good to have you with us this hour this is our top stories now for you past the hour here in moscow libya's new route has ordered an investigation into colonel gadhafi steffen promise to introduce islamic law and build a democracy on the ruins of a once prosperous nation. the health of egypt's former leader hosni mubarak has traveled to mistreat sources suggest a heart attack has left him in critical condition but he's nowhere denies those claims. a leak plugged wiki leaks suspends his whistle blowing american financial institutions refusing to accept the nation's credit cards it's found the files to fight the financial looking. most of the e.u. summit in brussels to generate sense of petty spats this tension over the debt crisis boils over and the british government faces a revolt by european m.p.'s and want. more from me in less than thirty minutes from

now in the meantime peter lavelle and his guest discuss the power of social media in changing the political landscape as happened during the arab spring cross-talk is next. with a. review of the latest unsigned statistics from. the future. to kick. start. the clock. and welcome across our computer a little 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 fear of season of discontent and

america's own anti wall street protests powerful tools indeed but can social networks really alter the political landscape. cross-talk visual 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 news you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage it but first marcia in social media driving the process it's more complicated than that but what we have witnessed over the course of less than here is remarkable three north african regimes down the larger part of the arab world ablaze and now civil uprisings are gripping settings from it away 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 that the internet and technology were part of the arab spring is narrative is beyond question the eclipse 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 leader many will refer to the tunisian revolution as the twitter or the wiki leaks revolution and bloggers will be basking in recognition likely not been many has even been suggested as a contender for the nobel peace prize. i think we should recognize cyber activism as a movement that 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 online media and even in europe protests over budget cuts headed surratt is contemplating the same we are working with the police the intelligence services and industry. the right to stop people communicating via web sites and

services when we know they are not in violence disorder 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 talk about a double edged sword thank you very much laurie fine go to you first in london is overrated became cyber activism changed the world well i think in some ways mistakes are being made between what cyber 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 global crisis of capitalism and people rising up in hundreds of countries all over the world and nine hundred cities at the moment are occupied because of anti astaire italy movements because people are dissatisfied with their lives they feel there's

a crisis and represent in representative democracy if their governments don't represent them so let's get that sorted earth's people don't just you know 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. cyber activists and what some people called how to best who can facilitate the process of information of 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 as 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 is 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 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 this sort of sense of a media college either 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 the 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 to it and turned on by it and we're seeing more and more surveys showing approval of the sense of 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 all over the world and they're getting information from multiple sources and it's very interesting if we can go to john you just if i could is going to john real quick here john you know i think it's very interesting and we look at it because bridge of how social media is used in mainstream media and thinking of television specifically bill 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 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 tender field of discontent that is said really 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 to develop a media quality 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 great task concentration of wealth in the upper one percent on a global basis. ok what do you want to jump in there laurie i'm getting a lot of break up on the left i'm laura. yeah that's replicated to some extent offline if you go down to the uk by wall street protests and in london you find it full of information leaflets and lots of books the idea is that very very fruit sense information is power and you know massing information and informing me of self almost replaces a defined ideology in terms of you know having a leader must behind but also the fact of being involved in social networks and the of the facets 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're seeing from london to terrorists where governments cracking down on the use of the internet use of 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 important really empowers people in a very very very little real way it makes people a lot of people 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 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 don't send things are going on i'd like to back up

a bit go 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 now now there is even more widespread phenomenon which is the the mouse pad revolutionary. which is somebody who's sitting in his computer you know probably in the basement with mom on the first floor. thanks 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 very clear that the things that matter involved involve getting getting out with your body and being there and being present ok so you know he's going to have been there before we got to the break and i had learned something yeah firstly hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets putting their bodies in the secondly you know if this. had revolutionary.

what you could 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 that on the internet watching these videos were not just you know this is not just about reading tweets and we have videos taken from underneath horses' hoofs in times square i don't feel like you are coming correct anyone he says this movement's been done for thirteen days they say let's start with occupy wall street much as the focus has been here we're going to go with brains and after that short break we'll continue our discussion of protests in social media state with r.t. . if you think you can.

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m d q slowest stick the welcome much across the computer old ultra mind you were talking about the influence of social networking on global change the i can see the us ok danny where you wanted to say something right before the break so go right ahead yeah yeah i did yeah i did and you know i'm 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 there are answers. in june i was in madrid in the possibile sol 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 exact you know any found that was actually or square there were people active so so it you know you shouldn't are still 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 thought i had there are several things that are new and i think they're important one of them is the through 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 than their parents would 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 and still you know the edge sword here is what happens when you succeed i mean just you know i'd like to ask everyone a question here could could we have seen the event i don't want to i don't know if it will be with revolution but it changes in egypt 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 amplify he's a brain he's in london for me sorry speak a few days into the egyptian revolution. barack shut down the internet right and everyone's huge surprise there everyone's huge surprise the revolution carry don't really wasn't just social media people from all over the world were actually getting information to activists on the ground sometimes 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 hardware is just the time people are fed up with being controlled by the take is they're fed up with capital working in the way it does they're fed up with being controlled by big business they're fed up with not having a real say in their own lives and good understand i think some of the posturing we're not not the way 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 the internet it's rather than because of a massive deep global crisis of capital and people being fed up with that ok do you feel. all of a sudden let me just jump in here you know all of a sudden the conversation has changed to the 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 chanted the whole world is watching well now the whole world is watching let's not forget al-jazeera is for on the role of other t.v. outlets in bringing this to large audiences all over the world that help spread this message also i think this notion of an. you know is

a little fuzzy i mean people don't have to have a political line to 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 emerging in these protests that's just it's not being done under the banner of the old left it's being done under the banner of up a new generation but many in the older generation who are a 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 country cluelessly there and it's very unique. there john. 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 in some point and have everybody fall in line with this solution ok you know it's i think we got a lot it was a remake a revolution will be a guy there's a lot i mean your eagle development from the debate is going to take its take it's taken out of here whatever you did 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 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 lazy i mean let's go to laurie go to laura first was laurie but that isn't going to head laurie he's real. if i can 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 movement organizing online going and writing op eds 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 too many medium which is the traditional mainstream print 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 we've seen that over the summer with you know that scandals with the murdoch press people are very very people are sick and tired of living in living under the diktats 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 the media they don't have to wait for the protests to be mediated as it were they can they can make that link if they can you know a. very direct from a process. 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 media is doing as a free media here then from manipulate them. as i think people are just people who are in the mainstream media a certain plate rather than certain that manipulates them and that's what's most clever about listening if you go down to any of the people. in your own matricular find it essential up and move it paperwork people are putting out press releases yes people through the mainstream press and generating the story themselves is a minute that's very very smart very very in keeping with how the media well this is not what still people are saying this is a bunch of crazy hippie that crazy hippies then have the guile to write press releases with as much punch as. ok john you touched on something earlier in the program which is that in tripoli john i think it's

a region. that's going to john in san francisco it is 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 we 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 there is no critical mass here so there's no critical mass in the movement how can they 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. 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 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 will supply in the power supply. and already going to start to do their thing all over. the floor you want to she's in a kind of glory may you be the last word in the program go ahead. i think one of the things that's important about tone saying is it's not the government that need to be overthrown necessarily in this case this is a movement that is global it's global 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 globalized principly talk or see a monopolization of wealth that needs to be forward simply overthrowing a government is not going to be all right and all right danny you want to throw your two cents a real going to be such a bad idea and so you would just say a lot over this miss 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'll 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 takes your viewers for watching us iraqis the next time and remember. you start. to think you can.

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