here's a related (side-step) to the discussion: Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting large-scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space Kalev Leetaru News is increasingly being produced and consumed online, supplanting print and broadcast to represent nearly half of the news monitored across the world today by Western intelligence agencies. Recent literature has suggested that computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events. Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30–year worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, including the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, predicted the stability of Saudi Arabia (at least through May 2011), estimated Osama Bin Laden’s likely hiding place as a 200–kilometer radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world’s cultural affiliations. Along the way, common assertions about the news, such as “news is becoming more negative” and “American news portrays a U.S.–centric view of the world” are found to have merit. Full text: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3663/... -robert On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 7:02 PM, Murray Turoff <murray.turoff@gmail.com>wrote:
There is a very interesting problem here. The fundamental reasons might have little to do with the use of social media except as way of people being able to receive the information which in it self may explain the cause of these revolutions.
I really think what is needed is a content analysis of Wikileaks. There was a news article i read which might have been in the NYTimes some time back which pointed out:
A lot of material in the famous release of u.s. secret cables by various diplomats and officials confirmed in the mind of many Arabs, especially the young ones, the real extend of corruptions among the leaders and their accumulation of wealth as a result of their leadership positions. While this was felt it was never really proved in the minds of these people until they could read it online or in circulated copies of materials downloaded by others.
I did think this was a cause that was worth considering for the Arab Spring. Given they already did not trust their regular news sources Wikileaks was considered a more trusted source.
I would like to see a real content analysis of Wikileaks to compare to other explanations for the Arab Spring.
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-- *Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff * _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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