Class Assignment!
Reflecting on our relationship with technology.
The fast-breaking legal developments on the Trump front have gotten me a little behind on the class lessons, but it is in progress! This month I will close out the module called “What Makes America So Vulnerable to Active Measures?" I’ll build on the themes I wrote about in Class 26 and Class 27, and examine how social media has drastically altered the way we relate with each other…and what that means for democracy. (And in a few weeks, we will tie together all of these threads together with our guest speaker, Barbara McQuade, author of Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, so stay tuned!)
As I’m writing next week’s lesson, I thought it would be a good opportunity to get your intellectual juices flowing with a little assignment. I’m curious to know your thoughts on the following:
How does social media compare with previous technologies, in terms of its impact on our behavior and relationships with friends and family, our communities, and society at large? Specifically, is it more like the telephone? More like television? A combination of the two? Something altogether unique and different?
Let me know your thoughts, below — I’ll be citing to some of your comments in next week’s posts! (Comments are open to everyone, if you want to jump in for the first time!)
Loving your comments! Please do focus on how social media impacts your behavior and social relationships, rather than the nature of social media in the abstract -- I'm interested to know how you think it compared in terms of its effects on social behavior compared to other technologies.
In my opinion, social media is a unique medium in comparison to the telephone or the television. Telephone calls are generally one-on-one and television is a broadcast medium that provides information filtered by the owner of the television network. Social media, on the other hand, permits individuals to share opinions (and other sources of information) both to friends and large groups. Posts that are shared by others can reach many thousands if not millions of people. Social media also require critical thinking on the part of the user, as there is no vetting process for many social media posts, and therefore can be a significant source of misinformation. The closest analog to social media may be amateur radio, which provides licensees with the ability to reach people worldwide on a broadcast basis. However, due to the limitations of licensing, amateur radio has never had the popular impact that social media has.