The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov New York: Public Affairs, 2011 409 pages $16.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In January 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a highly touted speech on Internet freedom in which she stated, "The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate. Once you're on the Internet, you don't need to be a tycoon or a rock star to have a huge impact on society." Evgeny Morozov, in his book The Net Delusion, takes great issue with the implication, however, that the so-called "Arab Spring" and "Twitter Revolution" were caused by unfettered access to the Internet. Instead, Morozov, a research academic, provides a cautionary tale about what he argues is any attempt to establish a monocausal relationship to meaningful political change (especially when that single focus is information technology). The book opens with a discussion of cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism--mind-sets that focus on the positive "emancipatory" aspects of Internet communication while ignoring the downsides. The argument throughout centers on nation-state policy, or lack thereof, that attacks the "wicked" problem of authoritarianism by, as a colleague of mine has dubbed it, "wiring the world." Morozov, expectantly, but importantly, cites the hedonistic world portrayed by Huxley and the "Big Brother" world of Orwell to consider both the proactive and reactive approaches to Internet freedom by authoritarian regimes. Interestingly, he notes that there is often a mix of both. Such regimes certainly use the anonymity and openness of the Internet to spy on their people and shutdown undesirable sites. But there is also a subtle approach that belies the jackboot on the keyboard methodology. While China may be known more for suppressing the Internet and for employing the masses to counter antiregime rhetoric, Russia imposes no formal Internet censorship. It relies on entertainment (porn is specifically cited) to soothe the masses, assuming that given options for political discourse and anything else, most opt for "anything else." Hitler would understand. And in nations where freedom is not widely understood from a western perspective, any bit of additional mindless diversion may be viewed as liberty by the populace. Perhaps most importantly, Morozov rails against social media determinism as driving the end of authoritarianism, labeling it "an intellectually impoverished, lazy way to study the past, understand the present, and predict the future." He does not dismiss the value of Facebook and Twitter to quickly mobilize like-minded individuals. He notes as well that the development of that very like-mindedness is complex and potentially can be manipulated by authoritarian governments using the same Internet freedom. …

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

Twitter has become a pervasive tool in election campaigns. Candidates, parties, journalists, and a steadily increasing share of the public are using Twitter to comment on, interact around, and research public reactions to politics. These uses have met with growing scholarly attention. As of now, this research is fragmented, lacks a common body of evidence, and shared approaches to data collection and selection. This article presents the results of a systematic literature review of 127 studies addressing the use of Twitter in election campaigns. In this systematic review, I will discuss the available research with regard to findings on the use of Twitter by parties, candidates, and publics during election campaigns and during mediated campaign events. Also, I will address prominent research designs and approaches to data collection and selection.

Twitter use in election campaigns: A systematic literature review

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Clay Shirky. New York, NY: Penguin, 2010. 242 pages, $25.95 pbk. It sometimes seems that the hardest thing to do in the Information Age is to communicate. In the rush of easily accessible data and the maelstrom of conflicting viewpoints, two otherwise intelligent people can talk past one another as they stake out territory with the tenacity of computer viruses. NYU professor Clay Shirky and media critic Nicholas Carr have been squaring off now for two years over what impact the Internet is having on our society. Shirky takes the more optimistic viewpoint, Carr the more pessimistic. Carr threw down the gauntlet with his 2008 Atlantic cover article "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" and has continued the debate with his recent book The Shallows. Shirky provides a response in Cognitive Surplus, but criticizes skeptics like Carr only obliquely. Shirky says their main frustration is with the profusion of choice: "Scarcity," he says, "is easier to deal with than abundance." But this book doesn't dwell much on the naysayers. Instead, it frames the subject of the Internet with a bold and startling vision about its potential. "Imagine," he says, "treating the free time of the world's educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus." We've not always used that surplus wisely. Shirky's case in point is television, and how it has come to dominate our culture. Over much of the planet, Shirky writes, "the three most common activities are . . . work, sleep, and watching TV." Like gin in early-eighteenth-century London, twentieth-century television is one of those social habits that critics have denounced and tried hard to minimize, but without success. There are signs now, however, that TV viewing - still thoroughly popular - isn't quite the juggernaut it used to be. Young people are increasingly turning to the Internet; and the Web, it turns out, allows humans to do things they can't do with other media - namely, create, produce, and connect. Instead of devoting twenty passive hours a week to the tube (the international average), people now use a medium that lets them make and share things. That may seem trivial, considering the amount of silly, offensive, or deceptive fare on the Web, but think of it this way: Which do you think contains more enduring cultural, intellectual, and societal value - posting comments on a blog or watching Gitligan's Island! The Internet is no utopia, but neither are older media. In fact, some of them may be a good deal less salutary. Take, for example, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft. As Shirky puts it in a tart retort: "However pathetic you may think it is to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience: it's worse to sit in your basement trying to decide whether Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter." There's a wide variety of content on the Internet, of course - the widest in any medium - and the largest number of producers of content: a colossal and revolutionary force. The "hundred million hours of cumulative thought" it took to produce Wikipedia is one example of Shirky's "cognitive surplus," and while it still pales before the "two hundred billion hours of TV every year," you can readily see the potential. …

