The focus of the presentations and the discussion was put on the protection of children and minors from offensive and harmful content on the Internet. The negative aspects of the social networks were discussed, and issues like private data protection and identity-stealing were touched upon as well. However, the main tone of the discussion was too moralistic and, in my opinion, paranoid at moments.

Anastas Vangeli, the representative of New Media Center, in his expose tried to present a different perspective, arguing that it is counter productive to try to regulate social networks and to “control” children. As well, he tried to relativize the arguments about the plenty of pornographic and violent contents online, by suggesting that the urge of young people to watch pornography is not an “online issue”, but a reflection of the lack of sexual education in their lives. Anastas also argued that unlike the TV news which bombard the public with violence, Internet users can freely decide what they want to watch. Finally, he supported the struggle for the protection of private data, but also warned that there are existing laws, such as the one for Following personal communications, that grant the government a very easy access to anyone’s private data, including logs from the Internet usage.

Low quality video of his address is available on this link: Anastas Vangeli address on Safer Internet (in Macedonian)

The goal of this training was to give the NGOs detailed input into the process and practices of online media today, as well as on the modern forms and tools for promoting the work of CSOs through various Internet platforms. This training is a part of MIM’s activities in the frames of the Civil Society Straightening Project (CSSP).

Source, More details

The New Media Center team was completely responsible for all online media activities and technical support of the event. After successful promotion we’ve created livestream website where we aggregated different content and video stream.

We’d like to say one big Thank you, to the local and regional online community for the honest support. As follow up you can watch the videos and slides of some of the presentations.

Thanks to all that were there esspeccially to Barry and the lovely people at the American Corner who allowed us to make video of this event.

Our work was based on 35 blog posts, from the local Macedonian blogosphere, with their comments and disscusions about the ongoing name dispute between Macedonia and Greece. We colected all different names that were used for both countries and people. The visual result is this semantic cloud:

As support of the cloud we have made short video animation that illustrates the ongoing struggle.

You cah download the Renaming Semantic Cloud as:

Renaming Semantic Cloud JPG 3600px ~900KB
Renaming Semantic Cloud PDF file ~430KB
Renaming Semantic Cloud WMV video ~18MB
Renaming Semantic Cloud 3gp video ~6.5MB

Part1

Part2

Also, here you can listen Thomas Bauer presentation on Global Village Media. Thomas Bauer is professor at University of Vienna. Below is his presentation presented on the first session of this event as a keynote.