Syria’s Revolution: The First Draft

I haven’t been following events in Syria that closely. ‘Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War’ (by Robin Yassin-Kassab, Leila Al-Shami) is only one among several books that have been written in the midst of the ongoing conflict, but I’d heard consistently good things about it since its release at the beginning of 2016. It doesn’t disappoint. I started it yesterday, lulled by the conclusion of a large project and a thousand pictures of Christmas dinner preparations on twitter. I woke up this morning and finished the rest.

Burning Country is compellingly written, not only on a structural level but also on account of its interspersed interview and other oral history-type testimony. This is the book’s primary strength, I felt. It’s hard enough to write accurate and compelling history after the fact. Doing so while events are still unfolding makes the job even harder. Thankfully, Burning Country delivers the goods.

After introducing Syria and Syrians as if to set the stage, Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami launch into an account of the Syrian uprising’s early days, told through a diversity of sources from a variety of backgrounds. They make a strong case for the initial moments of the revolution as being less co-opted by one group or another, even as later chapters show how a variety of forces pushed and pulled that initial impulse in unintended directions. I learnt a lot from the accounts of initial organisational strategies, the way different groups responded to similar kinds of threats from the state and how the logic of violent escalation started to take on more prominence. The chapter on cultural shifts (or expressions) brought about by the revolution (chapter eight) was also excellent. The end of the book falls a little short, if only because the conflict is ongoing and you had the sense that it is an unfinished project.

As a one-stop shop introduction and opening-out to some important parts of Syrian society, history and current affairs, Burning Country is well worth your time. The book ends with a note on thinking about and understanding Syria:

“In order to truly think globally – rather than to hide from thought behind clumsy globalising paradigms – it is necessary to act locally. We ask the reader, rather than applying the usual grand narratives, to attend to voices from the ground.”

I hope we get to read other histories of Syria (and other countries) that employ the same logic.

Knot 2: Translation as Trauma, Taxis and Artificial Intelligence

This week I fell back in love with a piece of software (DevonThink Pro Office) while reorganising and refreshing two dozen archival databases. I’ve been busy putting the final touches on The Taliban Reader and I’ve made new strides of progress on the slackline.

Articles

• Lina Mounzer - “War in Translation: Giving Voice to
  the Women of Syria” (Lithub)

A deeply affecting account of the author’s work as a translator of stories from Syria, how language mediates and obfuscates the terrifying realities of daily life, and how even translation and re-communication gives rise to secondary trauma of a kind. If you read nothing else this week, make it this article.

• Hamzah Nassif - “Understanding Amman’s Yellow Taxi Dilemma: a Different Take on the Government’s Ongoing Battle With Ride-Hailing Apps” (The Black Iris)

I wrote about Amman’s taxis in my Arabic-language newsletter, and this (slightly old) piece helps answer some of my questions as to why taxi drivers in Jordan’s capital behave as they do. It also makes a strong case for changing the status quo. Taxi drivers seem barely able to make a living under current circumstances, and passengers aren’t getting much of a service.

• David Meyer - “The dark side of .io: How the U.K. is making web domain profits from a shady Cold War land deal” (Gigaom)

As someone who has just bought a couple of new .io domains, I was unsettled to learn the backstory, how something dating back to the early nineteenth century’s colonial expansion (in this case, to the Chagos islands) has a direct descendent in the modern age. I’m most likely not going to return the domains I bought, but I probably won’t buy anything new from the .io set.

• Andrew Ng - “What Artificial Intelligence Can and Can’t Do Right Now” (Harvard Business Review)

There’s nothing especially new in this overview piece by one of the leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, both in terms of innovation and education. But it’s nevertheless a useful summary of some of the unique features of AI and machine learning, as well as some of the things it is less good at.

• Richard Benton - “Language hacking ≠ language love” (Loving Languages)

Richard’s posts are excellent at returning us to the reasons why it’s worth learning languages — to connect, to be useful perhaps, and not to simply chalk up notches on one’s belt. This recent posts is a challenge to the thankfully-less-omnipresent online polyglot community. Recommended if you’ve ever studied more than one second-language.

