“I am sitting here, six in the morning, I am staring at two people bascially naked in the shower together with 30 people watching and its like uh okay, but that’s the future.”-Josh Harris, We Live in Public Perhaps the most haunting film I have watched on publicity and the digital network is Ondi [...]
Archive for the ‘Democracy’ Category
Privacy is a Public Value or Why I am Not Boarding the Jarvis Bus
Posted: 1st November 2011 by Dave Parry in Democracy, Parallel ProcessTags: bus, Jarvis, Morozov, privacy, Public Sphere, publicity, We Live in Public
2
Social Media. Good for Revolution. Bad for Democracy?
Posted: 23rd June 2011 by Dave Parry in DemocracyTags: antipower, Egypt, MENA, Shirky
Prior to the MENA uprisings, Clay Shirky wrote an article published in Foreign Affairs titled “The Political Power of Social Media.” This piece although significantly shorter than either of his two books Here Comes Everybody or Cognitive Surplus, explains Shirky’s thinking on the role of social media in relation to democracy, and/or the possibility of people [...]
We Built Minority Report not Second Life.
Posted: 22nd June 2011 by Dave Parry in DemocracyTags: internet, meatspace, Minority Report, SecondLife, theory, virtual
This past April I was fortunate enough to attend the Theorizing the Web Conference at the University of Maryland (as a side note easily one of the better conferences I have ever attended). Following lunch, George Ritzer gave one of the keynote addresses in which he argued that sociology, specifically sociology research which focuses [...]
This Tuesday on the UT-Dallas campus I will be part of a panel discussion on the Middle East and North Africa. This is being put together by the Political Science folks, as such it is not really focused on the role of social media. In fact the other speakers are more focused on the history, [...]
5 Billion People Whose Values are Not Ours
Posted: 16th February 2011 by Dave Parry in DemocracyTags: 21stCenturyStateCraft, Egypt, Hilary CLinton, Twitter, Wikileaks
On January 21, 2010 Hilary Rodham Clinton gave what was then promoted as an important speech on promoting internet freedom. In this first set of “Remarks on Internet Freedom” Clinton used the backdrop of the Newseum to suggest that important ways in which the Newseum served as an important reminder of our first amendment freedoms, [...]
Why We Need New Models for Understanding Democratic Transformation
Posted: 7th February 2011 by Dave Parry in DemocracyTags: McLuhan, Ony, PrintingPress, prosthesis, Shirky, unicorns
A few posts ago I proposed what I thought was the crucial question surrounding the relation of the digital network and the future of democracy: And this is where I think the important debate is: Is the internet as a technology subject to the same analysis as other technological developments? Can it largely be understood [...]
It’s not the Public Internet, It is the Internet Public.
Posted: 4th February 2011 by Dave Parry in DemocracyTags: Egypt Tunisia InternetPublic Gladwell
Last night Gladwell published this short piece for the New Yorker. Gladwell revisits his earlier essay which argued that the ties produced by social media (weak ties) are not as important as social ties produced by face to face iteration (strong ties), and thus social media is not a particularly advantageous platform for fermenting social change. [...]
Are we Deluded in Thinking that the Internet Transforms Power Structures?
Posted: 26th January 2011 by Dave Parry in DemocracyTags: Morozov, Philosophy of Technology, Shirky, The Net Delusion
Let me start by saying that The Net Delusion is probably one of the most important books on internet democracy you will read this year. I realize that it is only January, so there is a great deal of writing yet to be done, but I think it is already safe to say that you [...]
Causes are Always Multiple
Posted: 24th January 2011 by Dave Parry in DemocracyTags: Causality, Facebook, Tunisia, Twitter, Wikileaks
Again, this time in the case of Tunisia, we have the rise of the “(insert Internet technology) Revolution” meme. And already it seems that I have read at least 10,000 words penned (typed) in defense of thesis that a specific internet technology (Wikileaks, Twitter, Facebook) caused the Tunisian uprising and as least as many [...]
The Mob, Violence, and Lone Gunmen
Posted: 12th January 2011 by Dave Parry in DemocracyTags: Loughner, Public Sphere, rhetoric, Smart Mobs
“We cannot be unaware of the fact that, particularly with the internet, there’s this huge echo-chamber out there, and anything any of us says falls on the unhinged and the hinged alike, and we just have to be sensitive to it.”-Bill Clinton As academics we tend to privilege the slow detailed nuanced carefully developed analytic [...]
