Latest Empirical Findings on Democratic Effects of the Internet Jacob Groshek from Iowa State University recently published the latest results from his research on the democratic effects of the Internet in the International Journal of Communication. A copy of Groshek’s study is available here (PDF). Groshek published an earlier study in 2009 which I blogged about here. The purpose of this blog post is to summarize Groshek’s research so I can include it in my dissertation’s literature review. Some Background: “Technological developments, especially communicative ones, have long been positioned — and even romanticized — as powerful instruments of democracy (Dunham, 1938; Lerner, 1958). The Methodology: “Though there are many ways to operationalize democracy and measure the prevalence of media technologies, this study relies principally on macro-level time–series democracy data from an historical sample that includes 72 countries, reaching back as far as 1946 in some cases, but at least from 1954 to 2003. The Results: In Conclusion: Like this:
The limits of the 'Twitter revolution' | Anne Nelson My friends and I spent much of the past month channelling Cairo via New York. Our Facebook and Twitter feeds kept breathless pace with the events in Tahrir Square. There were plenty of fears and reservations (which remain), but our dominant emotion was awe that such change was indeed possible – and that social media could play a significant part in it. Now that the euphoria has waned, hard political realities come into view. Coincidentally for me, the events in Egypt came on the heels of the first anniversary of the Haitian earthquake. Obviously, people who see real potential to overthrow a brutal dictator and people involved with dislocated populations as a result of natural disasters experience a strong motivation to use whatever tools come to hand. At the same time, there are a lot of worthy social media projects that have a hard time getting traction.
Social Media's Impotence During the Turmoil in Libya and Japan - Peter Osnos - Technology Even in our digital age, change often comes sweepingly, powerfully and from forces far more lasting than 140 characters could ever be. In early March, I attended a roundtable at the Paley Center for Media called "The Fourth Estate in a Digital Democracy." Only a few weeks later, that gathering and the countless others like it (celebrating the prominence of social media) have been given a chastening lesson. As Qaddafi routed his opponents, little more was said about Facebook and Twitter. Malcolm Gladwell's response was that, for Shirky's "argument to be anything close to persuasive, (he) has to convince readers that in the absence of social media, those uprisings would not have been possible." Two major developments have now demonstrated how abruptly what seems like certainties about technology and communications can be overwhelmed. Both examples took place in 1979, when I was the foreign editor of the Washington Post. Image: Reuters/Steve Crisp.
Egyptian Names Baby 'Facebook' For Site's Role in Revolution <br/><a href=" US News</a> | <a href=" Business News</a> Copy Looking for a name for their newborn daughter that celebrated the recent events in Egypt, an Alexandria couple skipped calling her "Tahrir Square" for something a little more trendy -- Facebook. Baby Facebook's father, Jamal Ibrahim, told Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper that he "wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of January 25 have achieved and chose to express it in the form of naming his firstborn girl," according to a translation by the blog TechCrunch. Social media played an integral part in coordinating three weeks of protests that ended in the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, after three decades in power. The Egyptian government quickly realized the power of the Internet in fomenting revolution and shutdown access across the country.
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Small Change At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. What makes people capable of this kind of activism? This pattern shows up again and again.
From Innovation to Revolution AN ABSENCE OF EVIDENCEMalcolm Gladwell While reading Clay Shirky's "The Political Power of Social Media" (January/February 2011), I was reminded of a trip I took just over ten years ago, during the dot-com bubble. I went to the catalog clothier Lands' End in Wisconsin, determined to write about how the rise of the Internet and e-commerce was transforming retail. What I learned was that it was not. Having a Web site, I was told, was definitely an improvement over being dependent entirely on a paper catalog and a phone bank. The lesson here is that just because innovations in communications technology happen does not mean that they matter; or, to put it another way, in order for an innovation to make a real difference, it has to solve a problem that was actually a problem in the first place. MALCOLM GLADWELL is a Staff Writer for The New Yorker. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register now to get three articles each month. Have an account?
