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Bradford Saron

The Political Power of Social Media | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...olitical-power-of-social-media

wikileaks social media

shared by Bradford Saron on 21 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a national leader.
  • How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it?
  • social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political movements, just as most of the world's authoritarian governments (and, alarmingly, an increasing number of democratic ones) are trying to limit access to it.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before.
  • Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of Internet statecraft is still problematic.
  • THE THEATER OF COLLAPSE
  • Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then they get echoed by friends, family members, and colleagues. It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference. As with the printing press, the Internet spreads not just media consumption but media production as well -- it allows people to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.
  • This condition of shared awareness -- which is increasingly evident in all modern states -- creates what is commonly called "the dictator's dilemma" but that might more accurately be described by the phrase coined by the media theorist Briggs: "the conservative dilemma," so named because it applies not only to autocrats but also to democratic governments and to religious and business leaders. The dilemma is created by new media that increase public access to speech or assembly; with the spread of such media, whether photocopiers or Web browsers, a state accustomed to having a monopoly on public speech finds itself called to account for anomalies between its view of events and the public's. The two responses to the conservative dilemma are censorship and propaganda. But neither of these is as effective a source of control as the enforced silence of the citizens. The state will censor critics or produce propaganda as it needs to, but both of those actions have higher costs than simply not having any critics to silence or reply to in the first place. But if a government were to shut down Internet access or ban cell phones, it would risk radicalizing otherwise pro-regime citizens or harming the economy.
  • Bradford Saron on 21 Dec 10
     
    The power of being digitally social, this is an example in the political arena. This is also what Clay Shirky is talking about in a Cognitive Surplus. This is the power of people collaborating and sharing without consideration of cost, distance, time, copyright, law, etc. Do we want to teach children how to ethically participate in this type of environment? Or, just let them go without any skills or discipline?
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