Democracy 2.0

1. The democratization of the media and the future of democracy
2. Hyperreal politics
3. Hashtag activism
4. Mobilizing real-world action
5. Democracy as roadkill
6. Some preliminary thoughts

Recommended Readings/Viewings

• Goldsborough, Reid (2011) "‘Slacktivism’ Is Becoming the New Activism"
• Jenning, Lane (2003).  "From Virtual Communities to Smart Mobs," The Futurist May/June 2003.
• Motadel, David (2011) "Waves of Revolution," History Today, April 2011.

Key concepts, people, etc

• Liberal democracy
  The assumption that citizens should be as free as possible and should participate in government through their thoughtful and responsible voting for representatives
• Neil Postman: Amusing ourselves to death
  The idea that television (and possibly all electronic media), including serious news and political debates, gets packaged as entertainment, and that voters make decisions largely in terms of personalities, images, advertising, and quick phrases without understanding the underlying policies and implications of the person they are voting for
• Hastag activism (/slacktivism)
  Making political statements online, through sharing, signing petitions, making memes, etc
• Smart mobs
  Bad actors mobilized and organized using the tools of social media and mass communication
  
• Surveillance capitalism
  The attempt to profile users (in an automated way) and provide tailored marketing to them, including political influence, to take advantage of their vulnerabilities as conceived through algorithms analyzing their online activities and interests (dataveillance)
• AI Companion
  One of a growing number of AI-generated online personas with which one can interact as though with a human being, for instance as advisors, confidantes, therapists, "boyfriends" or "girlfriends," etc. Potentially these bots could be exploited to exert political influence on those who use them, and to take the place of the conversations with real other people necessary for traditional democracy to work
• Three possible ways to resist social media as tools of unwanted influence and privacy invasion (and threat to real democracy)
  1. More government regulation of social media platforms
  2. Citizens voluntarily deleting their apps until the platforms are safer or better regulated
  3. More education about media and the demand for individuals to practice more critical thinking
  

References

• Altraide, Dagogo (aka ColdFusion) (2023) "The rise of AI companions"
• Harari, Yuval Noah (2023) "Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation," The Economist, 28 April 2023.
• Harari, Yuval Noah and Pedro Pinto (2023) "Humanity is not that simple"
• Lee, ArLuther (2020) "White supremacists use social media to organize racist attacks amid unrest," AJC
• McLaughlin, Timothy (2018) "How WhatsApp Fuels Fake News and Violence in India," Wired Dec. 12, 2018.
• Postman, Neil (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.(20th Anniversary Edition) Penguin, 2005.
• Tufekci, Zeynep (2017) Twitter and Tear Gas. Yale University Press.
• Vitek, Jessica; Zube, Paul; Smock, Andrew; Carr, Caleb; Ellison, Nicole; Lampe, Cliff (2011) "It's complicated: Facebook Users' Political Participation in the 2008 election," Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and social networking 14:3.
• Yaffa, Joshua (2020) "Is Russian Meddling as Dangerous as We Think?" The New Yorker.