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The Next Revolution: Smart Mobs
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"empower" and "democratize" does not equal utopia |
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2003-03-25 09:31:57 |
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anonymous2
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The previous two posters obviously haven't read the book. This is not a utopian fantasy. The printing press did empower people and did democratize access to knowledge. This enabled the emergence of science and democracy, and I would venture a guess that most people would say that a great many people are better off today than their ancestors were several hundred years ago because of the emergence of these institutions. Yet nobody would claim that the literacy and collective action enabled by the printing press eliminated war or injustice. The kind of simplistic thinking these posters decry is exactly the same kind they are exhibiting. We need to develop a more nuanced discourse about technology, neither naively projecting unrealistic utopian expectations on it, nor cynically dismissing possible benefits
(written by Howard Rheingold)
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