technology and social change: re-examining key assumptions

1. Technology and Social Change Re-examining 3 Key AssumptionsBy Evgeny Morozov@ World Skoll Forum 2009

2. Assumptions Assumptions1. Data Will Organize Itself 2. Technology Will Democratize Our Public Sphere 3. Civil Society Will Flourish on the Web 3. Assumption #1: Data Will Organize Itself 4. Semantic Health Search: CureHunter 5. CureHunter.com - II 6. Hakia: Curated/Verified Health Search 7. Aggregation is cheap; curation isn't 8. Growing availability of user-contributed data 9. Predicting Epidemics with Flu Trends 10. Tracking Crime with WikiCrimes 11. Tracking Crises with WikiMapAid 12. Tracking Conflict with Ushahidi 13. Can We Trust User-Submitted Data? 14. Determining trusted content 15. Assumption # 2 Technology will democratize our public sphere 16. I. Does Internet Breed Polarization? 17. Shared National Experiences 18. Shared National Experience? No, thanks 19. Blogs add more valueAshley Esarey, based on 2006 data/500 blogs 20. II. Does Deliberation Come at the Cost ofParticipation? 21. Pajamahadeen vs Movement Builders 22. There's less politics online than we think 23. Deliberation vs Participation in the USBlog-readers: as polarized as US senators (more polarized than TV news audiences/non-blog readers)Cross-cutting exposure to blogs with different ideological positions doesn't lowerparticipation (especially on the left) Farrell et al. (2008) 24. III. Is New Media More Participatoryand Democratic? 25. Anyone can contribute but not everyonedoes... Wikipedia: 1% of users responsible for half of thesite's editsDigg: top 100 users responsible for half of thesite's top stories 98% chance your submission won't make the Digg frontpage today 26. Gameabiliy and astroturfing; notableclients 27. Masses vs Elites 28. Top political bloggers vs top columnistselite education: 66% of columnists vs 73 % of bloggers doctoral degrees: 20% of columnists vs more than 50% of bloggers columnists score better on gender/ethnic balance Top bloggers far better educated than CEOs of American companies Matthew Hindman, Myth of Digital Democracy (2009) 29. Assumption # 3 Civil Society Will Flourish on the Web 30. Does technology erode state power? The role of the nation state will change dramatically and there will be no more room for nationalism than there is for smallpox...many of the values of a nation-state will give way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities...Being Digital (1996), Nicolas Negroponte 31. 1. Nationalists 32. 2. Anti-vaccination2007 study by U of Toronto: 153 YouTube videos about vaccination and immunization. More than half of the videos portrayedvaccinations negatively or ambiguously. Of those videos, almost half contained messages that contradict the 2006 CanadianImmunization Guide 33. 3. Corporations Aggressive SEO/Removing Complaints 34. Online Doesn't Always Mean Louder 35. Politics of Censorship are Global Censorship campaigns in UK, Australia, Canada give extra legitimacy to campaigns in China,Thailand, Vietnam... 36. Thailand: Crowdsourcing Censorship 37. Democratization of cyber-attacks 38. Digital Refugees 39. Exiled media from Burma 40. Russian LGBT online community+US 41. Dictators Don't Necessarily Hate the Web 42. Spinternet of China, Russia, Iran 43. China's 50 Cent Party (wumaodang) ~280,000 members Regular National/Local Trainings Priority Sites Required to Cooperate 44. Russia: New Media Stars start-up 45. Iran: Spinning Religious DiscourseBureau for the Development of Religious Web Logs established at the Religious School ofQom in 2006350 teachers and clergy in Qom were trained,with at least 800 studentsParticular concern: blogging women 46. Thank you!Email: [email protected]