Home
Will Richardson's Library tagged → View Popular
How Local Politicians are Using Social Media
"Local and state offices, from the governor down to the alderman are taking note and there has been a huge increase in the number of local and state politicians getting involved in social media; and not just in a cursory manner, but in ways that have opened the lines of communication to an audience clamoring for transparency."
Against Transparency
"There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption. Projects such as the one that the health care bill would launch--building a massive database of doctors who got money from private interests; or projects such as the ones (these are the really sexy innovations for the movement) to make it trivially easy to track every possible source of influence on a member of Congress, mapped against every single vote that the member has made. These projects assume that they are seeking an obvious good. No doubt they will have a profound effect. But will the effect of these projects--at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations--really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they righteously envisage?"
-
There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption. Projects such as the one that the health care bill would launch--building a massive database of doctors who got money from private interests; or projects such as the ones (these are the really sexy innovations for the movement) to make it trivially easy to track every possible source of influence on a member of Congress, mapped against every single vote that the member has made. These projects assume that they are seeking an obvious good. No doubt they will have a profound effect. But will the effect of these projects--at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations--really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they righteously envisage?
-
There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption. Projects such as the one that the health care bill would launch--building a massive database of doctors who got money from private interests; or projects such as the ones (these are the really sexy innovations for the movement) to make it trivially easy to track every possible source of influence on a member of Congress, mapped against every single vote that the member has made. These projects assume that they are seeking an obvious good. No doubt they will have a profound effect. But will the effect of these projects--at least on their own, unqualified or unrestrained by other considerations--really be for the good? Do we really want the world that they righteously envisage?
- 1 more annotations...
How Iran's Hackers Killed Big Brother - The Daily Beast
But I think it's also too easy to underestimate the real power of the Internet to provide more than information. On the Internet, content is not king - it never was. The value of Tweets right now is less the information they contain than the solidarity they promote. Like civil rights protesters who sang rousing hymns as they were carried off to jail, Twitterers are bearing witness to what's happening around them, and calling out into the darkness of cyberspace for confirmation. I'm here. You're here, too. We are present.
Twitter, for all its faults, and the Internet, for all its insubstantiality, nonetheless serve as the strands of an existential telegraph. By resisting those who would censor history in real time, those flinging messages into the ether are demonstrating their freedom of speech—or, rather, their freedom to speak in spite of all efforts to the contrary. This mere gesture of freedom— the ability to connect to others and confirm one's experience of the world — is what social networking is all about. While this may or may not be enough right now to topple an unjust government, the opposition, in demonstrating that this freedom is now a permanent right, has already claimed victory.
-
But I think it's also too easy to underestimate the real power of the Internet to provide more than information. On the Internet, content is not king - it never was. The value of Tweets right now is less the information they contain than the solidarity they promote. Like civil rights protesters who sang rousing hymns as they were carried off to jail, Twitterers are bearing witness to what's happening around them, and calling out into the darkness of cyberspace for confirmation. I'm here. You're here, too. We are present.
Twitter, for all its faults, and the Internet, for all its insubstantiality, nonetheless serve as the strands of an existential telegraph. By resisting those who would censor history in real time, those flinging messages into the ether are demonstrating their freedom of speech—or, rather, their freedom to speak in spite of all efforts to the contrary. This mere gesture of freedom— the ability to connect to others and confirm one's experience of the world — is what social networking is all about. While this may or may not be enough right now to topple an unjust government, the opposition, in demonstrating that this freedom is now a permanent right, has already claimed victory.
P2P2G: The rise of e-diplomacy - Micah L. Sifry and Andrew Rasiej - POLITICO.com
In an age when Israeli and Lebanese bloggers can IM each other while their countries are at war; when two college grads in Colombia can use Facebook to spark worldwide demonstrations, involving 14 million people, against the FARC rebel group; and when a half-million people using Kiva.org can lend more than $75 million in direct micro-loans to people in 185 countries, clearly international relations is no longer a monopoly of governments. Social media are helping redefine what diplomacy means at a rapid pace.
