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, ...
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 ...
I was invited by the International Center for Journalists to give two lectures to a group of South Asian journalists on digital media strategies and online safety, the first of which I delivered yesterday at my old haunt, the Sri Lanka College of Journalism. Was very sad to note that there were just two Sri Lankan journalists (from Wijeya Newspapers ...
The ICT4Peace Foundation just released an excellent report by Helena Puig Larrauri and Patrick Meier on the use of UAVs for peacekeeping operations. My foreword is reproduced below. The full report can be accessed here. Helena and Patrick are two of the most thoughtful individuals I know of interrogating the opportunities and challenges around the use of UAVs for ...
Earlier this week, Transparency International Sri Lanka (TISL) organised a workshop on improving the access to and accountability of Parliament, based on a South Asian study of legislatures. Systemic flaws in our own Parliament were anchored to two broad areas – access to internal workings and proceedings, and inadequate, often untimely, Parliamentary output. I was interested in three areas – ...
Cross-posted from the website of the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV). Wrote this note to follow up a presentation made to CMEV’s international monitors the day after the Parliamentary Election, held on 17th August 2015. Access the presentation here or see below. ### Overview The information and communications operations of the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV) for the ...
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. ...
Presentation delivered today at Open Edit, held at Park Street Mews, Colombo. A lively discussion ensued focussed around the politics of exclusion, power, the nature of corporate ownership over archived web content, questions over the nature of access, retention, formats, fundamental questions over the right to be forgotten and the interest of some to not be tracked, traced or archived ...
On Page 5 of USIP’s new report, Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring, it is noted that, In February 2011, a workshop at Stanford Uni- versity cosponsored by USIP, George Washington University’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, and Stanford’s Liberation Technology Program discussed the state of the art in empirical research ...
Illustration courtesy Asvajit Boyle Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo, Sri Lanka running till the 15th of September an art exhibition I was invited to curate. Titled Mediated, it’s a project that essentially seeks to create greater awareness around and engagement with aspects of post-war Sri Lanka’s ideational, constitutional, economic, social and religious challenges. If around in the city, please ...
Photo by Jareeya Arttanuchit I was invited to present a keynote address at the International Conference on “Communication, Conflicts and Peace Processes: Landscape of Knowledge from Asia and the Deep South of Thailand”, from 21 – 22 August in Pattani, Thailand. As an aside, half an hour before I left for the airport, my Mac completely crashed, which forced ...
Photo by Jareeya Arttanuchit I was invited to present a keynote address at the International Conference on “Communication, Conflicts and Peace Processes: Landscape of Knowledge from Asia and the Deep South of Thailand”, from 21 – 22 August in Pattani, Thailand. As an aside, half an hour before I left for the airport, my Mac completely crashed, which forced ...
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 ...
My work with UAVs is largely conceptual, framed by growing up in a context of war, deeply informed by having to deal with the enduring legacy of violent conflict even post-war and anchored to the inalienable yet often callously erased rights of communities and individuals around safety, security and privacy. My interest in UAVs results from the potential they bring ...
I was invited with colleagues from the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPACS) to deliver a presentation on our research and motivations to a group of locals this week, assembled at the Mornington Methodist Church in Dunedin. The central challenge around presenting my doctoral research for many who are fearful or anxious about social media in the ...
