three thirty pm on monday here in australia with your headlines now the critical condition sources say that egypt's former leader hosni mubarak is fighting for his life that's following his reported shock at seeing images of colonel gadhafi that was ousted from power in february during the arab spring revolution after thirty years of rule. in libya meantime many celebrators the country's transitional government officially declares a liberation this of course following the death of ousted leader moammar gadhafi but questions remain about whether the price paid in the form of lives and ruin infrastructure was too high. the search for a solution to be used that crisis at a summit him brussels brings no breakthrough in the u.k. there are growing calls to leave the gulf altogether the parliament prepares to

vote on whether to hold a referendum on the issue. just some of monday's. peter lavelle and its guests discuss the power of social media such as on the internet and its power in changing the political landscape what happened during the arab spring cross-talk is now. wealthy british scientists think it's time to explain. markets why not scandal. find out what's really happening to the global economy because the reports on our t.v. . you can. still.

call in welcome to crossfire computable 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 been witnessing the arab spring here of season of discontent in america's own anti wall street protests powerful tools and deeds but can social networks really alter the political landscape. you can. start. to cross the digital technologies and media i'm joined by any sector 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 though we have witnessed over the course of less than here is remarkable three north african

regimes down the larger part of the arab world a blaze and now civil uprisings are. in a way to the west 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. nation revolution on power in this century the internet and technology were part of the arab spring is narrative is beyond question and video clips of the first protests in tunisia were recorded using mobile phones and posted on facebook making their way across the arab world and eventually being picked up by news channels later 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 been many has even been suggested as a contender for the nobel peace prize. i think we should recognize cyber activism as a movement this can change things and make things better and recognizing that is what governments in countries like egypt libya and syria have done to control dissent by

cracking down on my media and even in europe protests over budget cuts ahead of sorties 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 in violence and criminality even though governments have always had to worry about information flows this is the first time there was finding of this 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 put out the double edged sword thank you very much for that matter laurie thank you first in london activism overrated became cyber activism changed the world well i think in some ways mistakes are being made between what it is and can help people do and what's the effect of sober up to this i'm on protest 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 feel 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 log on to 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. cyber activists and what some people call house call hacktivists who can facilitate the process of information now in for a nation liberation if you like and. ok danny if i go to you and we look at what's 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 but you can be more in touch with people because it's 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. but you know it's interactive so people can connect with each other as well as with information it's also quick and rapid and it's a way to get access to effort 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 a media college g.e. or that all this media at apple phys 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 do 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 you know exposed through it and turned on by it and we're seeing more and more surveys showing approval of the center the central message even though people don't know a lot of specifics about it the idea that people are fighting back or resisting or raising these economic issues or targeting wall street all of that is a turn on for people over the world and they're getting information from multiple sources and it's very interesting of it if we can go to john to see if i could is going to john real quick here john you know i think it's very interesting and we look at because bridge. how social media is used in mainstream media in anything in television specifically bill covered chair or anything related to terrorism terrorists 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 in the past what you usually had was some firebrand who wrote. a big book that contained an ideology that led to revolution and now what you can get is this tempered 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 that 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 to develop

a media ecology and i would say 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 paula because well i'm laurie. yeah i'm going to break up that's replicated to some extent offline if you go down to the uk wall street protests and in london you find it full of information leaflets pamphlets lots and lots of books the idea is that we're very very crude sense information is power and yet amassing information and informing of self almost replaces a defined ideology in terms of you know having a leader. but also the fact of being involved in social networks and the of this

class 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 of the individual with power because one of the ways that individual big government sorry exert power over individuals is to censor to control information especially in times of crisis you seeing from london to terrorists where governments cracking down on the use of the internet using mobile phone technology when there's civil unrest and actually the fact having internet technology and being able to break those censorship those censorship in force meant really empowers people in a very very very little real way it makes people a lot of people are able to experience that protest in real time almost as a mean 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 peeing part of a community by sensing 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 were not being educated enough and there are a lot of people at the park and in the movement who feel that 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 can 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 caviar it's one of which is that you know there used to be the term armchair revolutionary the well not and now there is even more widespread phenomenon which is the the mousepad revolutionary. which is somebody who's sitting at his computer you know probably in the basement with mom on the first floor and thinks that he's actively engaged in a revolutionary struggle when all you're doing is tweeting about it and i've been somewhat guilty of that i self i mean it's the the things that matter involved involve getting getting out with your body and being there and being present ok so

you know he wanted to be there before we got to the break and i had learned something yeah pressley hundreds of thousands of people in the streets putting up bodies in the line secondly you know i did this. revolutionary and what we can understand is that these protests are not just physical process that's the process they're about changing minds and changing ideas and some people are able to engage you know better i don't mean to that what it is we're not just you know this is not just about reading tweets and we have videos taken from under me in times square i don't feel like coming correct anyone who says this new. case this did not start with occupy wall street much as the focus is going to be here we're going to go with brains to that short break we'll continue our discussion of protests in social media state with our team.

