Cognitive Interfund Transfer

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.

Within a year Google had bought Gapminder, and a version of the bubble-graph software is now available free online under the name Google Motion Chart.

Do the data give any sneak previews of our future? “For most of human history, the world has been dominated by Asia, and it will be again within 40 years,” he says. “While nothing now can stop the surge to 9 billion, if the poorest 2 billion get improved child survival and the ability to buy bicycles and mobile phones, population growth will stop. We cannot have people at this level looking for basics like food and shoes. Lower-middle-income countries will also forge forward—but only if we invest in the right technologies to avoid severe climate change.”

“We can stop population growth, we can eradicate poverty, we can solve the energy and the climate issues but we have to make the right investments,” he says. “I know a good world is possible if we leave emotion aside and just work analytically.”

Average Participants Experience Social Media Schizophrenia

Google Doesn't Beat Them, They Join Them.

Social Functionality Makes Websites Fashionable Again

We call this shift in idea of work “the human cloud,” and just as cloud computing disrupted the idea of computing and corporate IT infrastructure, the human cloud is shorthand for the intersection of web and work.