March 03, 2012
Guildhall, Bath
Why is it Kicking off Everywhere?
Our world is changing dramatically. The global economic crisis has given way to social crisis; corrupt and dictatorial politics enmeshed with a global financial elite, and an ever-widening gulf between the haves and have-nots. From London to Cairo, Wisconsin to Tehran, we have witnessed new forms of collective action; fluid networks of agile, Twitter and Facebook-savvy networks of youthful protesters, who understand how power works. How radically do we now need to think about political alternatives, elite rule and global poverty? BBC Newsnight's Paul Mason discusses the issues with Allan Little.
£8 (£7 concessions)
A5
Supported by Verso
Authors
Books
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Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere
by Paul Mason
Incisive grassroots account of the new global revolutions by acclaimed BBC journalist and author of Meltdown
Blog
"A network can usually defeat a hierarchy"—Paul Mason extract in the Guardian
An extract from Paul Mason's Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions is published in the Guardian's G2 supplement today. Mason explains the role of technology and the importance of the network in recent global unrest.
Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. What's important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organised via Indymedia, but what they used these media for - and what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions.
Here, the crucial concept is the network - whose impact on politics has been a long time coming. The network's basic law was explained by Bell Telephone boss Theodore Vail as early as 1908: the more people who use the network, the more useful it becomes to each user. (The most obvious impact of the "network effect" has been on the media and ideology. Long before people started using Twitter to foment social unrest, mainstream journalists noticed - to their dismay -that the size of one's public persona or pay cheque carried no guarantee of popularity online. People's status rises and falls with the reliability and truthfulness of what they contribute.)