Welcome!

Linux Containers Authors: Yeshim Deniz, Liz McMillan, Zakia Bouachraoui, Elizabeth White, Pat Romanski

Related Topics: Agile Computing, Microservices Expo, Linux Containers, Release Management

Agile Computing: Article

Opinion: Is This the #Jan25 Uprising?

What's in a name? Might this become the world's first (but not last) revolution named for a Twitter hash tag?

By Jeremy Geelan
Article Rating:
January 31, 2011 07:00 AM EST
Reads:
 26,196

First came Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" and now we have the "#Jan25 Uprising" - the world's first revolution named for a Twitter hash tag.

Calling it the "Twitter Revolution" misses the beauty of the hash tag itself, and besides what would one then call the upcoming social unrest in other Arab States? So-called "hashtag dates" are already being planned for the Arab world: Sudan #Jan30, Yemen #Feb3, Syria #Feb5, Algeria #Feb12 and Bahrain #Feb14.

Photo by Arabist, via TwitPic

I am not the only one who argues that "Twitter Revolution" is not the right term. Ulyses Mejias has written vehemently that "...[I]t is [absurd] to refer to events in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere as the Twitter Revolution, the Facebook Revolution, and so on." And he is right. Let me quickly just give the floor to Mejias, since he in turn is generous enough to note that things can sometimes best be expressed by others closer to a situation:
"I, for one, refuse to associate corporate brands with struggles for human dignity. I agree with Jillian York when she says:
“...I am glad that Tunisians were able to utilize social media to bring attention to their plight. But I will not dishonor the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi – or the 65 others that died on the streets for their cause – by dubbing this anything but a human revolution.'

 Ethan Zuckerman says much the same, when he writes:
"Tunisians took to the streets due to decades of frustration, not in reaction to a Wikileaks cable, a denial-of-service attack, or a Facebook update.""
Mejias goes so far as to title his post "The Twitter Revolution Must Die" - read it for yourself to see exactly why. Because York – who is based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University but was writing in her private capacity – states the case in somewhat less sensationalistic terms, I will give the final word to her:
"...[T]o call this a 'Twitter revolution' or even a 'WikiLeaks revolution' demonstrates that we haven’t learned anything from past experiences in Moldova and Iran. Evgeny Morozov’s question –”Would this revolution have happened if there were no Facebook and Twitter?”'– says it all. And in this case, yes, I – like most Tunisians to whom I’ve posed this question – believe that this would have happened without the Internet. "
What do you think? Is "#Jan25 Uprising" just as bad as "Twitter Revolution" – dishonoring those who have lost their lives in Egypt? Does it perhaps disingenuously suggest that the Arab world could not overthrow its various dictators except with the explicit help of U.S.-based social networks?

Published January 31, 2011 – Reads 26,196
Copyright © 2011 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Jeremy Geelan

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.

IoT & Smart Cities Stories
By Liz McMillan
Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized digital expert, bestselling book author, frequent keynote speaker, analyst, futurist, and transformation expert based in Washington, DC. He is currently Chief Strategy Officer at the industry-leading digital strategy and online community solutions firm, 7Summits.
Nov. 11, 2018 04:00 PM EST  Reads: 3,170
By Pat Romanski
Digital Transformation is much more than a buzzword. The radical shift to digital mechanisms for almost every process is evident across all industries and verticals. This is often especially true in financial services, where the legacy environment is many times unable to keep up with the rapidly shifting demands of the consumer. The constant pressure to provide complete, omnichannel delivery of customer-facing solutions to meet both regulatory and customer demands is putting enormous pressure on...
Nov. 11, 2018 11:45 AM EST  Reads: 2,281
By Elizabeth White
IoT is rapidly becoming mainstream as more and more investments are made into the platforms and technology. As this movement continues to expand and gain momentum it creates a massive wall of noise that can be difficult to sift through. Unfortunately, this inevitably makes IoT less approachable for people to get started with and can hamper efforts to integrate this key technology into your own portfolio. There are so many connected products already in place today with many hundreds more on the h...
Nov. 10, 2018 11:45 PM EST  Reads: 2,064
By Pat Romanski
The standardization of container runtimes and images has sparked the creation of an almost overwhelming number of new open source projects that build on and otherwise work with these specifications. Of course, there's Kubernetes, which orchestrates and manages collections of containers. It was one of the first and best-known examples of projects that make containers truly useful for production use. However, more recently, the container ecosystem has truly exploded. A service mesh like Istio addr...
Nov. 10, 2018 10:00 PM EST  Reads: 3,206
By Pat Romanski
Digital Transformation: Preparing Cloud & IoT Security for the Age of Artificial Intelligence. As automation and artificial intelligence (AI) power solution development and delivery, many businesses need to build backend cloud capabilities. Well-poised organizations, marketing smart devices with AI and BlockChain capabilities prepare to refine compliance and regulatory capabilities in 2018. Volumes of health, financial, technical and privacy data, along with tightening compliance requirements by...
Nov. 10, 2018 01:00 AM EST  Reads: 2,941
By Pat Romanski
Charles Araujo is an industry analyst, internationally recognized authority on the Digital Enterprise and author of The Quantum Age of IT: Why Everything You Know About IT is About to Change. As Principal Analyst with Intellyx, he writes, speaks and advises organizations on how to navigate through this time of disruption. He is also the founder of The Institute for Digital Transformation and a sought after keynote speaker. He has been a regular contributor to both InformationWeek and CIO Insight...
Nov. 9, 2018 04:45 PM EST  Reads: 2,282
By Yeshim Deniz
Andrew Keys is Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settlement products to hedge funds and investment banks. After, he co-founded a revenue cycle management company where he learned about Bitcoin and eventually Ethereal. Andrew's role at ConsenSys Enterprise is a mul...
Nov. 3, 2018 05:00 AM EDT  Reads: 4,027
By Yeshim Deniz
To Really Work for Enterprises, MultiCloud Adoption Requires Far Better and Inclusive Cloud Monitoring and Cost Management … But How? Overwhelmingly, even as enterprises have adopted cloud computing and are expanding to multi-cloud computing, IT leaders remain concerned about how to monitor, manage and control costs across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. It’s clear that traditional IT monitoring and management approaches, designed after all for on-premises data centers, are falling short in ...
Nov. 2, 2018 03:00 PM EDT  Reads: 3,210
By Elizabeth White
In his general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Manish Dixit, VP of Product and Engineering at Dice, discussed how Dice leverages data insights and tools to help both tech professionals and recruiters better understand how skills relate to each other and which skills are in high demand using interactive visualizations and salary indicator tools to maximize earning potential. Manish Dixit is VP of Product and Engineering at Dice. As the leader of the Product, Engineering and Data Sciences team at D...
Oct. 30, 2018 03:45 PM EDT  Reads: 14,062
By Zakia Bouachraoui
Dynatrace is an application performance management software company with products for the information technology departments and digital business owners of medium and large businesses. Building the Future of Monitoring with Artificial Intelligence. Today we can collect lots and lots of performance data. We build beautiful dashboards and even have fancy query languages to access and transform the data. Still performance data is a secret language only a couple of people understand. The more busine...
Oct. 30, 2018 11:45 AM EDT
MORE »