Daily EM

I’ve got an oped in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. Check it out here. Here’s a short preview:

While the real war between Russia and Georgia may be over, the Internet war lingers on, with virtual battalions continuing to fight on sites like YouTube.

The point of contention is a short clip of a Fox News program, in which Shepard Smith, the host, interviewed two South Ossetians: a 12 year-old-girl from Walnut Creek, Amanda Kokoev, and her aunt, Laura Tedeeva-Korewiski, who happened to be in the region when the war broke out. The interview went fine until she blamed Georgia for the war. Smith, in a rather abrupt manner, interrupted and asked for commercial break - only to have the aunt call on the Georgian government to resign when they returned on air. “That’s exactly what Russians want,” whispered Smith, as he cut them off again - this time forever.

• Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals - NYTimes.com
  The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.
  (tags: china russia nytimes nationalism opportunity)

I have written another essay for openDemocracy . Examining the coverage of the Georgian-Russian war, the piece is somewhat critical of the idea that citizen journalists can adequately cover the wars as well as professional war reporters. I’ll probably take a good beating from the blogosphere for that, but so be it.

I have a story in Slate today about my experiences of being a “cyber-warrior” (teaser below). Also, you may want to check this story in the Washington Post on the subject of cyberwar between Russia and Georgia (ego alert — I am in it).

…Don’t get me wrong: My geopolitical sympathies, if anything, lie with Moscow’s counterparts. Nor do I see myself as an Internet-savvy Rambo character. I had a much simpler research objective: to test how much damage someone like me, who is quite aloof from the Kremlin physically and politically, could inflict upon Georgia’s Web infrastructure, acting entirely on my own and using only a laptop and an Internet connection.

Full story here.

you guessed, it’s about Russia-Georgia

here’s the teaser:

When a few years ago Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU and one of the chief proponents of citizen journalism, tried to describe the fundamental shift in the balance of power between the media and the public caused by blogs and other forms of user-generated content, he famously spoke of “the people formerly known as the audience”. “[They] are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable”, he stated in a rather solemn tone.

Call me elitist, but I never fully embraced the notion that this great unwinding of reality, fiction, and predictability merited that much celebration. Watching the information wars of the last few months-first in China in the aftermath of the Tibet and the Olympics protests and now in Russia in light of its war with Georgia ands its coverage in the Western media-I couldn’t help but wonder if Rosen fully understood all the implications of his otherwise spot-on diagnosis..

read more here.

Here’s my first take on the information war between Russia and the West - from Foreign Policy:

It started as a fairly predictable digital conflict, mimicking the one in the real world and displaying no shortage of “conventional” cyberwarfare: Web pages were attacked, comments were erased, and photos were vandalized. A typical prank on the Georgian Foreign Ministry’s Web site visually compared Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili with Adolf Hitler.

As Russian tanks lumbered southward over mountainous Ossetian terrain, Russian netizens were seeking to dominate the digital battlefield…

Continued here.

I’ve written a longish essay for openDemocracy. Although it’s mostly about Russia, I think it contains some interesting general thoughts about the extent to which governments may go in using the Web for ideological purposes. Have a look here.

I’ve written a short essay on new media literacy for the Publius Project. You can find it here.

• Balkan File: When Did Belgrade Get a Metro?!
  CNN screws up again by mixing video footage of the riots in Budapest into its video reports from the recent protests in Belgrade…
  (tags: cnn media error international news budapest hungary serbia)

• Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com
  excellent NYT feature on reading online
  (tags: reading brain online learning neuroscience cognition)