and again this is the latest news on the week's top stories for you now believe this integrations are stained by bloody accounts of the death of its late leader has a big ations and he was executed by a lynch mob of rebel fighters. street violence in greece this week out the country's government approves more tax hikes as well as cutting wages at the beginning of the year on the i am. battle of the barricades nato forces failed turn move along the dispute or so because the border as ethnic serbs got the blockade to stop the peacekeepers apartment complex it's called stop thinking about his guests discuss the power of social media like facebook and twitter to change the political landscape that happened during the arab spring.

look. the first step. and you can see. the full. blown welcome to cross talk i'm curious about the new weapons of mass mobilization you tube facebook and twitter they are favored tools able to bring segments of society together in the name of change this is being witnessed in the arab spring

europe season of discontent and america's own anti wall street protests powerful tools indeed but can social networks really alter the political landscape. you can see. to cross the digital technologies and media i'm joined by danny schechter in new york he is a journalist author and independent filmmaker in san francisco we have john perry barlow he's co-founder of the electronic frontier foundation and in london we go to laurie penny she is a journalist and feminist activist all right folks this is cross talk to me as you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage it but first marcia is social media driving the process it's more complicated than that but we have written it so the course of less than here is remarkable three north african regimes down the larger part of the arab world a blaze and now so a lot. presents are gripping settings from italy it to the u.s. to japan to that and many have raised questions about how much information

technology accounts for the scale of the process and as recent events in egypt and elsewhere have shown we are only just beginning to comprehend the effects of the information revolution on power in this century the internet and technology were part of the arab spring is narrative is beyond question video clips of the first protests in tunisia were recorded using mobile phones and posted on facebook and making their way across the arab world and eventually being picked up by news channels leader many will refer to the change in revolution as the twitter or the wiki leaks revolution and bloggers will be basking in recognition likely now ben many has even been suggested as a contender for the nobel peace prize. i think we should recognize activism as a movement that can change things and make things better and recognizing that it is with governments and countries like egypt libya and syria have done to control just by cracking down on our mind media and even in europe protests over budget cuts health or it is contemplating the same we are working with the police the

intelligence services and industry to look at the right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence and criminality even though governments have always had to worry about information flows this is the first time there were finding it hard to control political discourse and it marks an important paradigm shift in which the powers that be are now under intense scrutiny but then it could also prove to be a double edged sword to have another double edged sword thank you very much for that martial law referring to you first in london is overrated can cyber activism change the world well i think in some ways mistakes are being made between what activism can help people do and what's the effect of cyber activism on protests because these protests across the world aren't happening because of the internet they're happening because of a global crisis of capitalism and people rising up in hundreds of countries all over the world nine hundred cities at the moment are occupied because of and hysterically movements because people are dissatisfied with their lives they think

there's a crisis in represented in representative democracy if their governments don't represent them so let's get that sorted first people don't just look on the internet one day and decide to have a revolution what social networks can do is they can make that process much faster they can make the sharing of information much quicker and much easier especially if you have people on board like anonymous little sec. sober activists and what some people have call hacktivists can facilitate the process of information of love in for a nation liberation if you like and. ok danny if i go to you and we look at what is going through with the arab spring and we have what's going on in wall street here what difference is social networking making because there is the anger out there just social networking make us more aware of it and you can be more in touch with people because it really has nothing

to do with the root cause it's just a tool for others to communicate their their discontent even their rage. well you know it's interactive so people can connect with each other as well as with information and it's also quick and rapid and it's a way to get access to information some of it though rather superficial what you have is for example twitter feeds that are linking to mainstream media articles it's not at all you know generated in the social media world it's often generated in the mainstream media that's why i think you need a sort of sense of the media college easier that all this media amplifies what's going on it makes it something that the public itself finds out about here in new york three by a three to one margin new yorkers say they support you know occupy wall street that doesn't mean they're all online they're reading about it they're seeing it on t.v. and they're going down to the park and they're meeting people there and getting it

