Technology and Society 2019 - Weekly materials

Week #6 - Future innovations

AJ+

Digital Interactive Youth Society  AJ+

AJ+ is a digital interactive youth society that represents the intersection of human experience with interactive communication techniques. The idea to develop such a platform came as a response to the developments during the Arab Spring and to help get information to youth who use social media platforms to access information. AJ+ transmits different programs to convey information in unconventional ways.  

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NAWWAR

Technology and Education

NAWWAR is a youth initiative aiming at enriching the educational content through creating engaging customized videos and infographics for edutainment content, e-learning courses and awareness campaigns. They derived their ideas from the facts that more than 65% of students learn through audio-visuals, and that the brain understands audio-visual 60,000 times faster than written content. Additionally, the asserted benefits from audio-visuals and gamification learning techniques can help students learn better and remember what they have learnt.     

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America's Got Talent 2019

Virtual Reality Act

Virtual Reality (VR) has proved beneficial to various aspects of our lives. Two psychologists explored using AI to help people overcome their phobias to unlock their talents. The main idea is to put the person in a virtual situation where he/she does things he/she did not know is capable of. They showed the efficiency of such an approach  by creating virtual realities to help Howie Mandel (AGT judge) confront his fears

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Week #5 - Digital Economy and the Employment Sector

Neha Narula

The Future of Money

What happens when our way of buying, selling and paying changes, or can we eliminate our need for banks and monetary institutions? This is the core of the new generation of cryptocurrencies according to Neha Narula the currency futurist. The monetary system went through changes over the centuries, and now we are moving to programmable money (cryptocurrencies) like Ethereum, Stellar, Dogecoin Litecoin and Bitcoin. Based on the science of cryptography the world is moving to an era of more secure and faster monetary transactions, which in return has its two folds by eliminating jobs and creating new cryptocurrencies mining opportunities.        

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Stephan Bachenheimer

How Start-ups Can Push Middle East Economy into the 21st Century

“The Middle East has become one of the most fertile grounds for start-ups. As governments and big companies struggle to provide solutions for the region’s major problems, disruptive technology has opened up new options and opportunities. One of them most successful start-ups in the Middle East is Careem, which has become a popular car service almost overnight. Energy 24 is another start-up that hopes to soon bring solutions to the Middle East’s power outages. And with youth unemployment one of the most pressing problems in the Middle East, several start-ups are creating impressive numbers of new jobs. Since 2011, IFC has invested more than $50 million in tech start-ups, incubators, and venture-capital funds across the region.”  

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Mohammad Sayed

What is GDPR? How does it affect users’ and companies’ privacy?

The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) set by the EU on May 25th, 2018 is a data privacy and security law, aiming at protecting users personal data and granting the “right to be forgotten/ to erasure”.GDPR is applicable to organizations anywhere as long as they are targeting and/or collecting data related to people in the EU.  Breaches to GDPR could cost companies and organizations millions of Euros and/or 4% of its global turnover, thus is daunting for SMEs.

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AND CO

The anywhere workers- remote work and digital nomad study

Remote working has become a trend in the past decade. This high momentum to shifting to remote working is referred to the appealing advantages in terms of freedom, flexibility, and pay-offs. Nevertheless, some challenges come with this lifestyle; where the “anywhere workers” are closer to home, struggle with ending their working days, feel lonely without their virtual community, etc.      

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Week #4 - Social Media and Civic empowerment

Amonge Sinxoto

From Social Media to Social Impact

Sinxoto alike other African youth encountered white discrimination/bullying in Johanesberg; therefore she has taken upon her shoulders to cause societal change by using social media to give voice to African youth to acknowledge their frustration in a non-judgmental environment. 

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Advocacy Assembly

Social Media Exchange: how one NGO shapes digital activism in the middle east

Launching a digital campaign doesn’t just happen with the click of a button. Understanding your audience, employing the right tools and having a well thought-out strategy are some of the many things an NGO or a digital activist must consider.

 

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ZDNET

What’s driving MENA rush to social media?