please. least some. just say. wealthy british scientists. let's go.

see. what's really happening to the global economy. look at the global financial headline news. reports. the you can see just say. the least so. welcome back to the computer. we're talking about the influence of social networking on global change see can you see the is. ok danny where you want to say something right before the break so go right ahead yeah yeah. yeah i did and you know i'm saying a whole movement started thirty days ago saying that the occupation of the park

here in new york city started thirty one days ago and it's quite amazing that in that short amount of time this whole example spread around. world the way it did but obviously they were at the scene site in june i was in madrid in the possibile soul which had a big encampment the indignados of spain have been cleared 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 the anymore a local deal that the protests in egypt started two years earlier before exam you know any foundation is actually or square there were people active so so it will you know you should know as little about those facts and the 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 several foot. there are 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 and their parents would be that's important and i get the really important thing though is the absence of ideology in the absence of leadership and i think that 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 suddenly you've got a vacuum and this is much of the problem in the arab world at the moment and i'm

very concerned about what's going to happen that still you know will edge sword here when 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 what revolution but the changes in egypt in tunisia without social media would have it would have 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 actually say loriene here in london first sorry man speak a few days into the egyptian revolution. was the repair it shut down means that's right and to everyone's huge surprise there wasn't a huge surprise 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 time to 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 emerging from the technology but part of that is just that time people are fed up

with being controlled by take this they're fed up with kept the working in a way because they're fed up with being controlled by big business they're fed up with not having a real say in their own lives to understand that i think some of the posturing we're not we're not sure why we're discussing it now but some of the posturing in the mainstream media over this is the twitter revolution is quite competitive i find because it seems to suggest this comes that this happens because of being from the it's rather than because of a massive the global crisis of capital and people being fed up with that ok do you think about that i mean how critical are you. to sudden all the sudden let me just jump in here you know all of a sudden the conversation has changed to the issue there wasn't really being discussed the power and abuses of wall street of economic power and 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 chanted the whole world is

watching well now the whole world is watching and let's not forget al-jazeera is wrong the role of other t.v. outlets in 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 merging 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 what we could display there and i think it's very you know i had john i think i think that the absence of ideology is almost always

a positive thing and i don't think that 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 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 at some point and have everybody fall in line with his solution ok you know it's i think we need a lot of his remake a revolution would be ok there's a lot i mean your eagle development for me but it is it's taking a state it's taken out of you know with whatever you know 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 point of view i mean we mainstream media you know 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 laying the lies i mean let's go to laurie go to lauren first and was laurie go ahead but that isn't going to head laurie he's real. if i can if i if i can come in. the just 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 movements organizing online going and writing op posts 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 associated digital technologies and a few to many medium which is the traditional mainstream print radio television press and their 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 we've seen that over the summer with you know that scandals 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 link they can you know. very direct from a protest. 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 circus that the mainstream will hear essentially as a free media they have been for manipulate them. as as i think people are just people on the sorry or in the mainstream media they can play rather than certain that manipulates them and that's what's most clever about this and if you get into any of the big occupations in london in new york in matricular find a center and movie it putting out press releases you know speaking to the mainstream press on the phone generating the story themselves is a movement that's very very smart very very in tune with how the need here is not

what still people are saying this is a bunch of crazy hippie or crazy piece then i think i'll to write press releases that there's much current as a. ok john that you touched upon something earlier in the parade which is indirectly john i think it's a vision something. that's going to john in san francisco if these that you mention something really it's very interesting is it when what is success for this kind of social movements i mean it when they win what does that mean ok how does the world change because you know what you pointed out i mean a lot of people sitting in their basements writing you know tweeting and things like that and it is no critical mass here so there's no critical mass in the movement how going to be critical mass and some kind of outcome well 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. but what we have to do is to

is to keep 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 spin up 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 plutocracy has literally taken over the well supply and the power supply. and all right now we're starting to do that laying all over are you trying to say i noticed it lawry you want to see something 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 to be overthrown necessarily in this case this is a movement that is global it's globalized and the technology the internet allows people to start thinking about global solutions to a global problem like john says this is talk or see this is close allies principally talk christie and monopolization of wealth that needs to be fought in

the overthrowing of government is not going to be all right and all right do you want to throw your two cents a real going to be such a bad idea and so you would just say you know going over the smiths 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 rocky see you next time and remember. you can. still.

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