you know exposed to it and turned on by it and we're seeing more and more survey showing approval of the sent the central message even though people don't know a lot of specifics about it the idea that people are fighting back or resisting raising these economic issues or targeting wall street all of that is a turn on for people all over the world and they getting information from multiple sources and it's very interesting of it if we can go to john to see if i could just go to john real quick here john you know it i think it's very interesting and we look at it because bridge of how social media is used in mainstream media and i'm thinking of television specifically and all covered chair anything related to terrorism cherice different groups around the world groups that the united states doesn't like and its allies but you know when it comes to social discontent and these kind of protest occupation protests people find out through social media first not through the mainstream. well i think that's because

these movements are social in their nature they're not ideological and that's a significant difference even in the past what you usually had was some firebrand who wrote. a big book that contained an ideology that led to a revolution and now what you can get is this tender field of discontent that is said only ignited by almost an arbitrary incident and blows up to be a movement overnight that doesn't have an ideology and doesn't have a leader and i think that's profoundly different from anything you've seen before also i think because of the digital media people are able to marshal a lot more information that is within their own media ecology they develop a media call it and i would say that that a lot of people who didn't know very much about the banking system didn't know very much about the the way in which the lobbying combine works are suddenly very well

informed on that by virtue of the fact that they're passing around a lot of charts and graphs and data about the grotesque concentration of wealth in the upper one percent on a global basis. ok more do you want to jump in there laurie i'm getting a lot of break up only because well i'm laurie. yeah to be a break up that's replicated to some extent offline if you go down to the wall street protests and in london you find it full of information leaflets lots and lots of books the idea is they're all very very fruit sense information is power and massing information and informing me of self almost replaces a defined ideology in terms of you know having a leader to must but i but also the fact of being involved in social networks and the fact of being involved in what you call in the media ecology i think in which governments cannot control access to information really changes the relationship

with the individual with power because one of the ways the individual big government sorry exert power over individuals is to censor to control information especially in times of crisis you're seeing from london to terrorists where governments cracking down on the use of the internet using mobile phone technology you know when there's civil unrest and actually the fact having internet technology and being able to break those censorship those censorship is important really empowers people in a very very real way it makes people a lot of people able to experience that protest in real time almost as a means ok. i think so i think so but i don't fully agree with it you know in terms of people are getting turned on just by the internet they're getting turned on by participation by king part of a community by sensing of a movement that is in just thirty days gone from one park in new york to the whole

world i mean i didn't hear some of what john had to say because the audio seemed to be breaking up at least in my head here but anything he says i tend to agree with but you know i would say that we are not being educated enough and there are a lot of people at the park and in the movement who feel it needs to be more education i personally you know i've been doing a lot of work on financial crime i've made a film about it i've i've written a book about it you know and i find that a lot of the people there are not very well informed about the details of it because it hasn't been covered either in the independent media or or in the in the in the social media so i think we have a long way to go here and trying to educate this movement so that they realize this is a long term struggle it's not something that's going to change tomorrow morning john you want to jump in there and i talk about phil i'd like to talk about filters too because a lot of people in send things are ok john i'd like to back up

a bit ahead. yeah you know yes it does allow for a kind of very thin but broader participation but i want to issue a couple of have yeah it's one of which is that you know there used to be the term armchair revolutionary the well no no there is even more widespread phenomenon which is the the mousepad revolutionary. which is somebody who's sitting in his computer you know probably in the basement with mom on the first floor. thinks that he's actively engaged in a revolutionary struggle when all he's doing is tweeting about it and i've been somewhat guilty of that i suppose i mean if we're going to the things that matter involves involve getting getting out with your body and being there and being present ok well you know you want to have been there before we got to the break and i had no rights only yeah it's firstly hundreds of thousands of people on the

street fighting that bodies in the ring secondly you know i took this. revolutionary. weaker and started these protests are not just physical process that's the process they're about changing minds and changing our beings and some people are able to engage better on the internet watching these videos we're not just you know this is not just about reading blogs on twitter we have videos taken from underneath horses in times square i don't feel like coming correct anyone who says it's being done for thirty days this didn't actually start with occupy wall street much as the focus is here we're going to do it for a new after that short break we'll continue our discussion of protests is social media with r t. k.

