Monday, February 14, 2011

Revolution

The resignation of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak was truly revolutionary. Not the part where a dictator is overthrown; that happens from time to time. The world-shattering part is that the revolution was achieved with an almost total absence of gunfire. The weapon of choice was the internet. (www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/02/11/egyptian.president.) The revolution began, at least in part, on Facebook. If the unlikely election of Barack Obama in 2001 did not signal the end of business as usual (his war chest was almost completely funded by small contributors through the internet) then certainly this change of government does. The Egyptian people’s overthrow of Mubarak is a gigantic boulder thrown into a pond with ripples of influence that are so far unimagined, both positive and negative. This form of public oversight sounds radically like a government “of the people, by the people.”


By Sam DelPresto

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

He Saw This Coming

The Tucson, Arizona shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and other defenseless victims has stimulated a lot of debate about the civility or lack thereof in media and in politics in general. The very suggestion that a connection exists between the two has generated much rancorous dialogue. I find it fascinating that this type of connection was predicted by the 2oth century communications guru, Marshall McCluhan years before the invention of the internet. Forty years before it was even possible, McCluhan warned in The Gutenberg Galaxy that a medium defined by “participation and a multiplicity of inputs” might have dire consequences.( www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/books/review/Carr-t.html?scp) “When people get closer together, they get more and more savage, impatient with one another”, McCluhan wrote before his death in 1980.

What? You don’t believe me? What are you some kind of a liberal, neo-conservative #%/$*?

By Sam DelPresto