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Guestpost by David Sasaki

Depending on who you ask, social media and greater access to information are leading us either to liberation or chaos. In a matter of weeks, Egyptians and Tunisians organized massive revolutionary movements to remove longstanding dictatorial regimes — and to open the door to meaningful democratic reforms. However, social media also facilitated the coordination of violent rioting in London, while right-wing, extremist bloggers are said to have influenced Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik.

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The Brucknerhaus is almost ready for the Interface Cultures – Exhibition, the artists have transformed the foyer into a beautiful space to show their art. The exhibition kicks off at September, 1st, there’s still time to get the details right. One of the exhibits that’s going to turn the visitors’ heads is “sight clearing” from the swiss artist Andrea Suter. And if you ask yourself: “Is this a windscreen wiper on a wall?”, then you can be happy that your eyes are doing a good job. The artist talks about the piece in her own words.

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Put it on your wall! Spread it into the world!

Whereas a significant and positive role is being attributed to Twitter and Facebook in what’s being called The Arab Spring, quite a different picture is now emerging from the rioting in England. Eliminating the causes of the unrest will be a difficult and protracted process. A bit of a diversion is provided by logging onto so-called social media; after all, they offer people an option for communication that the police can’t even come close to effectively keeping under surveillance, to say nothing of shutting down. And this is precisely why the British government now wants a parley with representatives of the various sites in order to develop strategies to somehow get a grip on this “problem” of networking that is resistant to oversight. In North Africa, Facebook, Twitter & Co. have given considerable impetus to democracy; but what are the prospects on the British Isles in this respect? This issue will most assuredly come up for discussion on September 3 at Public Square Squared. It will definitely be interesting. You could almost say: 1984 suddenly isn’t all that far off.

Anyone who has even a modicum of interest in physics and its subsidiary fields and has gotten a look at the lineup of panelists and speakers on tap at the ORIGIN Symposium must definitely be jumping for joy about now. Not to blow our own horn or anything … but the international stars of science who will be doing the explaining, discussing and imparting in Linz on September 2nd and 3rd make for a truly extraordinary conclave. It’s tough to pick out individual names. Where’s a blogger to begin?

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Maff Honzik, the man in black, discusses marketing-strategies with Martina Huber and Christian Korherr, thinking about how to flee from the heat.

This is a guestpost by David Sasaki, together with Isaac Mao he’s responsible for Public Square Squared

I first met Lina Ben Mhenni at the 2nd Arab Bloggers Meeting in Beirut, Lebanon about two years ago. The meeting, organized by Global Voices Advocacy and the Heinrich Boll Foundation, aimed to strengthen a regional network of Arab bloggers, online activists, and civil society organizations. Lina had been blogging from Tunisia since 2006 — frequently about freedom of speech issues — but it wasn’t until late 2009 when she became a full fledged online activist; coordinating the campaign to free Mohamed Soudani, a young Tunisian student who was imprisoned after giving interviews to international media.

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