Recommended reading

 If you haven ' t yet read this by Zeynep Tufecki,do so now. That is an order.  I remember all too well the early days of the Internet, followed by its wholesale migration to the World Wide Web. There was an intoxicating culture of revolution. The Internet was going to make information -- assumed to be a synonym for truth -- free for all. It would bring down tyrants, and liberate everyone from the soft tyranny of ideology and politicians ' seductive promises and lies. Of course, all of these visionaries couldn ' t perceive their own ideology -- this was all closely bound up with  a glib libertarianism and faith in a coming meritocracy in which they presumed they would rise to the top.Well, that didn ' t happen. Before the WWW became largely synonymous with the Internet, the precursor of social media as we know it today was the on-line forum. Of course these still exist, with more sophisticated features, but the early experience should have served as a warning. The most popular subject for these fora was pornography, while accurate information and enlightening discourse were in short supply. With the development of contemporary forms of social media, the same excitement about a coming liberatory era re-appeared.  Instead we got a catastrophe. As Tufecki writes:Power always learns, and powerful tools always fall into its hands. This is a hard lesson of history but a solid one. It is key to understanding how, in seven years, digital technologies have gon...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs