My following article is published today by the Melbourne Age: During the bruising Democratic Party tussle with Hillary Clinton in April, a citizen journalist recorded Obama saying that he understood why working-class voters in decrepit industrial towns were “bitter” and clung to “guns or religion”. Despite being a paid-up Obama supporter, writer Mayhill Fowler worked…
Showing all posts tagged Cuba
Beating the western drum
My following essay appears in the Guardian today: During the recent war between Georgia and Russia, bloggers on both sides of the conflict provided searing accounts of atrocities and manoeuvres unseen by western journalists. In a country such as Russia the space for alternative and critical views are rare. The war showed an authoritarian regime’s…
Holidays in blogging hell
The following post is by Phil Gomes on one of Australia’s most popular blog sites Larvatus Prodeo: In The Blogging Revolution Antony Loewenstein takes us on a personal journey through some of the more difficult places in the world to blog. Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China. It’s a timely book on the…
Bloggers lead revolution
The following article by Matthew Ricketson appears in today’s Melbourne Age: Blogging is an inelegant term for an often inelegant activity. It is easy to be turned off by bloggers for whom civil discourse equates to personal insult — anonymously delivered — but this undersells the vast range of blogging swirling through cyberspace. Antony Loewenstein…
Don’t touch our boy Castro
With the release of my new book, The Blogging Revolution, I’ve been expecting certain elements of the Left to criticise my focus on so-called repressive regimes, rather than closely examining censorship far closer to home (ie. within the US.) It hasn’t taken long. Sydney University academic Tim Anderson – who wrote an article in 2007,…
Sunday Night Safran on blogging
Sunday Night Safran is a great weekly show on ABC youth radio Triple J. I was interviewed last night about The Blogging Revolution, the role of Western multinationals in repressive regimes and how the American relationship to the internet should be viewed in the non-Western world.
The Fourth Estate on blogging
The Fourth Estate is a great weekly radio program on one of Sydney’s finest independent radio stations, 2ser. In a wide-ranging interview, host Daz Chandler and I talked about the role of Western multinationals in authoritarian regimes, the seeming lack of understanding of online privacy in the West and the issues in The Blogging Revolution.
Castro’s deafness
A classic interview with former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, challenged about his views on freedom of speech on the Communist island. The American interviewer, Barbara Walters, is the typically “God bless America” kind of reporter – seemingly incapable of understanding how any nation on earth could be better than the US – but Castro’s unwillingness…
The Media Report on blogging
I was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s Media Report today on The Blogging Revolution and the ways in which the internet is far more complex than simply being a supposedly democratising force: Antony Funnell: What do Iran, Cuba and Egypt all have in common? Well, they all have governments which suppress dissent and they all…
Fidel, the geriatric
A small victory for common sense in Cuba: Cuban punk rocker Gorki Aguila, lead singer of Porno para Ricardo, charged with “social dangerousness” because of his songs denouncing and deriding the government, was released with a $28 fine after calling upon his fans to hold a public protest. Facing up to four years in prison…