MESSAGE TO YOU... (e-resources)

  In what way do we use social network?
  To communicate with our friends, to share information about our life, to keep in contact...
We seem to know just the good side of those networks, we don't even think about other ways, but what about countries without free speech, countries where there is war and government hides everything, where the news are role by power of the government. In Iran protesters are using Facebook and Twitter to ensure that news of their demonstrations and brutal repression reaches the outside world.
  Protesters have struggled to be heard on media channels, so they turned to social networks, posting images and tweets about the situation that they are in. Those protesters are struggling with free speech issue, with tight internal media restrictions, but the power of freedom is so strong that they find the way of reaching the networks, they access them via proxy servers, this allows them to stay anonymous. On those images we can see that protesters are both male and female, groups of all ages, what is not clear is what is really going on and how much trust we can put in to those images.

British Journal of Photography, Message to you, 01/07/2009, p.11

  I looked on You tube as the writer Julian Lass suggested and find a film "Basijis are shooting at civilians" and from this short recording it is very hard to say what is really going on. Some of the men are blurred, running away from the shootings, on other recording we see a man shooting one way, in seconds maybe hundreds of men are running towards him. Those are films of news reports and as we think they can't lie, but it paints a very bleak picture, who is shooting and who is running away.

  In all that we have to think about the power of online networking, that so many of us ignore. 

Born in Moldova, activist and journalist Natalia Morar started a tweet about a demonstration, she expected at most a couple of hundred friends and colleagues, but with power of Twitter 15,000 turned up to the square, mostly young people with access to the internet.

British Journal of Photography, Message to you, 01/07/2009, p.12

British Journal of Photography, Message to you, Julian Lass, 01/07/2009