Socially Mediating Gaza

So, today Israeli Commandos boarded a ship running a blockade into Gaza in international waters and managed to shoot a bunch of the crew who attacked them with chairs and bits of metal. Now this episode raises some fascinating issues - legality of blockade running vs storming a ship in international waters, whether soldiers are the best guys for this sort of thing, the advisability of shooting civilians when the media is watching (remember Sharpeville?), never mind the bigger issues of what is required to run Gaza as a viable state.

So, I was quite curious about what the Social Media scene would do in reaction to these events - to wit, what colour would who paint their avatars? (if previous events are any guide). This one promised to be interesting as its not quite a simple good guys/bad guys story.

On Memeorandum the issues seem to be resolving into two camps throwing stones from their respective high grounds..... but political wonks are known to be that way, and the rational middle ground is always sparsely populated in social media. And so it has proved here - it was only the "quality" Main Stream Media that seemed to make any vague pretence at dispassionate analysis.

Would the Tech crowd would be more sanguine?

No, this time on Techmeme the major obsession seemed to be whether #flotilla (the Twitterstream covering the event) was censored or not when it dropped off the Twitter trending radar*. (The comments resemble memeorandum's stone throwing though.)

This blog aims to be pretty much apolitical, but re social media responses, bear in mind that many pundits believe Social Media is both the New Media and the best way to Government 2.0. May just be me, but I don't think that this episode so far has been a great advert of its capabilities - not exactly wisdom of the crowds at its finest.

To me the big debate is what is required to run something like Gaza as a viable state (or not), and everything follows on from that.

(But while we are getting all social meta, to me the most interesting lesson social media wise was the Israeli Defence force chose to put videos of the event on their website first, rather than waiting for the world's media to distribute it.)

*By the way that's not a criticism of the article, its a critique of the audience......