"Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring brings together some of the most celebrated and respected names in Arab media research to reflect on the communication conditions that preceded and made the Arab uprisings possible." (Publisher description)
"Internet censorship and surveillance becomes more sophisticated. The first-generation controls like China's "Great Firewall" are being replaced by techniques that include strategically timed distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, targeted malware, take-down notices and stringent terms-of-usa
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ge policies. Their aim is to shape and limit the national information environment. This publication reports on these new trends and their implications for the global internet commons. In addition, it offers 32 detailed country profiles on internet surveillance from the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia and Europe." (CAMECO Update 2-2010)
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"While the safety of children and young people in digital spaces has become an important issue of qualitative as well as quantitative research in the developed world and has led to a significant body of knowledge, the research efforts in the developing nations, with few exceptions, are still relativ
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ely early stage. A brief analysis of digitally relevant developing world characteristics suggests that various contextual factors such as technological, economic, market, educational, and cultural parameters need to be taken into account at the levels of risk analysis and risk evaluation and with regard to response strategies." (Summary/conclusions, page 30)
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"This study explores the structure and content of the Arabic blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 active Arabic language blogs (about half as many as we found in a previous study of the Pe
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rsian blogosphere), discovered several thousand Arabic blogs with mixed use of Arabic, English and French, created a network map of the 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a team of Arabic speakers hand coded over 4,000 blogs. The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs. We found: a Country-Based Network: We found that the Arabic blogosphere is organized primarily around countries [...] Who are Arabic Bloggers? Demographic coding indicates that Arabic bloggers are predominately young and male. The highest proportion of female bloggers is found in the Egyptian youth sub-cluster, while the Maghreb/French Bridge and Syrian clusters have the highest concentration of males. Personal Life and Local Issues are Most Important: Overall, the writing of most bloggers is centered on personal, diary-style observations. Those that write about politics tend to focus on issues within their own country and are more often than not critical of domestic political leaders." (Key findings, page 3-4)
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"Internet filtering takes place in at least forty states worldwide including many countries in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. This publication examines the political, legal, social, and cultural contexts of Internet filtering in these states from a variety of perspectives. The six introd
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uctory chapters (only available in the print version) discuss the mechanisms and politics of Internet filtering, the strengths and limitations of the technology that powers it, the relevance of international law, ethical considerations for corporations that supply states with the tools for blocking, and the implications of Internet filtering for civil society groups that increasingly rely on Internet technologies for communicating their missions. Regional overviews and reports on Internet content regulation in forty different countries follow (which are also available online), with each country profile outlining the types of content blocked by category and documenting key findings. The study relies on the results of the "OpenNet Initiative", a collaboration of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and the University of Cambridge." (CAMECO Update 4-2008)
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