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It's a logical move for Snapchat to encourage its users to vote. The app reaches 41% of all 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. daily, a Nielsen study reported, according to the Wall Street Journal. Another survey conducted for Variety by Defy Media revealed that 30% of Snapchat users used the app to get news for the 2016 presidential campaign.  Millennials — people between the ages of 18 through 35 — make up approximately 31% of the overall electorate, NPR reported. It is also the group that has had the lowest voter turnout out of any other age group — just 46% voted in the 2012 presidential election. 

Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.

I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.

Her 1,500-word speech, a version of which appears in Vital Little Plans, became the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her main argument was Kirk’s: Small neighborhood stores, ignored by the planners in their grim demolition derby, were essential social hubs. She added that sidewalks, stoops, laundries, and mailbox areas were also indispensable centers of community activity, and that sterile, vacant outdoor space served nobody. “The least we can do,” she said, “is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own.”

Amid all this disruption, Britain and other countries have created a smorgasbord of incentives to power providers to keep the lights from going off. Neil Hutchings, director of power systems and storage at Anesco, the small British company that supplied Mr. Beatty’s battery, said there were no fewer than 14 ways that it could make money. “The real secret is how to pick out the best combination,” he said. Independent journalism.More essential than ever. Subscribe to the Times While he said the batteries, which are imported from China, were improving, the real key was in the electronic controls that allowed them to react almost instantaneously to the needs of the grid.

User-generated content, by and large, is not lucrative at a scale that satisfies investors, and as a result, most social-media companies are changing direction toward other revenue streams. One of the more significant shifts is the move into social messaging.

These new messaging features work to bind private groups tighter together, by making it more fun to talk to one another than to engage with the world at large.

We are more interested in locating alien species than understanding the humanity among the species we already live with

Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—however controversial those conversations often were. Bleeker says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned from this election cycle is that social media is increasingly going to be part of any candidate’s so-called “earned media strategy”—that is, the coverage a candidate gets for free in the press. The President-elect has shown he can turn a news cycle in 140 characters or less; in a recent 60 Minutes interview, he said he plans to continue using Twitter as president. “He’s going to tell his side of the story from the digital bully pulpit,” Lira says. Whether fake news did or didn’t affect the election’s outcome, Facebook as a platform did. The winning candidate was not just willing, but eager to break with traditional models of campaigning. His team invested in new ways of using the digital tools and platforms that have come to dominate the media landscape. Anyone who wants to defeat him in the future will have to do the same.