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.
Interpretation
The virtual world is an expansive platform for public discourse that cannot be easily controlled or suppressed.
Jared Cohen's quote highlights the difference between physical control over a space, like Tiananmen Square, and the challenges of governing the vast and dynamic nature of the internet. In the digital age, the internet serves as a public square for free expression, where attempts to suppress voices are met with resistance, making it difficult for authorities to impose control as they might in real-life protests.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about internet censorship policies.
Technology is a tool, and it's a platform. Nobody gets arrested for being a blogger; people get arrested for dissent. Nobody gets arrested for putting information about themselves online; they get arrested for being an activist. I'm a strong believer in the fact that you should not blame the tools; you should blame the circumstances.
Name any issue in the world, I can tell you how technology is intertwined with it. I can tell you how technology will make it better. How it can make it worse. It needs to be part of everything that we do, whether you are a government or a company or a citizen.
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
Every tech story is different. Every moment in history happens only once. All successful companies are successful in their own unique way. It's your task to figure out what that future history will be.
The internet, Facebook and Twitter have created mass communications and social spaces that regimes cannot control.
Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.
Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.
Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'
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