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Dave Anderson edited “Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework” (Springer, 2014), has taught at 5 universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016. He wrote this for the Fulcrum.
The web and social media have supplied organizations and folks with an excellent many home windows on the world in comparison with the three main tv stations of the Nineteen Fifties.
There have been optimistic and detrimental implications of this info expertise improvement. On the optimistic aspect, everyone seems to be a writer and an advocate. You don’t have to be NBC to succeed in 3 million and even 30 million individuals with a narrative. You could be a star or an environmental advocate who reaches 50 million and even 500 million individuals with a tweet. Citizens have extra energy because of having a laptop computer or smartphone at their fingertips.
Moreover, everybody can entry information, tales and blogs which can be of curiosity to them. The info expertise smorgasbord — like humility, in accordance with T.S. Eliot — is limitless. Information expertise has additionally led to the event of numerous new types of medical expertise, protection expertise and shopper items.
On the detrimental aspect, the web and social media often unfold lies and false statements. They allow authors to manufacture claims and tales with digital methods. Hacking and different types of cybercrime are all over the place. Moreover, specialists have noticed that residents can simply channel info that solely represents one viewpoint. This results in political polarization and might foment prejudice and hostility alongside racial, gender, sexual id and non secular strains.
The web and social media have been blamed for serving to to create a crimson coat/blue coat struggle by which there are only a few centrists in our authorities. And whereas there are extra centrists amongst residents themselves, they lack illustration in Washington.
We proceed to stay with this chaos — boundless freedom, limitless capability to study, clear tendencies for rigidity, intolerance, polarization and even violence.
Is there a means out? No, there isn’t any means out.
Information expertise, like industrialization, is without delay a blessing and a curse. The industrial revolution modified the world. It accelerated the event of capitalism and gave delivery to new types of transportation, communication, meals manufacturing, medication and shopper items. It additionally led to poverty, exploitation, alienation, air pollution and sophistication struggle.
We haven’t resolved the inherent pressure inside Nineteenth-century industrialization, and thus we must always not count on to resolve the inherent pressure inside late Twentieth-century info expertise both.
But what can we do?
Perhaps the primary factor we will do is acknowledge that info expertise, like industrial expertise, is inherently conflicted. Indeed, there have been two IT revolutions, not one: first industrial after which info expertise. Nuclear expertise has the identical pressure. IT1 and IT2 are neither inherently good nor inherently dangerous.
This recognition should be made extra express in our politics. We want a Congress and a president, and state governments, that settle for the strain and work weekly to stability it, recognizing that it’s inconceivable to beat it. Several issues that may very well be executed embody: set up a congressional oversight committee and a presidential fee to plot metrics to measure and monitor the 2 IT tensions. The media may also create scorecards.
Various newspapers and media oversight web sites have “fact check” providers. There may very well be a month-to-month scorecard on the “technology balancing acts.” What is to be prevented in any respect prices is dismissing or oversimplifying the 2 IT tensions.
Wisdom includes accepting the strain however working always to stability the values of effectivity, financial progress, freedom, equality, security and stability which can be at stake in our nation and civilization itself.
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