The Fourth Estate in a Digital Democracy Bio Floyd Abrams Floyd Abrams is a member of the Firm's Executive Committee and its litigation practice group. Rafat Ali Rafat Ali is the CEO and founder of Skift, which is an early-stage travel intelligence startup that offers news, insight, advice, tools, and services to the travel industry and business travellers. John Avlon John Avlon's new book Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America is available now by Beast Books both on the Web and in paperback. Don Baer Don Baer is worldwide vice chairman and chief strategy officer of the strategic communications firm Burson-Marsteller, chairman of research firm Penn Schoen Berland, and founder and chairman of Palisades Media Ventures, a public affairs and news media development company. Merrill Brown Merrill Brown is Principal at MMB Media LLC. Brooke Gladstone Brooke Gladstone is an American journalist and media analyst. Jeff Greenfield Andrew Heyward John Hockenberry Jeff Jarvis Susan Robinson King David Kirkpatrick Josh Marshall Peter Osnos
Yemen’s Protests and the Hope for Reform In early March, as tens of thousands of people were calling for revolution, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been the President of Yemen for the past thirty-three years, staged an enormous celebration of himself. Uprisings across the Middle East had already swept away two of Saleh’s peers and were threatening to bring down his own regime. In the capital, Sanaa, thousands of Yemenis filed into the Stadium of the Revolution, their loyalty insured by the promise of payments after the rally. Some climbed into the bleachers; others gathered on the field, where an array of blue and white plastic lawn chairs faced an elevated stand reserved for the President and his men. Outside the stadium, about a mile away, protesters, who had been gathering for weeks, condemned Saleh, chanting “Leave!” The crowd cheered, and thousands of people raised their arms, some holding up posters. Saleh is a short, stout man, with a thick-necked demeanor and a sandpapery voice. But this time Saleh’s tone was soft.
Twitter, Facebook, and social activism At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. What makes people capable of this kind of activism? This pattern shows up again and again.
Médecine 2.0 : le Web redéfinit le rapport patient-docteur Les patients refusent de se fier à une seule source d’information -le corps médical. Ils fouillent le Net, postent des messages sur des forums, discutent entre eux de leurs traitements. Et font descendre de leur piédestal les médecins, plutôt hostiles au Net, mais qui commencent à se former à l’interactivité. Catherine a eu un cancer du sein. « Mon médecin m’a dit que j’avais un “carcinome”. Le professeur Bernard Granger, psychiatre à l’hôpital Cochin, reconnaît que certains malades en savent maintenant plus que lui : « Parfois, les patients m’apprennent des choses ! Dès 2004, des patients s’interrogent sur le Mediator Bernard Granger lui aussi furète sur le Net, à la recherche de nouvelles informations sur un traitement ou ses éventuels effets secondaires. « Parfois, je fais une recherche sur Google devant mon patient », sourit le psychiatre. « Un endocrinologue m’a prescrit du Mediator pour perdre 5 kilos. Peu d’informations données aux futurs médecins
TIC, réseaux sociaux et pouvoir/5: le cas de l’Espagne et le paradoxe de l’adrénaline - Transnets - Blog LeMonde.fr Le côté pacifique des manifestations ayant donné lieu au printemps arabe et la force de leur impact politique constituent une référence et une émulation pour les citoyens des pays démocratiques. Nous sommes beaucoup à nous demander comment s'en inspirer pour obtenir les changements que présidents, parlements et partis ne nous donnent pas. C'est exactement ce que les Espagnols sont en train de montrer en ce moment.Le problème c'est que tout cela ne fonctionne pas de la même façon par gros temps et par temps calme. [Ce billet s'ajoute à une série sur les médias sociaux et le pouvoir dans laquelle j'ai abordé le rôle perturbateur des réseaux sociaux , leur contribution aux printemps arabes , leurs limites et les dangers qu'ils représentent, le fait qu'ils ne semblent pas jouer un rôle déterminant dans la prise du pouvoir ] C'est un article du Guardian intitulée "Les limites de la révolution Twitter" qui m'a mis la puce à l'oreille. La question devient alors: comment sortir de ce paradoxe?
Egyptian Bloggers Report on New Unrest Video of Egyptian security forces uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday night by a blogger who said that it was shot above Talaat Harb, a street in Cairo, at 9 p.m. local time. Updated | Thursday | 9:30 a.m. Despite restrictions placed on the Internet and a ban on protests, Egyptians who oppose the continued rule of President Hosni Mubarak managed to post accounts and images of fresh demonstrations on the streets of Cairo online on Wednesday. As my colleagues Kareem Fahim and Mona El-Naggar report, “In front of Cairo’s press and lawyers’ syndicate buildings, more than 100 people shouted slogans, outnumbered by a force of security officers.” From outside the press syndicate, an Egyptian blogger who writes as Sandmonkey posted text accounts on Twitter and photographs on Yfrog. Sandmonkey/YfrogEgyptian protesters and riot police outside the press syndicate in Cairo on Wednesday. Sandmonkey/YfrogProtesters are seen breaking through police barriers in Cairo on Wednesday. Ms.