The Political Power of Social Media

The Political Power of Social Media

Q1) Will social media be established as the new means of revolution? It has happened all over the world and there is little governments can do to completely disenable social media users.

Q2) Will laws be formed around the use of social media around the world as the worlds authoritarian governments try and limit access to it? Will we see radical change in the way governments respond to the use of social media, as seen in Belarus in 2006, the 2009 uprising of the Green Movement, or in Thailand in 2010?

Q3) How exactly did China, and authoritarian governments all around the world, limit access to what citizens could view online? What were the ramifications they faced if they breached it, if they could?

Q4) Clay Shirky talked about how there are software developers trying to make a program capable of implementing censorship. At the rate we’re going, it seems like such ideas are possible given enough time. Have they created anything close to that capability since the article’s publication in 2011?  

Resisting Technology: Regaining a Personal Ecology

Resisting Technology: Regaining a Personal Ecology

Q1) Ravi Agarwal states that, “[He has] been left resisting technology”. Do you think this will happen to more people as technology progresses, and do you think technology may, in some ways, be just a fad?

Q2) Agarwal said, “Though [technology] meant to provide answers to human problems, they created dominances and acquire the arrogance of being able to guide human density”. Thus far in our technological advancement, do you see technology creating more problems, or fixing more problems overall?

Q3) Do you think that there will be technology that will solve environmental problems in the near future? Will they be widely adopted? If not, what will prevent the adaptation of this kind of technology?

Q4) “Knowledge is no longer local, it is centrally controlled and distributed to the more fortunate who can access it”. I am wondering what this means for the future of education and if this will create somewhat of a caste system?  

Formulate a brief argument against the effectiveness of social media in sociopolitical change.

Social media has had many effects on our culture, on in particular is sociopolitical change. Social media, as seen from experience, is often adopted by the younger generations. This exclusion leaves older generations out of the loop with this fast paced means of communication. This fast paced communication has also been integrated within our fast pace lifestyle and leaves cohorts of technologically illiterate individuals permanently out of the loop. This also brings up the fact that some individuals within our country (even more so outside of our country) do not have the means to access this information due to underprivileged environments, such as poverty. Both the technically illiterate and those underprivileged are not able to contribute to this socio-political atmosphere which exposes social media's inefficiency and leaves many people unaccounted for.

Social media, in general, has become very personal and users can select their exposure to different media sources. This poses the problem of selective exposure and being ill-informed on any particular subject. Social media consumers will only retain information consistent with their beliefs, neglecting any other viewpoints and ultimately introducing unnecessary bias in the sociopolitical atmosphere and altering sociopolitical change (not to mention people angered by others's ignorance). Social media has also opened an outlet to impulsive, emotion based posts. Before social media (based on my opinion) I could imagine the delay between the impulsive thought, and the publication of that impulsive thought, allotted time for a rational thought processes to take over and prevent the individual from publishing their emotions. This further exposes the inefficiency of social media in the sociopolitical changes as rational thought processes are neglected.