these. are looming. it's. six years. and. was coming.

to the latest in some instances some of. the future coverage. think it's. welcoming to cross the country will call to mind you we're talking about the influence of social networking and global change. ok danny where you wanted to say something right before the break so go right ahead yeah yeah i did it and i did and you know i'm not saying that the whole movement started thirty days ago i'm saying that the occupation of the park here in new york city started thirty one or two days ago and it's quite amazing that in that short amount of time this whole example spread around the world the way it did but obviously they were at the scene site and june i was in madrid in the possibile

soul which had a big encampment the indignados of spain have been part of this this this movement and movements like it are not new but what is new is this media component and also this sense of global solidarity it's not just the national deal anymore a local deal that the protests in egypt started two years earlier before exactly when we found that it's actually are square there were people active so so it you know you should there are still about those facts in a chronology but about what the impact is and what it's likely to be ok john go ahead you want to jump in because i want to ask everybody a question about the arab revolutions you hear several foot ok there's several things that are new and i think they're important one of them is that. to an even greater extent than i saw in the sixty's this is a generational phenomenon. where the people who are sort of natives of cyberspace

have a very different sense of the world then the people who are immigrants. and there they're much more able to communicate organize assemble and change their views using digital media then their parents would be that's important and i the really important thing though is the absence of ideology in the absence of leadership and i think those are both in principle extremely good things but when you get around at the end of say a successful revolution and you try to form a government there you go suddenly you've got a vacuum and there you go this is much of a problem in the arab world at the moment and i'm very concerned about what's going to happen and still be double edged sword here with what is what happens when you succeed i mean just you know i'd like to ask everyone a question here could could we've seen the i don't want to know i don't know if i want to agree with that revolution but the changes in egypt and in tunisia with out

social media would it would if it happened anyway or was that a critical element a critical tool for it to happen laurie what do you think about that. well i don't . see london for me sorry mistake a few days into the egyptian revolution. barack shut down mean that's right and to everyone's huge surprise there weren't huge surprise at the revelation carried on and it wasn't just social media people from all over the world were actually getting information to activists on the ground from times using fax machines and this is not just about the technology itself it's about the mindset created by that technology and part of that is an emergence from the technology but part of that is just the time people are fed up with being controlled by dictators they're fed up with capital working in the way those they're fed up with being controlled by big business they're fed up with not having a real say amen their own lives and understand that i think some of the posturing we're not not the way we discuss the ignorance of but some of the posturing in the

mainstream media over this is the twitter revolution is quite clear i find because it seems to suggest this comes that this happens because of the internet rather than because of a massive the global crisis is packed so and people are being fed up with that ok jenny what do you think about that i mean how critical are you seeing the sun and a sudden all the sudden let me just jump in here you know all of a sudden the conversation has changed that issue that wasn't really being discussed the power and abuses of wall street of economic power is now being discussed all over the media you know things start in one way but they also morph into something else you know back in the sixty's we chant the whole world is watching or now the whole world is watching let's not forget al-jazeera is for on the role of other t.v. outlets and bringing this to large audiences all the world that helps spread this

message also i think this notion of in any ology you know is a little fuzzy i mean people don't have to have a political line they have a shared set of values and convictions. and a sense of who the enemy is and what's wrong and i think that that is a merge ing in these protests it's just that it's not being done under the banner of the old left it's being done under the banner of a new generation but many in the older generation gray heads like myself are also involved in being supportive so it's multi-generational it's multi-racial it's international it has a lot of heavy going to stay there and it's very you know. go ahead john i think that the absence of ideology is almost always a positive thing and i don't think there's an absence of understanding i mean simply because there's not a an ideological take on this because you know it's not marxist or something like that i think that this is actually quite valuable because what we're doing here is

