middle East, popularly grouped together
under the banner of the ³Arab Spring,² signal the rise of a new kind of
political activism across the region, made possible, in large part, by the
now widespread use of social media. The world has witnessed millions across
Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Syria as they have marched to the
squares and told their stories of life under repressive political regimes.
How have women been involved in these events? What are their experiences and
stories? In addition to the more widely known stories of political
demonstrations in the region, there have also been more localized events,
such as the women-led driving protests in Saudi Arabia, that suggest that
there are many stories still to be told to unveil the realities of women¹s
experiences in the Middle East. In what ways have women utilized media,
including social media such as Twitter, Facebook and blogging, for both
personal and political expression and have these platforms contributed to
the democratization of women¹s lives?

This special issue seeks manuscripts that focus on Middle East women and
their relationship with the media old and new how women are portrayed, how
and why women utilize media and technology, and women¹s media production.

Topics of interest in relation to Middle East women and the media include
but are not limited to:

Media portrayals of women

Women¹s use of social media

Women¹s utilization of media to promote the ³Arab Spring² revolutions

Women and cyberactivism

Women¹s use of media (old and new) for self expression and identification

Women¹s utilization of media for empowerment

Women¹s media production

Please submit a 350-word abstract to Dr Nahed Eltantawy at:
neltanta@highpoint.edu by no later than April 1, 2012.

Aims and Scope of the Journal:
Feminist Media Studies provides a transdisciplinary, transnational forum for
researchers pursuing feminist approaches to the field of media and
communication studies, with attention to the historical, philosophical,
cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions and analysis of sites
including print and electronic media, film and the arts, and new media
technologies. The journal invites contributions from feminist researchers
working across a range of disciplines and conceptual perspectives.
Feminist Media Studies offers a unique intellectual space bringing together
scholars, professionals and activists from around the world to engage with
feminist issues and debates in media and communication. Its editorial board
and contributors reflect a commitment to the facilitation of international
dialogue among researchers, through attention to local, national and global
contexts for critical and empirical feminist media inquiry.

When preparing your paper, please click on the link ŒInstructions for
Authors¹ on the Feminist Media Studies website
(www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rfms <http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rfms> )
which provides guidance on paper length, referencing style, etc. When
submitting your paper, please do not follow the link ŒSubmit Online¹ as
special issue papers are handled directly via email with the special issue
Editor.

Conference organised by the
Arab Media Centre
Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI),
University of Westminster

Date: Friday, 20 April, 2012
Venue: University of Westminster, Regent Street Campus,
309 Regent Street, London W1

Is ‘subculture’ a universal category that discloses itself in similar ways, regardless of differences in historical moments or cultural geographies? Or is it inextricably linked to particular historical moments and cultural specificities?

Fifty years of ‘subculture theory’ in the West have provided a rich repertoire. Nick Bentley (2005) traces a paradigmatic shift from the 50s and 60s, when the dominant readings focused on ‘the sociological’ as a determining factor in the study of youth culture, to cultural, predominantly Marxist, class-based and ethnographic approaches in the 1970s. From there the emphasis moved to semiotic readings of subcultures in the late 1970s and 1980s, and on to a postmodern identification of ‘post-subcultures’. Yet concepts such as ‘youth’ and ‘teenager’ are western social constructs par excellence, determined by historical events, including changes in geopolitics and a transition from the economies of scarcity to the economies of abundance. As Dick Hebdige (1979) has argued, ‘subculture’ is always mediated – inflected by the historical context in which it is encountered and posited upon a specific ideological field which gives it a particular life and particular meanings.

Papers are invited that explore youth subcultures in the Arab context, relating them to specific historical, economic, cultural and political moments.  We especially welcome theoretical and ethnographic based papers dealing with, but not limited to, the following themes:

-              Social media, subcultures and the politics of resistance
-              Popular music/sport/cinema as subculture
-              Sexuality, gender and the politics of representation
-              Theorizing Arab subcultures/Rethinking Arab subcultures
-              Contemporary Arab art and subcultures
-              Subcultures and new forms of Arab identity

PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION

This one-day conference will take place on Friday, April 20, 2012. The draft programme envisages at least one plenary session devoted to a keynote speech.  The fee for registration (which applies to all participants, including presenters) will be £95, with a concessionary rate of £45 for students, to cover all conference documentation, refreshments and administration costs. Registration will open in February 2012.

