Given the vituperative pushback of the BBS online against those who participated in the vigil in Colombo a few weeks ago, immediate measures to secure content posted on to web based social media platforms are essential to protect one’s own privacy, and those of family, friends and colleagues.  Engaging in liking content on Facebook, featuring articles on it, uploading ...

Presented the work I had done with Groundviews to a group of activists from South Asia recently, noting that using social media platforms on the web, combined with mobiles, it is increasingly possible to bear witness to and report on inconvenient truths, no matter what the timbre of government. I also flagged that in contexts where mainstream media, for whatever ...

The Ceylon Today newspaper quotes me in what is becoming a familiar story – identity theft and the unauthorised use of photos posted to various online social media fora for nefarious activities. Women and Media Collective‘s Sepali Kottegoda underscores the problem, yet the challenge remains on how to build and teach this (new) media literacy to parents, young adults and ...

Reblogged from appvocacy: We've written before about the way political leaders use Twitter, and about Groundviews, the award-winning citizen journalism blog in Sri Lanka. Last week, UK Foreign Minister Alistair Burt held a live Twitter Q&A on Sri Lanka, in which Groundviews was one of the most engaged participants. After the event, Groundviews released a summary of the Q&A, ...

Excerpt from a much longer piece I wrote for Groundviews (The Sri Lankan President’s Twitter archive and Propaganda 2.0: New challenges for online dissent), dealing with an archive I created that captures every single tweet published by the Sri Lankan President’s official Twitter account, and why this is so important. ### It is evident therefore that the President’s new media ...

Excerpt from a much longer piece I wrote for Groundviews (The Sri Lankan President’s Twitter archive and Propaganda 2.0: New challenges for online dissent), dealing with growing challenges for online activism in Sri Lanka. ### Aiding the regime’s increasingly competency and strategic use of new media is (domestic) civil society’s ignorance of its potential and reach. New media knowledge is ...

“The demographics on (sic) these hate groups on social media are very young, which is alarming,” says Sanjana Hattotuwa, editor of Groundviews. “A thrust of hate speech today takes place more on social media than on mainstream media, and it is going viral. These ‘pages’ also carry a lot of photographic and illustrative content that is edited to look frightening ...

I was recently contacted by a journalist from one of the leading Sunday newspapers in Sri Lanka on the growing anti-Muslim hate campaigns in Sri Lanka. The journalist asked two questions (reproduced verbatim), Anti-Muslim/Anti-Buddhist sentiments are being spread around effectively by social media, how do you analyse this? How can social media be used to stop such conflicts between communities? ...

The proverbial glass ceiling has long been in the way of women’s upward movement within the public sphere, including in media institutions. How have women overcome the limitations of access and opportunity of the conventional media structures by increasingly and innovatively engaging with online media platforms and spaces? The Sri Lankan chapter of South Asian Women in Media Network (SAWM ...

Around a fortnight ago I was invited by two leading civil society organisations (Women and Media Collective and Young Asia Television) to conduct full day training programmes for civil society activists, mostly women and from outside the Western Province, introducing them to web based social and new media, new media advocacy strategies and Internet security. The lectures were delivered in ...

Yet something of the old media world is deeply missed. The serendipitous discovery of news and information, for example. We all now live in so-called ‘filter bubbles’, consuming information either curated by us, or for us. Some of this curation is human, which offers agency and choice to the few who wish to really engage with difference and divergent opinion. ...

Read this post for a full description of this event and book, which also contains a video interview with me in English. This video of the launch was produced by Young Asia Television, and was part of a longer episode in the Connections series. The original video can be viewed on Vimeo here. Filed under: ICTs in general

The problem is simply stated. Peacebuilding today, however defined and conducted, cannot exclude the importance and impact of content produced and shared on Twitter (and other social media platforms). This content is particularly resonant when produced and disseminated within cycles of violence, either during or after war. The volume of this content is growing. The pace with which it is ...

Reblogged from appvocacy: Appvocacy meets Sanjana Hattotuwa, 2010 TED fellow and founder-curator of award-winning citizen journalism blog Groundviews Among other things, what makes Groundviews remarkable is the climate in which it emerged and thrived. In 2009, three years after its launch, the civil war which had ravaged Sri Lanka for two decades came to a very bloody end, as ...

Kasun Erandi, now a graduate of Kelaniya University and currently employed at the Central Environmental Authority (CEA), is someone who came and met me around one and a half years ago as she was writing her thesis on new media and citizen journalism in Sri Lanka. I was happy to note that she had gone on to expand her thesis ...

Guy Gunaratne and I have known each other for a few years, and were first acquainted in the lead up to a film he went on to produce and show around the world, The Truth That Wasn’t There. Having subsequently set up his own production company CODOC with a few others, Guy’s most recent venture is into interactive web ...

Cross-posted from my personal blog. ### To remember is a choice, a hard one. To remember is to hold in check those who wish to return to the horrors of the past. To not revisit policies that led to past horrors is to give Sri Lanka a greater chance of healing, and reconciliation. And yet, remembering is never easy, ...

Every single white dot in the satellite image above, taken in March 2009, is the temporary shelter for an internally displaced family in Sri Lanka. When viewed at full resolution on Google Earth, it is a mind-boggling concentration of people in conditions that were absolutely appalling. After working on it for a whole day, I published on Groundviews (The ...

Every single white dot in the satellite image above, taken in March 2009, is the temporary shelter for an internally displaced family in Sri Lanka. When viewed at full resolution on Google Earth, it is a mind-boggling concentration of people in conditions that were absolutely appalling. After working on it for a whole day, I published on Groundviews (The ...

Reblogged from A Janusis: After reading about Mediated on Groundviews, I simply had to go to the Sasika Fernando Gallery and see it for myself, even though all of the information was available on their site. The exhibition is brilliant. I have been a fan of visualizing data for the past few years, and while I have experimented a bit, this ...