Director’s Blog

We have all got to stop believing in the Monkey Myth of the Internet and Democracy, according to Evgeny Morozov, speaking at  Polis. By this he means that the current wishful thinking is that the Internet works like the monkey and the typewriter. Leave it alone to bash away and probability theory says that eventually it will write out the complete works of Shakespeare.

Evgeny was talking primarily about how digital optimists think that somehow, naturally, inevitably, the Internet will bring democracy to authoritarian regimes like China, Iran and Russia. But his argument can also apply to hopes for E-Democracy in liberal states, too. (more…)

Does the use of new social media technology in the protests in Iran this year herald a new politics too? Will networked journalism turn into networked politics?

This is a paper I wrote for the LSE Taiwan Research Programme conference on comparative approaches to the idea of Justice.

It looks at how violence is represented in the contemporary news media and asks how the nature and effect of that representation may be transformed as journalism changes. It will use the case study of Neda Agha-Soltan who was killed during the 2009 protests in Iran over the Presidential elections. It will examine how the video of her death was created and then mediated by various citizen journalists and then by international corporate media and how it was used as a political tool. It will explore how the public participation and connectivity of this kind of Networked Journalism alters the nature of news communication. It will also consider whether that makes a difference to the moral or ethical claims of news communication as suggested by Professor Roger Silverstone (2006). In other words, in what ways are new media technologies and practices altering the relationship between citizens and the idea of justice?

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