Yochai Benklerexplains: “The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization.”
Democratic bodies are typically elected in periods of three to five years, yet citizen opinions seem to fluctuate daily and sometimes these mood swings grow to enormous proportions. When thousands of people all start tweeting about the same subject on the same day, you know that something is up. With so much dynamic and salient political diversity in the electorate, how can policy-makers ever reach a consensus that could satisfy everyone?
At the same time, it would be a grave mistake to discount the voices of the internet as something that has no connection to real political situations.
What happened in the UK was not only a political disaster, but also a vivid example of what happens when you combine the uncontrollable power of the internet with a lingering visceral feeling that ordinary people have lost control of the politics that shape their lives.
Polarization as a driver of populism
People who have long entertained right-wing populist ideas, but were never confident enough to voice them openly, are now in a position to connect to like-minded others online and use the internet as a megaphone for their opinions.
The resulting echo chambers tend to amplify and reinforce our existing opinions, which is dysfunctional for a healthy democratic discourse. And while social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter generally have the power to expose us to politically diverse opinions, research suggests that the filter bubbles they sometimes create are, in fact, exacerbated by the platforms’ personalization algorithms, which are based on our social networks and our previously expressed ideas. This means that instead of creating an ideal type of a digitally mediated “public agora”, which would allow citizens to voice their concerns and share their hopes, the internet has actually increased conflict and ideological segregation between opposing views, granting a disproportionate amount of clout to the most extreme opinions.
The disintegration of the general will
In political philosophy, the very idea of democracy is based on the principal of the general will, which was proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century. Rousseau envisioned that a society needs to be governed by a democratic body that acts according to the imperative will of the people as a whole.
There can be no doubt that a new form of digitally mediated politics is a crucial component of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: the internet is already used for bottom-up agenda-setting, empowering citizens to speak up in a networked public sphere, and pushing the boundaries of the size, sophistication and scope of collective action. In particular, social media has changed the nature of political campaigning and will continue to play an important role in future elections and political campaigns around the world.
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more on the impact of technology on democracy in this IMS blog:
the topics of privacy pertaining technology is becoming ubiquitous.
If you feel that the content of your class material can benefit of such discussions, please let us know.
Please have some titles, which can help you brainstorm topics for discussions in your classes:
the truth is that on the internet, nobody has control.
omething is about to change — that much is true. Since its founding in 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has held a contract with the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). That contract was for “IANA functions,” which are useful and important functions that allow parts of the internet to work the way they do.
IANA, which stands for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, is like a land registry for the internet that prevents two different functions from laying claim to the same value at the same time.
For instance, when you visit a web page, you probably use the conventional port 443 for a secure connection. Everyone knows to use port 443 for this purpose (as opposed to, say, port 25, which is for mail) because it’s written down in an IANA registry. It wouldn’t matter which number we used as long as everyone used the same number. If everyone does not, then in order to make a connection you’d first have to negotiate what port to use, and that would be less convenient.
One of the IANA registries is the Domain Name System root zone. It holds the name servers for the top-level domains (such as .com and .org and country codes such as .us, .cn and .in). Ultimately, in the DNS, every response depends on the values in the root zone. This is why the job is a critical function.
The end of oversight by the U.S. government does not mean that ICANN gets to do whatever it wants. Instead, in the past two years, the internet community came together to invent new, community-based ways of ensuring that ICANN does a good job. If it doesn’t, the community can, in effect, fire ICANN. That is the way everything already works on the internet. The idea is to take the existing successful model of the open internet, built by voluntary collaboration, and use it again for that purpose.
The United States is not “giving away” the internet. NTIA is wisely acknowledging that the internet has grown up and that the system works as designed and doesn’t need governments to keep it going. On Oct. 1, nobody will be able to tell that anything has changed. We should all be thankful that NTIA recognizes that its job is complete and that it can step back confident that the same enlightened self-interest that keeps the internet delivering its magic will work for this part of the internet, too.
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more on the Internet-related topics in this IMS blog at
The Department of Homeland Security’s proposed policy to collect information on the social media profiles of foreign travelers violates the rights of travelers and their American associates, according to privacy groups.
n a strongly worded rebuke of the proposed Customs and Border Protection policy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that the rule change would do little to enhance national security and would open the door to greater spying on Americans.
Visa Waiver Program (VWP) travelers by adding requests for social media identifiers to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization and I-94W forms.
As FCW reported in June, the rule change came on the heels of a number of policies CBP initiated after criticism from Congress that potential terrorists could be exploiting the VWP, which allows citizens of 38 countries to enter the U.S. without a visa for up to 90 days.
Other human rights groups and civil liberties organizations submitted a joint letter to CBP stating that “DHS collection of online identity information is an intelligence surveillance program clothed as a customs administration mechanism.”
In more supportive comments delivered to CBP, the Center for Data Innovation said that just as universities, employers and lenders check social media profiles of potential clients, DHS should collect social media information from foreign travelers.
A Bitly study found that branded domain names can increase click-through rates (CTRs) by up to 34% on Twitter.
Generic top-level domains (GTLDs) are the new domain extensions provided by ICANN, which recently released more than 1,000 “strings.” In addition to the common .com, .org, .us, and so on, there are now many more possibilities: .deal, .link, .xyz, .cool, .marketing, and even .pizza!
It’s hard not to consider the real opportunities for your company’s brand. Brands like Slack (slack.help) are jumping on board with clever domain names they can use to improve their performance online.
Journal of Technology and Teacher EducationVolume 24, Number 2, ISSN 1059-7069 Publisher: Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education, Chesapeake, VA
The majority of the participants were female. All of the participants were junior and senior students enrolled in elementary teacher education programs. Specifically, this study compared pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy, outcome expectations, intentions (internal factors) and perceived school climate (external factor) for technology integration in education in these countries.
Unlike Turkey and the US, self-efficacy predicted technology integration intention to a smaller degree than school climate in the Spanish sample. Interestingly, outcome expectations scores did not make a statistically significant contribution to predicting pre-service teachers’ intention to use technology in the US sample.
Cheating remains a stubborn problem at many schools. According to the Educational Testing Service and the Ad Council, who define cheating as “representing someone else’s work as your own,” cheating tends to start in junior high, peak in high school, and occur most often in math and science classes. Men and women cheat in equal measure, both sexes aided by the ubiquity of computers and the internet, and most cheaters aren’t caught. Both high- and low-achieving students find ways to misrepresent their work, explaining away their misconduct with familiar rationalizations: everybody does it, it’s a victimless crime, and getting the grade matters more.
while few cheat a lot—20 of the 40,000 involved in the experiments—many more—about 28,000—cheated a little bit. Most everyone has what he calls a “personal fudge factor” that allows for just a little dishonesty, provided that the conditions are right. For example, if people see others cheating without consequence, they’re more apt to do the same; social norms permit it. If cheating seems to benefit a “good cause,” even more feel comfortable deceiving.
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more on cheating and academic dishonesty in this IMS blog
