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Paradise Tossed: Three Theses on the Impossibility of Future Progress « Genera... - The Diigo Meta page

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forestfortrees
Forestfortrees bookmarked on 2009-09-29 social technology web history critique critical theory politics
  • Technologically mediated sociality, rather than becoming the means by which radical democracy takes hold, is simply a testament to that very idea’s impotence.
  • a person’s reading proceeds geometrically while tweeted content expands exponentially
  • What’s more, we face a very McLuhanesque danger in which the medium quite literally becomes the message; all these romantic imaginings of spontaneous uprising are projected onto the technology, which consequently acquires a sort of messianic aura in the process and turns reportage into gospel. Perception management thus becomes more a bottom-up that a top-down affair purely as a consequence of situational constraints: a handful of tech-enabled eyewitnesses tweet their observations, which provokes a frenzy of re-tweets from which reporters, barred access to the scene of the action, cherry-pick with nothing to guide them but their intuitions as to the information’s reliability. The net effect is, then, that rather than offering immediacy, events like Twitter Revolutions introduce added layers of mediation, such that it is incredibly difficult to evaluate information sources. Call it crowd-sourced propaganda; it’s certainly not objective reportage.
  • Prophets of social-media enhanced news reporting also tend to overlook the class element of their rosy prognostications. A trip to any library serving poor inner-city neighborhoods quickly reveals what social media’s revolutionary potential means to large portions of the citizenry. It means waiting an hour for a half-hour turn on a computer that was obsolete four years ago. This, I think, the dialectical image of the Twitter Revolution, which is really just an internecine power struggle between a monied superclass and its tech-savvy auxiliary. The former seek to preserve oligarchy; the latter to establish technocracy.

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Sep 2009, by Jeremy Price.

  • 29 Sep 09
    forestfortrees
    Jeremy Price

    social technology web history critique critical theory politics

    • Technologically mediated sociality, rather than becoming the means by which radical democracy takes hold, is simply a testament to that very idea’s impotence.
    • a person’s reading proceeds geometrically while tweeted content expands exponentially
    • 2 more annotations...