identifying and clarifying the problem and then collectively getting together to come up with solutions to it which i think is vastly superior to having some guy. describe the problem in some point and have everybody fall in line with this solution ok you know it's i think we need a lot of his remains harriet revolution will be i there's a lot i mean your article development from it and it is it's taking a state it's taken out of you know this here whatever you know it is this really just if it also just a failure of what was generally called mainstream media because people are looking for alternative news to looking for an alternative points of view i mean we in mainstream media in the u.k. in the united states are still very dismissive of the occupation movement and things like that they're a bunch of loons they're on the fringe they're lazy was i mean let's go to laurie. was laurie go ahead let's put that he's going to head laurie. if i can if i if i can come in. the the the tension between mainstream media and online

media is very very interesting at the moment because obviously it's not a straight divide you have people out there who are journalists like myself blogging and tweeting and you have people who are mainly involved in the movement organizing online going and writing opcodes for mainstream papers like the guardian or the new york times but the tension is very much between many to many medium which is the internet and associate digital technologies and a few to many medium which is the traditional mainstream radio television press and the relationship with power that that generates people feel that they don't want the mainstream media dictating what politics is and how simple how sick how the symbolism of politics should work anymore and you've seen that over the summer with you know the standards with the murdoch press people of very very people are sick and tired of living in living under the dictates of the third estate people don't

want what they see as corporate interests controlling the media involved in their politics and now having digital technology allows people to feel that they're more in control that they are the media they can create their media they don't have to wait for protests to be mediated as it were they can they can make that because they can you know. very direct approach as soon. you know at the same at the same time and i'm speaking now as an independent journalist who was also at one point a network journalist you know i see an interplay here you know i don't think we want just to talk to ourselves i think we want to talk to the whole society and the media started off by ignoring it then after the police attack people here in new york they started covering it then they started ridiculing it and making fun of it now they seem to be reporting it in a much more serious way and public opinion is showing itself to be very supportive

which is a good thing it's the movement's power it adds to the movement's appeal and i think we want that to happen to the same time the social media service that the mainstream will hear is really is a cleaning lady a happens at manipulating them. as i think people are just people i'm sorry in the mainstream media they can look late rep and certain that manipulates them or that's what's most clever about this and if you go down to any of the big occupations in london in new york in matricular find at the center of paper weapon propelling our press releases you know speaking to the mainstream press in the. story and so this is a movement that's very very smart very very encouraging with how the media well it's not what still people are saying this is a bunch of crazy crazy hippies they don't have the guile to write press releases and there's much point as i've seen. ok john you touched upon something earlier in the program which really is an indirect way john i think it's

a. good meeting john and i go to john in san francisco is that you mentioned something really is very interesting is it when what is success for this kind of social movements i mean it when we just got me ok how does the world change because you know where you pointed out i mean a lot of people sitting in their basements writing you know tweeting and things like that there is no critical mass here so if there's no critical mass in the movement how can to be critical mass and some kind of outcome oh i think there can be. critical mass and the outcome i mean obviously i don't i don't believe that what we're trying to do here in the united states is in any way similar to what had to be done in egypt say where they really literally had over overthrow the government and and probably have to do it again now i think but what we have to do is to is to get people to seriously take a look at how our government is working and start to put in the necessary inhibitors to this kind of of spinup in the concentration of power and wealth.

people need to know what the hell's going on first of all there has to be a movement of understanding that sees that the police accuracy is literally taken over the will supply and the power supply. and already know you're starting to do the thing all over are you trying time here i noticed did you are you want to see someone kind of glory may you be the last word in the program go ahead. i think one of the things that's important about that is tone saying is it's not government that need to be overthrown necessarily in this case this is a movement that is global it's globalized and the internet allows people to start thinking about global solutions to a global problem like jones says this is talk or see this is close allies with plutocracy and monopolization of wealth that needs to be forward simply overthrowing a government is not going to do all right and all right you want to know you to be such a bad idea so you just say you got over don't dismiss overthrowing governments governments

that are not doing their job that are broken that are not responsive to the people don't deserve to be there but it's not just a political issue it's an economic crisis and we have to focus on that we find a lot agreement on this program here many thanks and i guess sitting in new york san francisco and in london thanks to our viewers for watching us here our kids see you next time and remember. ok. still. if you want to. home.

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