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Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan studies how new media can both upend and consolidate power structures around the world. Most recently, he has investigated the ways offline and online social networks ignited revolutionary movements such as the Arab Spring, the London Riots, and the Occupy movement. Unlike many of the pundits who opine on social media’s effects from afar, Ramesh has done extensive field research, and spent two months in Egypt last summer interviewing a diverse array of Egyptians about Mubarak’s ouster. On this episode of Radio Free Ruin, he shares some of his conclusions from his research, and explores the nuances and complexities in the relationships between new media, class, power structures, and social movements.
During Breaking News, Paul does a roundup of the week’s Occupy news, including the brutal crackdown on Occupy Oakland and the ensuing solidarity marches, Occupy Foreclosures, the NYPD’s treatment of transgender detainees, and courts that are theatening Twitter and WordPress with jail time for Occupy-related activities on their networks. We also look at the arrest of documentary filmmaker Josh Fox at a congressional hearing about fracking, the semiotics of Rick Santorum’s sweater vest, Snoop Dogg’s support of Ron Paul, and Newt’s moon colony.
Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He wrote for the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University.
Radio Free Ruin art: “As Things Fell Apart (Jewelers)” by Carrie Sieh
Radio Free Ruin theme: “FT2 Theme” by Phil Manley from the album Life Coach used with the gracious permission of Thrill Jockey Records
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