politics Apr/May 2014

Chips Democratic

It’s hard to believe, but just five years ago one could still make a good living by pontificating about the growing chasm between the experts and the amateurs. Who cares today whether we can trust Wikipedia? Or—to take what seemed the most burning question of the last decade—whether bloggers are journalists? That particular debate has petered out for reasons that are primarily economic rather than philosophical: The contemporary consensus seems to be that if your “content” attracts “eyeballs,” you will probably have a job in the media business. Whether you call yourself a blogger or a journalist

politics Feb/Mar 2013

Future Shock

In the gushing, breathless copy that justifies Gavin Newsom’s lead spot in his publisher’s catalogue, we learn that “government cannot keep functioning in a twentieth-century mindset.” We are informed further that Newsom, the present lieutenant governor of California, and formerly the youngest mayor of San Francisco in more than a century, came to his tirelessly sanguine view of digital democracy by overseeing the digital renovation of San Francisco’s city hall. In a flourish as logical as it is grammatical, we learn that “Newsom’s quest to modernize one of America’s most modern cities—and the

print Apr/May 2011

How Much Did Social Media contribute to Revolution in the Middle East?

Tweets were sent. Dictators were toppled. Internet = democracy. QED. Sadly, this is the level of nuance in most popular accounts of the Internet’s contribution to the recent unrest in the Middle East.

Consider, for example, the quite representative testimony of Chris Taylor, Mashable.com’s San Francisco’s bureau chief, who, after a few disclaimers about the real-world organizing that preceded the Egypt revolt, delivers this breathless estimation how Facebook’s revolutionary power has transformed the very foundation for conceiving of social change. Never before have we “created a club that’s

Evgeny Morozov