It all started on social media: #bristol’s #stokescroft riots

2011 was unquestionably the year of protests. From the Arab Spring to the infamous rioters across the UK the social media appears in hindsight to have rebelled every day.

In April came Bristol’s turn with the unrest against a newly built Tesco Express store in Stokes Croft. Amid fear from reports that the store was to be petrol bombed by squatters living across the screet, the police came in to and clashed with protesters. According to one blogger, “the news reports […] were mostly late to the party – they were written about 10am this morning, but those of us using Twitter were on top of the real breaking news.”

It all started on social media: the Egyptian revolution

This festive season, the Interhaktives at City University have decided to follow the trend set by both traditional and alternative media institutes and practitioners by devising our own news round-ups. Blogging about social media on this platform, we’ve chosen to reminisce on the big news stories that month in and month out have emerged on social media first and have then been reported widely. Thus, without further a due, as we appreciate the hustle and bustle the holidays bring upon us all, we’ll start off with January 2011, undoubtedly the month when the Arab Spring ball started rolling.

#Jan25

by Jillian C. York @ http://bit.ly/vwOo5h

The landmark Egyptian protest on January 25 was not only broke but also organised on social media. Inspired by the Tunisian revolution and fuelled by the four Egyptians who died in front of their Parliament at the start of the year, many took to facebook, Twitter and Youtube to voice their concerns. The protest organised on the National Police Day, on 25 January 2011, gathered over 70,000 attendees on facebook, according to the New York Times. #Egypt and #Jan25 are both in Twitter’s top 10 hot hashtags of 2011 and Wael Ghonim, a proeminent activist on the Twitterverse (@Ghonim) and one of the users behind the prolific “We are all Khaled Said” page on facebook, who also wrote on Jan 26: “I said one year ago that the Internet will change the political scene in Egypt and some friends made fun of me,” has been branded the ‘symbol’ for #Jan25 by Twitter. Asmaa Mahfouz, also known as ‘the girl who organised Egypt’s demonstrations,’ posted an

How we forgot what social media is all about

We follow, we friend, we linkin, we have buzzed and we have myspaced. We keep connecting. I believe I’m not too far off if I say we network now more than ever before in our entire history. Yet what we mostly do is connect at, dare I say, a technological level.

Additionally, we are so found of this word, network, that we have “networked” the majority of, if not all of our professions. Take for example Networked Journalism, a concept that arguably lies at the very heart of journalism today, even though, to play devil’s advocate, it’s something that journalists were required to do since the beginnings of storytelling.

However, especially as journalists, we’ve shifted from the Who to the What, from focusing on the people to focusing on the platforms, albeit platforms full of people (except for the bogus accounts), which in return makes it quite a paradoxical and problematical issue.