Media

Mao and the Facebook Panopticon

/ Eamon / 1 Comment

Photo by Clemson on Flikr. Click for attribution.

I read this passage in a biography of Mao Zedong (yes, I am making my way through all the major historical figures) and started having nightmares about Facebook. This is from the early 1940s, when Mao was consolidating his base for war against the Nationalists. According to Mao: The Untold Story, the Party chairman interrogated vast swaths of his young recruits in order to instill in them feelings of submission and control, and to foster an atmosphere of deep mistrust, as friends informed on each other.

“One supreme accomplishment of the terror campaign was to squeeze out every drop of information about any link whatever with the Nationalists. Mao introduced a ‘Social Relationship’ form: ‘Tell everyone to write down every single social relationship of any kind [my emphasis].’ At the end of the campaign, the regime compiled a dossier on every Party member. The result was that Mao knew every channel the Nationalists might use to infiltrate in the forthcoming showdown. Indeed, during the civil war, while the Nationalists were penetrated like sieves, they had virtually zero success infiltrating the Communists. Mao had forged a machine that was virtually watertight.”

That blew my mind a little. Facebook could do for free what took Mao huge expense and organized brutality. It’s a Stasi/KGB/mukhabarat/CIA dream come true.

As this blog’s sidebars should prove, I love social media. But at its worst, can it be a voluntary Panopticon? Maybe the point is irrelevant in a mostly functioning democracy (actually, I don’t think it is), but certainly this historical perspective on state surveillance is relevant to all the arguments boosting social media in, ahem, more controlled atmospheres.

One thing’s for sure: no more pictures of any substance on Facebook for me.

Frisco

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I just came back from a 10-day visit to my hometown, San Francisco. There’s a lot I want to write about San Francisco. And by a lot, I mean a book’s worth.

Sidewalk graffiti on San Bruno Avenue, San Francisco. "SFC" stands for "Sucka Free City."

But while I struggle to form my Grand Theory of San Francisco, I’ll settle for a collection of tidbits, which sometimes are the best way to describe an unquantifiable entity. Here’s one: an enduring discussion about whether or not “Frisco” is a legit nickname.

Common knowledge says that it’s off limits. Herb Caen, San Francisco’s most famous columnist, published a book called Don’t Call it Frisco in 1953, which Wikipedia says was taken from a 1918 San Francisco Examiner article. The subject has been on steady rotation in local media for years — especially since San Francisco street culture has resurrected the term. (Read more about the whole debate in this 2003 Chronicle article, whose author seems to have read this San Francisco State publication’s article from 1997.) Continue reading →

Land and conflict in Africa

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It is rare that I read an article about Africa that successfully intertwines a rich understanding of history with current events, politics and human lives. Jina Moore‘s article about African land disputes this week in the Christian Science Monitor does it. The article is especially impressive because, although scholars of Africa know that conflicts over land are a fundamental element of wars, upheaval and disagreements from Darfur to Tanzania to Nigeria, it’s not usually a subject that makes for great headlines. It’s also a difficult topic to bring to American audiences that are used to being fed the facile story of “ancient hatreds” — tribe, ethnicity and race — as explanations for African conflict (and behavior in general). Visit Moore’s story through the Scarlett Lion, where Glenna Gordon has posted more relevant links and the photography she did for the piece.

More on Mwalimu

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There’s been some interesting debate on the relevance of Julius Nyerere in the comments field of my blog (thanks to the input of the great TZ blog louder than swahili). On the subject, this week’s East African had a nice column about the ambiguity of Nyerere’s life and contributions, check it out. It’s hard to sum up Nyerere’s real contribution to Tanzania, but I remain impressed by his vision, which almost singularly among leaders of his era transcended tribe and the other constraints that colonialism foisted on the continent. I got more convinced of that after watching the documentary “Mwalimu: The Legacy of Kabarage Nyerere” at the Kenya Film Festival last week. (This film has almost no presence on the internet, which is unfortunately not too big of a surprise for something coming out of TZ.)

Writing about Africa: who will hold you accountable?

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I’ve been reading some interesting stuff on a mini-scandal involving a guy who was quoted in several news reports as being a spokesperson for Darfur refugees. Turns out the man, who went by the name Abu Sharati (clearly a nickname, though never noted as such in the stories), was actually probably a spokesperson for a rebel group. Read the whole discussion through these posts and their links (I’m pasting straight from my Twitter feed because I’m writing this from a net cafe): via @SBengali http://bit.ly/GPQOY & @robcrilly http://tinyurl.com/y8rhy9h.

Now, I’m truly sympathetic to the pressures that international journalists are under, their limited resources and their need to rely on sources like “Abu Sharati” because there is no time and no way to look for anyone better.  In my brief foray into journalism, one thing I’ve immediately seen is that it is vastly easier to criticize media than it is to report. But the fact that this error was caught is really important. Some hedging language should have been used in the original reports. The revelation will, I hope, promote more caution in the future.

But there is a deeper issue that this discussion points to: reporting about people who will not read your work and do not pay for your stories (indirectly or directly) means there are fewer incentives for good fact-checking. There is a structural paradox at the core of international journalism, especially in Africa: our American audience’s preceived lack of proximity to the stories we produce makes it (that audience) passive about the information it receives.  Continue reading →

In praise of Prendergast

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After I wrote the Huffington Post piece on the John Prendergast-Mahmood Mamdani debate, I sort of felt like pro-Prendergast bloggers thought their man was under attack for no reason. It’s not that he always gets everything wrong, though–and that wasn’t the point of my article. For example, I like this CSM column on being a conscious electronics consumer so you don’t inadvertently contribute to conflict in the Congo. Continue reading →

Re: Twitter

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Here’s an email I received from a friend who works in Web promotion, in response to the sentiments expressed in my last post about finally succumbing to Twitter. He’s on point, and I’m just glad I’m not the dude he describes in the first graf (right? fellas?):

“All this social networking is annoying because most people don’t have shit to say.  They have no draw, no product, no expertise in anything, they aren’t funny, they offer no insight and no one cares about their stupid lives.  They’re yelling into the void and hoping that if they yell loud enough and often enough someone will pay attention.  People try to offer themselves as the draw but if their personality were that magnetic they probably wouldn’t be spending so much time on the Internet in the first place. Continue reading →