Thoughts.

tiffanihillin:

Informative and quite entertaining to watch.  Good job, guys.

todgeweiht:

The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?

 

Years ago, government entities would torture individuals for the kind of associative information that Facebook and Twitter can now give them for free.

 

What we hear a lot about is the distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants. What we don’t hear a lot about is the distinction between digital renegades and digital captives, which I think is a much more important one, because we need to know exactly how technology influences civic engagement and  their propensity to actually go and engage in protest. You have to go back to maslow and start thinking about how this hierarchy of needs can be applied to cyber space. It may as well be that, when you are bringing internet to China and Russia, and Iran, at the very beginning what people would want is to just go online, have fun, explore pornography, or youtube, for pictures of funny cats, and will want to communicate and chat about all this. Some will want to explore learning, and eventually some will even want to campaign. Some will go and download reports from human rights watch, but most will still be downloading pornography. Which is all just an important perspective to keep in mind. If you really want to understand the actual net impact & net effect of technology on society you have to look much broader at in fact the negative consequences as well.

(via freepressnews)