The rise of visually oriented social networks, video, and messaging apps is helping shape usage patterns in the MENA region. A change driven by smartphones ownership, high levels of internet penetration, and a large youth population; contributed to a rise to unprecedented numbers in the usage of social media in the Gulf states and the MENA region (with some exceptions in Northern African countries). Despite restrictions on some functions offered by those apps and censorship, the numbers continue to grow rapidly to constitute more than 30% of the world’s usage.     

 

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Week #3 - Social Media networks

AJ+ Arabic

Is the Palestinian cause the cause of Palestinians only?

“Is Palestine the cause of Palestinians only?” No, says a group of activists as they record their reactions to the decision of the American president Trump to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. They indicate the severity of seperating the Palestinian cause from the rest of the Arabs, as it is core issue for liberation in the Arab World. Likewise, the activists asked youth in Palestine and the Arab world to demonstrate against this decision.

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MARKS AND SPENCER

This is additional optional material.

 

Sensemaking / Do new technologies bring us closer together or drive us apart?

 

The authors of the article tackle the changing world we are living in and the micro-level challenges and solutions arising from the modern world. The authors argue that technology is helping new communities to emerge. Technology is also creating solutions of local communities, solutions that range from water to food distribution. The authors support their argument with several examples of digital initiatives like NextDrop, Neighbourly, and Net Democracy Foundation. 

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Week #2 - Identity in the Digital Era

Ulrike Schultze, TEDxSMU

How Social Media Shapes Identity

Technology/Social media plays an essential role in our lives nowadays. Schultze explores the co-constitutive relationship “we construct technology but technology also construct us, we become what the technology allows us to become”, by using the example of ethnic emoji’s as identifiers of racial actions. She furthers by explaining the second life/ virtual world life(a profile, virtual body/avatar,etc), that should be different and separate from your real life, where one explores what he/she should and would like to be if he/she could only get rid of his/her actual body.     

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Izza Fathi

Arabic started to Extinct due to the internet

An interview with Izza Fathi (a lecturer in social sciences) about the correlation between internet and national identity. Fathi indicated that internet distorts the identity (national, religious, and Language) by targeting kids and youth through movies and cartoons. Portraying super heroes in certain ways, conveying religious or atheist messages to kids, using dialects rather than the Classical Arabic are all ways of distorting identities. 

Izza emphasizes that language is the pot of thought, for example, Jews came from 180 countries speaking different languages; thus Israel acknowledged Hebrew as a national language and made all science in Hebrew.

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داستان

Behind all the idealism we see in social networking sites

An advertisement on the reality behind the idealism we see in social media. The video shows how people try to maintain an image in the eyes of their followers hiding behind the likes and comments the sad truth about their actual lives.

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Moudhi AL-Jamea

Digital Identity In Social Media

Online users tend to create their own digital identity that does not necessarily equal their physical identity. They can be categorized against the type and quantity of information they share online (fake, professional, real)/ (private/public). In the online space inattentive users may become victims of identity theft through trojans and fishing. Nevertheless, although numbers of identity theft are rising, numbers of social media users (twitter specifically) are rising.     

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Week #1 - Setting the scene

Suzanne Talhouk, TEDxBeirut

Who says if we speak Arabic we are no longer “cool”? 

Suzanne tells her story while trying to preserve Arabic. She along with others launched an initiative and many campaigns to preserve Arabic with various slogans like “بحكيك من الشرق  Betred min el Gharb” and “Do not kill your language”. 

She built the initiative on core element of nations rise. She indicated that studies have shown that to be creative in other languages you need to master your mother tongue, and that “If you want to kill a nation, kill their language”. She went on to talk about examples of developing countries that went up the ladder while preserving their language like Malaysia and Turkey. At the end she gave some suggestions for how to preserve Arabic and get it back to the throne of languages by starting from oneself.

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AJ+ عربي

Why is there so little Arabic content on the Internet?

Post, Tweet, Computer, Telephone are all terms that have synonyms in Arabic, yet the English version is more popular on the internet. The Arabic content contributes only 3% of the global content on the internet, although 96 million Arabs use the internet. Many reasons were mentioned here that are related to the core language and/or technical difficulties, which gave birth to ARABIZI – writing Arabic using English letters and numbers.

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