The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites.
Interpretation
Decentralized online conversations can easily influence public opinion, allowing regimes to disseminate messages subtly.
This quote highlights the shift in how information is shared and controlled in the digital age. It emphasizes that the decentralized and often anonymous nature of online interactions provides new opportunities for manipulation of public opinion, where traditional centralized media control is bypassed, enabling regimes to spread their ideologies through covert means, such as anonymous commentary and social media influence.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of social media on democracy, this quote can illustrate the risks of manipulation.
Just as Josef K, the protagonist of Kafka's 'The Trial,' awoke one day to discover that he had become part of some unfathomable legal carnival, we, too are frequently waking to discover that the rules of the digital game have once again profoundly changed.
Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly.
For many oppositional movements, the Internet, while providing the opportunity to distribute information more quickly and cheaper, may have actually made their struggle more difficult in the long run.
I have no problem with technological solutions to social problems. The key question for me is, 'Who gets to implement them?' and, 'What kinds of politics of reform do technological solutions smuggle through the back door?'
The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.
Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses.
The virtual world is a 'public square' much more vast than Tiananmen Square. And you can't send in the tanks to crush the netizens.
Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.
By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
If every sector of business and society will be driven by software - how does that get enabled? By highly-paid computer scientists funded by risk capital in Silicon Valley? Or by lots of engineers who can build it themselves?
Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best
The truth is I've been doing Kickstarter before there was Kickstarter; there was no Internet. Social Media was writing letters, making phone calls, beating the bushes.
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