"Get ready for SHARE2. Make sure you spread the news around."
Blog post by BTurn Magazine:
On April 26-28, Belgrade hosts the second edition of Europe’s premium event showcasing all things smart and subversive. Make sure you spread the news around.
With ominous acronyms liks SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA flooding our news feeds, the Share2 conference couldn’t come at a better time. Last year, the event was described as “a unique educational platform that represents new forms of social activism, and promotes Internet, new media and music related content”. In essence, Share is about what is best about “digital culture”, about the potential for the circulation of critical and progressive ideas, images and sounds; it’s about the invigoration of democracy, citizen participation and the promotion of a more cosmopolitan public. It’s also about parties filled with hackers and DJs and models and professors from MIT.
The event will be held on April 26-28 in Belgrade, Serbia, a surprisingly fitting place for an event focused on dissident digital culture. Serbia has yet to welcome such digital corporate offerings as PayPal, Apple, Spotify or Pandora. The Eastern Bloc fell apart in 1989, and Yugoslavia dissolved soon after. The home computing revolution and widespread usage of the Internet followed the failed socialist experiment in Europe, once a revolution of its own.
Yet this more recent revolution, like them all, has its share of detractors. Tools that enable new forms of freedom often enable new forms of surveillance and control. The Internet panopticon, which allows anyone with one of the five billion mobile phones in the world to record and upload to the Internet a single instance of police brutality, also works in reverse. It allows governments to monitor IP addresses and arrest activists organizing peaceful protests on Facebook. And while they may be used by activists for mobilization purposes or as evidence in international criminal courts, new media allows the viral circulation of videos of private suffering that attend images of human rights abuses that victims never consent to have distributed in the first place.
Meanwhile, the Internet illuminates the banal and the extraordinary alike. The Internet has made oversharing as easy as sharing.
