[Air-l] terrorwar and the internet

[david silver]

hi folks,

last saturday i met up with a team of about ten to join the seattle
anti-war march (or what many of us call the pre-emptive peace movement)
and documented much of what we witnessed.  some shot film, some recorded
sounds, some shot digital and not so digital cameras, all marched.  for
some of what we saw, see

http://students.washington.edu/irinag/peace/
http://faculty.washington.edu/dsilver/peacemarch

somewhere near the beginning i met up with doug schuler, who many of you
may know through his work on community networks and computer professionals
for social responsibility, who was beaming.  he looked around at the
20-30,000 crowd and shouted, "and most of it is because the internet!"

and he had a point.  i originally heard about the march through the
internet, our team of ten organized through the net, a ton of marchers
held posters downloaded from the net, we posted our digitized experiences
the indymedia so citizens from around the world could see and compare and
redistribute, and we ended the evening reading dozens of news reports from
all over the place and sharing our findings face to face.

so from an anti-war perspective, that is one way of seeing how the
internet has influenced these terror/war days.  it would be interesting to
hear stories about the inverse: the influence of these terror/war days on
the internet.  it's reading a news website for the latest popular polls in
turkey or reading and forwarding an email-version of a chomsky article on
one side and a petition to support the war from the other side.  it's
downloading bush's last state of the union speech and it's being sent all
the anti-war flash and quicktime digital protest art.

any thoughts on this?

david