Group items tagged

Discussion of the political impact of social media has focused on the power of mass protests to topple governments. In fact, social media's real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere -- which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months.

FIVE centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the ReformationRead on: How Luther went viral, from our Christmas edition

Summary: Do the tools of social media make it possible for protesters to challenge their governments? Malcolm Gladwell argues that there is no evidence that they do; Clay Shirky disagrees.

Social media provides huge opportunities, but will bring huge problems

* Released 1999 * Running time: 60 minutes * Produced by Berkeley Media and available through their website http://www.berkeleymedia.com/ * Educational discounts are available; be sure to ask. A review quoted on their site says: "This film manages, miraculously, not to fall into the simplistic trap of equating population growth with abstract numbers that count up doom and disaster. Rather, it reminds us that this is the most human of all subjects, and its future depends above all on the human lives of young women, who live in many different circumstances in many parts of the earth. It depicts these young women, appropriately, as looking ahead to lives very different from those of their mothers -- lives at a global turning point toward lower birth rates and population stabilization." -- Donella Meadows, Prof. of Environmental Studies, Dartmouth Univ.

Good information about the fact that we have the means to communicate across the world, but we are in fact getting more isolated in terms of what we are being reported and what we are interested in. Good extension from Alyssa Miller's talk