Books

This week, I reread Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Looking into my Goodreads list, I noted that I gave it a two-star rating when I first read it a few years back. Now, perhaps I was in a better place to absorb some of the lessons, but I gave it four stars. I’ll be writing a longer review for the blog here of some of the more contrarian or unexpected lessons. I’m currently reading Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me alongside Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* (as audiobook).

Films / TV

I’m working my way through Channel 4’s Humans, albeit painfully slowly. It was recommended on a recent podcast as a possible vision for what a future with humanoid AI machines might look like: not as different as we might imagine, but still different enough to provoke some real societal challenges.

On Untangling Syria's Socially Mediated War

Some old photos from when I used to live in Damascus

How do we figure out what is going on in a country like Syria, when journalists, researchers and civilians alike are targeted with frustrating ease? Is it enough to track what is being posted on social media outlets? These two questions are at the core of a fascinating recent(ish) study published by the United States Institute for Peace (USIP).

Syria’s Socially Mediated Civil War – by Marc Lynch, Deen Freelon and Sean Aday – came out in January 2014 and analyses an Arabic-and-English-language data set spanning a few years. It offers a useful overview of the social media trends as they relate to the ongoing conflict in Syria. It is especially relevant for those of us who aren’t inside Syria right now, and who are trying to understand things at one remove, whether that is through following social media output or talking to those who have left the country. (This means journalists, researchers and the like.)

Some stark conclusions emerge from the report. The ones I’m choosing to highlight here relate to how international media and research outlets have often been blind to structural issues that obscure their ability to understand Syria from outside the country.

“Social media create a dangerous illusion of unmediated information flows.” [5]

The role of translation or the importance of having research teams that are competent in both English and Arabic comes out very strongly from the research.

“The rapid growth in Arabic social media use poses serious problems for any research that draws only on English-language sources.” [page 3]

The report details how tweets about Syria in Arabic and English came to be different universes, how the discourse rarely overlapped between the two and that to monitor one was to have no idea of what was going on in the other:

“Arabic-language tweets quickly came to dominate the online discourse. Early in the Arab Spring, English-language social media played a crucial role in transmitting the regional uprisings to a Western audience. By June 2011, Arabic had overtaken English as the dominant language, and social media increasingly focused inward on local and identity-based communities. Studies using English-only datasets can no longer be considered acceptable.” [6]

Also:

“The English-language Twitter conversation about Syria is particularly insular and increasingly interacts only with itself, creating a badly skewed impression of the broader Arabic discourse. It focused on different topics, emphasized different themes, and circulated different imagery. This has important implications for understanding mainstream media’s limitations in covering Syria and other non-Western foreign crises and raises troubling questions about the skewed image that coverage might be presenting to audiences.” [6]

Also:

“researchers using only English-language tweets would be significantly misreading the content and nature of the online Twitter discourse.” [17]

And:

“These findings demonstrate once again the insularity of English-language journalists and the rapid growth of the Arabic- speaking networks. Both findings are potentially troubling for at least two reasons. First, they imply a journalistic community whose coverage may be influenced more by its cultural and professional biases than by the myriad constituencies within Syria and across the region. Second, they point to the power of social media to draw people into like-minded networks that interpret the news through the prism of their own information bubbles.” [26]

The general ideas in here won’t necessarily come as a surprise but I found it instructive to see just how different those two discourse universes are in the report.

In a separate but not-unrelated note, I have been thinking of ways that I can stay engaged in what’s going on in Syria beyond just consuming reports at one step removed. I’m working with a beta-testing team using a piece of software called Bridge – made by the lovely team at Meedan – which allows for the translation of social media and the use of those translations as part of an embedded presentation online. I will be translating strands and snippets from certain parts of Syria’s social media universe in Arabic. More on this soon, I hope.