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS

The deadline for abstracts is Monday, October 10, 2011. Successful applicants will be notified by Monday, November 14, 2011. Abstracts should be 250 words long. They must include the presenter’s name, affiliation, email and postal address, together with the title of the paper and a 150-word biographical note on the presenter. Two copies of the abstract should be sent by email, one to Dr Tarik Sabry (Sabryt@westminster.ac.uk) and one to Helen Cohen, Events Administrator (journalism@westminster.ac.uk). The selection committee will comprise members of CAMRI, including the CAMRI Arab Media Centre.

TRAVEL EXPENSES

The conference organisers have the possibility to apply for funding to assist with travel costs of selected participants whose own institutions are unable to provide the necessary support. In order to meet the deadline for such an application, the organisers need to identify potential recipients of travel bursaries by mid-October 2011. Therefore, if appropriate, please make your needs known when submitting your abstract. However, since support funding cannot be guaranteed, participants should ensure they have alternative arrangements to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses.

PUBLICATION

Opportunities will be open for publication of selected conference papers in an edited book focusing on specific conference themes or in academic journals whose editors or co-editors are based in CAMRI. Articles may be submitted to the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Global Media and Communication, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, and Interactions.

Focused mainly on Tunisia and Egypt, this research included creating a unique database of information collected from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  The research also included creating maps of important Egyptian political Websites, examining political conversations in the Tunisian blogosphere, analyzing more than 3 million Tweets based on key-words used, and tracking which countries thousands of individuals Tweeted from during the revolutions.  The result is that for the first time we have evidence confirming social media’s critical role in the Arab Spring.

The contributors include Philip Howard, Muzammil Hussain, Will Mari, and Marwa Mazaid at the University of Washington, Deen Freelon at American University, and Aiden Duffy at Amazon Web Services.

Download Report Now (click HERE)

Position Summary

Freedom House seeks a Program Assistant for its Global Internet Freedom program. The Global Internet Freedom Initiative seeks to counteract this rising trend of government censorship and surveillance. It aims to analyze the state of internet freedom, to expand the use of anti-censorship technologies, to build support networks for citizens fighting against online repression and to focus greater international attention on the growing threats to users’ rights. The Program Assistant will report to the Project Director.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in related field
• Strong ability to communicate effectively in English both verbally and in writing, ability to communicate in more than one language preferred
• Familiarity with Privacy, Digital Safety, and Internet Safety, and Internet Freedom issues
• Familiarity with blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter
• Knowledge of human rights principles and mechanisms preferably related to Freedom of expression
• Strong ability to plan, organize, prioritize work, and multi task to meet tight deadlines
• Excellent attention to detail and ability to produce timely and error-free work
• Ability to collaborate with others and work as an effective team member
• Ability to apply interpersonal skills, work under pressure and succeed in a fast paced environment
• Ability to work both independently with minimal supervision

Some Duties and Responsibilities

• Assist with administration and logistics of program implementation
• Organize meetings and events
• Arrange travel as needed
• Assist with financial management
• Maintain files and databases
• Assist with the preparation of proposals and budgets
• Assist in the development and production of promotional materials
• Support of Freedom House’s ongoing advocacy

We offer great benefits including:

• 100% employer-paid dental insurance
• 100% employer-paid health insurance; or generously subsidized depending on plan and coverage
• 100% employer paid life insurance and accidental death and dismemberment
• 100% employer paid short-term disability and long-term disability insurance
• 403(b) Retirement Plan with generous matching funds with 2 year 100% vesting schedule
• Flexible Spending Accounts for medical and dependent care reimbursable expenses
• Transportation pre-tax payroll deduction for metro, and garage parking in DC
• Generous paid vacation leave, sick leave, personal leave, and holidays
• Tuition Reimbursement for graduate studies
• And much more……

Qualified and Interested Applicants

Please send a resume, and cover letter with salary requirements to:recruiting@freedomhouse.org or fax to (202) 822-3893, Attention: HR. Dept., referencing: 2011-049 Program Assistant.  Only candidates who have been selected for an interview will be contacted.