Education Leaders Regret Reduction in Stimulus Funding for Technology-Rich Classrooms
Two leading education associations today expressed concern over the reduction in funding for technology-rich classrooms included in the conference report of the economic stimulus bill. The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and the International Society for Technology Education (ISTE) released the following joint statement:
"We are deeply disappointed that funding to create technology-rich classrooms has been significantly scaled back in the compromise economic recovery bill. The funding provides a much-needed down payment toward meeting President Obama's vision that all students receive the benefits of 21st century learning environments, but the final level of investment falls short of funding in the House and Senate bills, and far short of what is needed by our students to compete in today's digital age.
The Freedoms That Technologies Help Bring - NYTimes.com
Story about the Egyptian governement trying to reign in technology: But thus far, each time technology has promised to help introduce democracy to the country, the young peoples’ hopes have been dashed. A movement for political reform that used Facebook t
Jamie Alter Lynton: Obama and His Field Force: How California Roared
So it may come as a surprise that the California team actually pulled off what can only be called a field operation coup: on election day, California volunteers got on their own phones and managed to make an astonishing 2 million calls into battleground s
Obama's Online Power: Blessing or Curse?
President-elect Obama will take office in January with a weapon no president has ever had at his disposal: an online army of more than 10 million supporters who can now be put to use to help carry out a sweeping agenda.
The vast lists of e-mail addresses
For a Washington Job, Be Prepared to Tell All - NYTimes.com
The application also asks applicants to “please list all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet.”
The vetting process for executive branch jobs has been onerous for decades, with each incoming administration erecting new barrie
Battle Plans: How Obama Won
There was an almost obsessive singularity in the way that Obama and his chief strategists—Axelrod and David Plouffe, the campaign’s manager—saw the contest. In their tactical view, all that was wrong with the United States could be summarized in one word:
5 Signs President-Elect Obama Is a Geek | Geekdad from Wired.com
1. Obama has pledged to create a cabinet-level Chief Technology Officer for the country. The U.S. CTO would be responsible for making broadband technology readily available to every U.S. citizen, and for fighting the telcos for net neutrality. While this
Civics 101 - Nicholas D. Kristof Blog - NYTimes.com
Once I started working with Mikva, my students showed…energy. Enthusiasm. All that you don’t usually see when handing out the next reading assignment. Finally, I made the connection. I used to think that teens weren’t ready to act, that they needed more “
Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World - NYTimes.com
Old media, apparently, can learn new media tricks. Not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won in part because of the increasingly popular medium of television, has changing technology had such an impact on the political campaigns and the organizations cover
The First Internet President | Election | TheRoot.com
In true community organizer fashion, Obama built a bottom-up machine on the Web, upending the traditional one-to-many approach of politics to truly embrace the chaotic Internet ethos of many-to-many action. Three innovations stand out. First, in the prima
Net Geners Come of Age - BusinessWeek.com- msnbc.com
[This would be great to use in the literacy essay.]
The Nov. 4 election will be a spectacular display of the power of a new generation of Americans. I call them the Net Generation because they're the first to grow up digital, and in this election year t
Obama's Cellphone Army -- Courant.com
For four hours several nights a week, a room at Yale turns into an Obama phone bank, where any student with a cellphone and a laptop can become a virtual campaign worker, chatting up undecided voters in battleground states from the comfort of a dorm in un
If Elected ... - Rivals’ Visions Differ on Unleashing Innovation
Both presidential candidates, in their careers and in their campaigns, have made detailed arguments for how the nation should deal with technology rivals, sharpen its competitive edge and improve what experts call its “ecology of innovation.”
Yet their v
YouTube for president?
Great look at how YouTube is changing politics: "Consider how all this content is being used, with millions of people finding videos that speak to them and forwarding these videos to their friends and acquaintances. Collectively, this is the hum of democr
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in politics
-
Race, Culture, and Politics in the "New South"
These resources address iss...
Items: 11 | Visits: 318
Created by: David Voelker
-
comments
Items: 6 | Visits: 79
Created by: greentlr
-
Politics and Beyond
Items: 54 | Visits: 163
Created by: ken meece
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo