woensdag 23 maart 2011

To all anonymous repliers

More and more people respond to the blog about the Libyan twittering activist, who suddenly fell still after intensive tweeting from Tripoli. The blasting silence scared many others and myself. What happened to him? Nobody seems to know.

Recently, reactions started to come in. ‘He is still out there’ as well as ‘They took him, we saw a picture of his body’. These reactions come in anonymous. And each and every one of them renders a piece of the puzzle, sometimes blurring it, but mostly giving new clues. Some people urge me to take all info from the net, as if Gaddafi is going to read my blog and find new things that lead him to …

The anonymous thing is what bothers me most. I don’t think my Tripoli friend will like it either; since he asked to retweet as much as possible, he seems to be a guy who chooses for openness and wants the world to know what is going on in his country, Libya.

So dear responders, if you like to share something with me, sign with your name. Should you – for whatever reason – want to abstain from having your comment published, just say so, and it will stay between the two of us. Do you want me to publish it, say so too, and we’ll look into it. As long as you sign your posts and we can reach you by email. A comment without a name is no comment and will be trashed, so it is a waste of time to even push the send button.

In the meantime I hope the Tripoli tweeter and his loved ones are all right and we will hear from him and from the other tweeters in Libya soon.
Although this is a personal blog, I can speak for nonfiXe in this matter: We, at nonfiXe, wish for the whole world to be free.

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zondag 20 maart 2011

Code Silence from Libya

Hearsay is going to become the biggest problem for mankind, due to the growing influence of social media. Nobody knows what is true or false when twittered, facebooked, wikileaked. We cannot check the correspondence between real and virtual. In true life you meet somebody, look him or her in the face and decide whether you trust the person or not. In fact we don’t even know for sure if our virtual friends exist for real. We can only deduct, check the Internet for more info and follow our gut feeling. The same goes for you, dear reader, you don’t know for sure whether I exist or not. Maybe I am somebody’s avatar.

But we do develop some kind of intuition on what is true and what is not, while using the social media. When browsing on the Arab Revolution you encounter messages that look sincere. And since everybody leaves traces, you can search deeper into the messenger and find this person trustworthy, or not.
On twitter we have seen messages of scared, but brave Libyan civilians who wanted nothing more than freedom. Links to youtube showed blurred short movies of Tripoli at war, a dictator crashing on his own people. Sirens and gunshots companied the phone recorded images.
The people calling out to the world were obviously not prepared to become freedom fighters, since their profiles are traceable. They show photos of children and homes, give information about jobs. In short, anyone who is looking for the identity of opponents of the Gaddafi regime can easily find them. This makes them trustworthy but endangers them as well. If I can find this much information on a person, any dictators’ intelligence is capable of doing so.
In the beginning of March the Tripoli bloggers fell silent. White letters written on a black sheet screamed without a sound: ‘Code Silence’.
It lasted two weeks before the international community finally decided Libya had had enough Gaddafi terror. Now the war is complete and out in the open. But the Libyan tweeters are still not heard from. Meanwhile the International Community of Tweeters keeps looking for them on the Internet. Today I encountered a Chicago tweetmate who sent a promising message about one of the Tripoli freedom fighters: ‘Yes, someone talked to him on 10th of March, he was safe then. No news after.’
I don’t know who is this woman from Chicago. We never met until today I retweeted her message. I don’t know whom she talked to that spoke to the Tripoli tweeter. I can only hope the message is true and the guys in Libya are still at large and safe.

All names and personal information are deleted from this blog on May 8th 2011

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woensdag 16 maart 2011

Unlock the world

Don’t you hate it: when adding someone on linkedin they have blocked their friends. It almost a personal assault, apparently they assume you (or anyone else in their linkedin peer group) will ‘steal’, abuse or spam the people they know.

As a matter of fact, hiding your contacts is showing that you are not a sharing person. You do not understand the principles of the social media. The value of it is in transparency, sharing knowledge, information and friends.

The contacthiders are still in the middle of the Industrial Revolution era, when knowledge was power. Today sharing is power and protection as well. Protection from dictatorship.

Unlock the world and start sharing and browsing.


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