Posts by giovanni tiso
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Firstly these are urban dwellers, thus tend not to be the rural poor. Secondly, looking at the imagery they seem to be mostly younger. Thirdly, when you are earning $2 a day you simply don't have the luxury of the time.
There are also the urban poor, and those who are chronically un- or underemployed. Basing the assessment on presumed similarities with Indonesia also seems a bit thin. Not entirely implausible, but not enough to make factual statements either.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Simon Grigg,
I think it's reasonable to assume that the Facebook numbers are well represented in the people who have the time or inclination to do such a thing.
On what grounds do you assume that?
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Even if just a sector of the insurgency had made significant use of social media, that would be newsworthy, sure, but it's what it says about our capacity for political analysis that we can't move on from that detail that concerns me. If you were to read the original coverage of the Russian revolution, I'm guessing that you wouldn't find every other article screaming "OMG! the Bolsheviks use phones!" and then attaching the capacity to bring about change to the phone itself, rather than the people who used it.
Oh, and
I'm not sure that everyone needs access to Facebook etc to get the benefit from the spontaneous organization they provide
There is nothing spontaneous about organization! It's not Facebook that organises people.
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You beat me to that you devil!
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It is their revolution and from here it may look like facebook and twitter play a role but in Egypt I doubt it. It may be our portal to the events but not theirs.
There have certainly been widely circulated materials on demo strategy that expressedly urged participants not to use Facebook or Twitter, for they'd be monitored. I'm not denying that they might have been of some use - hey, protestors will use whatever ICT is available, what's new? - what's been really appalling is how social media-obsessed types have insisted to make it the story, as they did wrt to Iran. If I read the phrase "the Twitter generation" one more time in the coverage of this thing I'm going to kill somebody.
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What's I think most laughable about the rant is that - wait for it... instant coffee is actually more expensive than proper coffee. So the effete liberal out-of-touchness boils down to the fact that the crowd here fails to conform to the (alleged) taste of "most New Zealanders". As if in order to be sympathetic to the working class you needed to practice an almost calculated lack of refinement and taste.
Amazingly, the main problem with that view is not how patronising it is - it's how retrograde it is. Even if this "taste of most New Zealanders" (English miner food out of some bad 90s flick?) was actually a thing, there are plenty of working class immigrants who would gladly spit into your average instant coffee, and for whom cultivating a very cultured taste in food and drink is entirely compatible with socialist leanings and class solidarity.
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Hard News: Only what we would expect a…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
apparently the most newsworthy thing about Egypt right now is that Frank Bunce is there.
Yes, It thought that that was worth immortalising. They're now running an AP story on the actual insurrection that is refreshingly Bunce-free.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Joe Wylie,
As corporate received wisdom doesn't appear to have evolved, the next real drought seems due in around 2092.
Great. I'm fully determined to die before I have a cold shower.
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Hard News: Because it's about time we…, in reply to Danielle,
Which was a pretty common coffee additive in Louisiana, because they were poor.
Drank a bit of that growing up, I had a cup here at one point and it was quite the olfactory blast from the past. Not bad tasting either.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to George Darroch,
Gordon and Lyndon both deserve columns at a major newspaper
It's the newspapers that don't deserve them.
That said, I'd so live in a country run by Ricky Gervais...