Location-based Protesting
Student protesters in London use Google Maps to outwit police “kettling”. Interesting use of icons. See the live map here. Apparently they are using the forms feature of Google Docs for gathering information.
A subtle subversion of existing infrastructure. Cheap, efficient and volatile. Somehow reminds me of something i read in an interview by the Columbia Journalism Review with Ethan Zuckerman recently (he was talking about WikiLeaks, but it seems fitting nonetheless):
What’s really hard about this is that we perceive the web to be a public space, a place where you should be able to go and set up your soapbox and say whatever you want to say to the world. The truth is, the web is almost entirely privately held. So what happens here is that we have a normative understanding that we should treat this like public space—that you should have rights to speak, that no one should constrain your rights—but then you discover that, basically, you’re holding a political rally in a shopping mall. This is commercial speech, controlled by commercial rules.
If you don’t have a right to use the available infrastructure, improvise, move quickly and keep overhead low.
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