/reading/ 227 words 4 links

|

#politics #history

Metadata

Highlights

They also found themselves unable to sustain and organize in the long term in a manner proportional to the energy they had been able to attract initially and the legitimacy they enjoyed in their demands. Having arisen so suddenly and grown so quickly, they hit their first curve requiring agile tactical shifts at great speeds, with little or no prior experience in collective decision making and little resilience. Thus, they often faced greatest peril in their infancy when they were both powerful and large, but also underprepared and fragile. — location: 109 ^ref-31623

Throughout the eighteen days of the initial Tahrir uprising, I turned on the television only once, wanting to see how networks were covering the historic moment of Mubarak’s resignation. CNN was broadcasting an aerial shot of the square. The camera shot from far above the square was jarring because I had been following it all on Twitter, person by person, each view necessarily incomplete but also intimate. On television, all I could see was an undifferentiated mass of people, an indistinct crowd. It felt cold and alienating. The television pictures did not convey how today’s networked protests operate or feel. — location: 296 ^ref-65012