Author: Joe Glenton File Type: epub I looked around my cell and saw the sheet of paper taped to the door at chest height. It listed everything in the room, chair, bed, soldier box For a moment I thought it meant the cell itself a box to put soldiers in. When the War on Terror began, Briton Joe Glenton felt compelled to serve his nation. He passed through basic training and deployed to Afghanistan in 2006. What he saw overseas left him disillusioned, and he returned home increasingly political and manifesting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. When he refused to return for a second tour, he was denied his right to object and called a coward and a malingerer. He went absent without leave and left the country, returning later to the UK voluntarily to campaign against the wars. The military accused him of desertion and threatened years in prison. ul lSoldier Box* tells the story of Glentons extraordinary journey from a promising soldier to a rebel against what he came to see as unjustified military action.l ul**ReviewIt takes as much courage to stand up against the Army as it does to go to war. History is made by people prepared to make that kind of sacrifice.Tony Benn, former British Member of Parliament Joe Glenton is the really brave soldier the one who refused to fight in an unjust war and suffered imprisonment as a result. Above the sound of gunfire it is his story that deserves to be heard.John Rees, cofounder of the Stop the War Coalition About the Author Joe Glenton was born in Norwich, Great Britain, in 1982. He joined the British Army in 2004. Since his release he has campaigned against the wars and has written for the Guardian, Mirror, New Internationalist, Military History Monthly, and Counterfire. He is currently studying International Relations.

Author: Jose van Dijck File Type: pdf Social media has come to deeply penetrate our lives Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and many other platforms define many of our daily habits of communication and creative production. The Culture of Connectivity studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century up until 2012, providing both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how these media have come to profoundly affect our experience of online sociality. The first stage of their development shows a fundamental shift. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Author and media scholar Jose van Dijck offers an analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of this transformation. She dissects five major platforms Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecology of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, and filtering content rely on shared ideological principles. At the level of management and organization, we can also observe striking similarities between these platforms shifting ownership status, governance strategies, and business models. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. Sharing, friending, liking, following, trending, and favoriting have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization, the author argues, is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become social. Crossing lines of technological, historical, sociological, and cultural inquiry, The Culture of Connectivity will reshape the way we think about interpersonal connection in the digital age.