The internet has democratised human discourse, allowing individual citizens to be heard and become influential via IrishTimesBiz
You might argue that this is a negative attribute, since some jurisdictions, such as China, Iran, India and others, can regulate what access their citizens have to global internet content. However, it is otherwise difficult to conceive how a single global authority operating a single global network could ever have been politically or economically acceptable.
Without the internet, we might have headed towards the stupefaction and docility envisaged by Aldous Huxley in his transcendent 1932 novel Brave New World – a conformist and obedient society, in which servitude to authority is completely accepted because of the contentment brought by technology, consumerism and society norms.
But the internet has broken passive consumerism. I think Huxley might have been pleased to have seen bilateral debate by the public with politicians, mainstream media and corporations, rather than the largely unidirectional flow of content in the 1970s and 1980s. Bloggers have diluted the monopoly of corporate and government journalism.
But in just the last two months, the online public has reacted to the risks involved in allowing a single corporation, or even a single billionaire mogul, to control a social network, its content promotion algorithms and its digital debate policy.
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