The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?

WHISTLEBLOWING - SURVEILLANCE, SHORT VIDEO CLIPS, 21 Mar 2011

RSA Animate - TRANSCEND Media Service

Does the internet actually inhibit, not encourage democracy? In this new RSA Animate, Evgeny Morozov presents an alternative take on ‘cyber-utopianism’ – the seductive idea that the internet plays a largely empancipatory role in global politics.

Exposing some idealistic myths about freedom and technology (during Iran’s ‘twitter revolution’ fewer than 20,000 Twitter users actually took part), Evgeny argues for some realism about the actual uses and abuses of the internet.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU

Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (out in January 2011). He is  a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine’s “Net Effect” blog about the Internet’s impact on global politics (neteffect.foreignpolicy.com). Morozov is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He was formerly a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a fellow at George Soros’s Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. Before moving to the US, Morozov was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 21 Mar 2011.

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