culture is the same on the taxpayers although maybe once a year and a real serious problem a weapons of mass mobilization you tube facebook and twitter they are favored tools able to bring segments of society together in the name. please please please please. please

. british science. market finally. come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report on our team play.

you can start. to think. oh and welcome to crossfire computor all 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 as has been 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. to keep slaves. 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 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 a blaze 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 the internet and technology were part of the arab springs narrative is beyond question the 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 lederman you will refer to the tunisian revolution as the twitter or the wiki leaks revolution and bloggers will be basking in recognition but equally now ben 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 she things make things better and recognizing that is what governments in countries like egypt and syria have done to control dissent by cracking down in online media and even in europe protests over budget cuts health already scanned to 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 probably violence and criminality even though governments have always had to worry about information flows since the first time they're well i'm doing it 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 franco you first in london is overrated can cyber activism change the

world well i think in some ways mistakes are being made between what is and can help people do. you know 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 at 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 all represent in representative democracy they governments don't represent them so let's get that sorted first 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 her call her activists who can facilitate

a 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'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 the information it's all so 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 a media college easier that all this media apple flies a 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 you know exposed to 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 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 if we can go to john if i could just go to john real quick here

john you know it i think it's very interesting and we look at the coverage of how social media is used it i mean stream media and thinking of television specifically bill covered chair or 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 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 quality 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 branch 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 what 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 occupy wall street protests and in london you find it full of information leaflets let's lots and lots of books

the idea is that we're very in a very free 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 must behind but also the fact of being involved in social networks and the of this 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 of the individual with power because one of the ways the individual the governments 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 and those censorship in force

meant 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 getting turned on by participation 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 even send things are going to john i'd like to bat it up a bit and head. 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 you know 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 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 still felt mean that the things that matter involved involve getting getting out with your body and being there and being present ok well you know he wanted to have been there before we got to the break and had lawrence and me yes presley hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets putting that bodies in the ring secondly you know i did this. revolutionary what we don't understand is that protests are not just physical process that's the process they're about solving minds and beings and some people are able to engage you know better on the internet watching these videos we're not just you know this is not just about reading tweets we have videos taken from underneath this one same time square i don't feel like coming correct anyone who says this movement's been going

for thirty days this did not start with occupy wall street much as the focus is going to be here we're going to go with brains and after that short break we'll continue our discussion of protests in social media state which are key key . a very warm welcome to you this is your news today protesters on the polls. they have. been canceling the chance to get the status of the human experiment to. see if we pursue a business rather than support it snows the busy trying local economies and it's

all changelings us financial template a reason to maintain a confidence in monkeys and. want to be seems way mullen says recession look at the nation's close to seeing a subprime loans close. to fail so we pull a bus again feel like things us crash smashed. against the glass is an inspiring. for me i'm just programs increase the total economy. download the official placation join a phone called touch from the on choose option. video on demand r.t.s. mind bold colors and r.s.s. feeds now in the palm of your. on the

dot com. welcome back to the computer old ultra mind you were talking about the influence of social networking on global change. and. ok jenny where you wanted to say something right before the break so go right ahead yeah yeah i did it yeah 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 in 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 the protests in egypt started two years earlier before exact you know any found it was actually or square there were people active so so it you know you should there is a law 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 several foot. there are several things that are new and i think they're important one of them is the. 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 to 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 all right that's important and i 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 it's just you and 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 the word 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 i am going to say right here in london for me sorry man speak a few days into the egyptian revolution. barack shut down the internet right and everyone's huge surprise severance 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 that 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 in grand style but 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 complicitous i find

because it seems to suggest that this comes at this happens because of the internet rather than because of a massive deep global crisis of capital and people being fed up with that ok do you think i mean how critical. 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 in any ology you know is

a little fuzzy i mean if 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 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 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 heavy cluelessly there then a very unique 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 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 this solution ok you know it's i think we got a lot it was premature revelation we were being i was like i mean your eagle development from the but it is it's a state it's taken out of here whatever it is this really just if it's also just a failure of what was generally called mainstream media because people are looking for alternative news they're 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 was i mean let's go to laurie go to lauren first was laurie go ahead with what that is we're 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 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 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 we've seen that over the summer with you know that stands 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 the media they don't have to wait for protests to be mediated as it were they can they can make that leap if they can you know. brain drain 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 is able to maintain will hear is certainly is a free media here and program manipulates and. i don't think people are just people i'm sorry the mainstream media they can really play rather than something that manipulates them or that's what's most clever about this and if you go down to any of the patients in london in new york in matricular find it essentially up and move it paper reputable putting out press releases yes speaking to the mainstream press and generating the story themselves that's very very smart very very in keeping with how the media world is not what still people are saying this is a bunch of crazy happy crazy hippies then have the guile to write press releases with as much punch as a price ok john you touched upon something earlier in the program which is an indirect way john i think it's a religion something. that's going to john in san francisco if you mention

something really it's very interesting is that when what is success for this kind of social movements i mean it when they when what does that mean 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 there's no critical mass in the in the movement how can to be critical mass and some kind of outcome oh i think there can be. critical mass in 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 is in any way similar to what had to be done in egypt say where they really literally had over overthrow the government and probably have to do it again now. 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 a 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 already we're starting to do this thing all over are you trying to me i noticed it lawry 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 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 the this is globalized person plutocracy a monopolization of wealth that needs to be forward simply overthrowing a government is not going ok all right all right you want to throw your hands and say we're going to be such a bad idea i'm sure you would just say you know a lot over the smiths overthrowing governments governments that are not doing their jobs 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 right look we find a lot agreement on this program here many thanks to my guest today in new york san francisco and in london thanks to our viewers for watching us here are keep me next time and remember. if you. want to. get a lot sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you clip something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't. charge because a big check. the

in. the book.