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

The global financial and economic downturn that affected tourism from 2007 through to 2010 and beyond has cast substantial attention on the role that crisis events play in tourism. These concerns have only been exacerbated by natural disasters, such as the 2010 Icelandic volcanic plume, pandemics, and the potential of future global change. The potential effects of crisis events on international tourism are likely to increase in both size and frequency as tourism becomes increasingly hypermobile and the global economy even more interconnected. A review of the literature on tourism and crisis suggests that economic and financial crises receive the most research attention, with these crises events often being linked to other events such as terrorism and increased energy costs. This article concludes that the discourse on crisis in tourism raises fundamental concerns about the way that the notion of crisis is conceptualised and what constitutes normality.

Crisis events in tourism: subjects of crisis in tourism

In 1998-1999, Prahalad and colleagues introduced the base/bottom of the pyramid (BOP) concept in an article and a working paper. This article’s goal is to answer the following question: What has be...

/pdf/reviewing-a-decade-of-research-on-the-base-bottom-of-the-alysrxlytf.pdf

Reviewing a Decade of Research on the “Base/Bottom of the Pyramid” (BOP) Concept:

Although the state of Kerala in India has been regarded as a 'model of development', its achievements may be unravelling thanks to a host of internal and external problems The government and the bureaucracy now project tourism as 'an engine of growth'--an excellent source of foreign exchange and employment--to revive the local economy Opposition to large-scale tourism projects by environmental and labour activists is often dealt with through undemocratic means This article points to a less than sanguine role for tourism in the local economy and the dynamics that work to exaggerate tourism's share in the economy in an emerging context of governmental failure, political crisis and interest group consolidation Lessons are drawn to revisit the debate on tourism and development

Contentions and contradictions of tourism as development option: the case of Kerala, India

Enhanced deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is considered as a major factor in eliminating vestiges of feudal social organization and hierarchies in rural Asia, and a t...

/pdf/cyber-kiosks-and-dilemmas-of-social-inclusion-in-rural-india-4ly74gdk8o.pdf

Cyber kiosks and dilemmas of social inclusion in rural India

Studies that go beyond the ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) framework emphasize the social and cultural dimensions of mobile phones. Nevertheless, the cultural dimension, in literature pertaining to both urban and rural use patterns, typically takes an individualistic orientation. The possibility of actualizing the collectivistic logic in a community's appropriation of new technologies is mostly overlooked. The present article explores how the fishers community in Kerala, India, use mobile phones in culturally enhancing and ecologically oriented ways that improve their working and living conditions. In the case of Kerala fishers, the impulse toward cooperation has long been ingrained in their culture, as often happens among marginalized groups. The availability of mobile technologies has allowed for the amplification of this impulse and enabled new modes of cooperation, especially in sharing of information on promising fishing spots and safety and rescue at sea.

Mobile Phones and the Cultural Ecology of Fishing in Kerala, India

The central themes addressed in this paper relate to the critique of the notion of e-governance as an essentially administrative innovation facilitated by ICTs. It argues the need to recognize e-governance as a social process involving not only attitudinal change and transformation of traditional forms of governmentality, but also as a contested arena of social forces shaping the trajectory of the evolution of this technocratic innovation. The paper is based on the experiences of the Gyandoot Intranet in Madhyapradesh, India. One of the critical issues that emerge in the context of exploring the interrelationship between technology and governance is the questioning of the assumption of the neutrality of technological processes enmeshed in the notion of e-governance. Technical processes defining contours of e-governance are embedded in the structures of power that reinforces the power relations that e-governance is expected to eliminate. This is particularly obvious when scrutinizing the consequences of the introduction of ICT-based administrative projects like Gyandoot in villages where the local managers play key roles in its implementation while benefitting from its public good. The study shows that the projects are often implemented with the active support and participation of village elites and their collaboration becomes a major aspect in the survival of the project. It discuses how the idea of ICT as an inherently liberating technology and e-governance as a new way of transcending inept and inefficient bureaucratic systems which empowers ‘end-users’ appears to be completely inaccurate in the rural setting. Moreover, despite the claims of active networking of people in Dhar made in behalf of Gyandoot, its ability to connect to multiple social and economic domains was found to be extremely limited and ostensibly mediated by the social power equations that enveloped its institutional setting.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.1681-4835.2007.tb00223.x

Decrypting e-governance: narratives, power play and participation in the gyandoot intranet

Scholars have variously described the development experience of the Indian state of Kerala as a “model” or a “paradox” or an “enigma” and posited different meanings and significance to its developmental trajectory. Rather than following the usual one-dimensional accounting of Kerala's achievements and shortcomings, we present a historically informed social and political analysis to reveal the meaning and significance of the “Kerala model” of development. This article, thus, critically appraises Kerala's development experience since decolonization to show how the discourse on development and the discursive practices of the dominant actors involved in governance of Kerala diverge in recent years, especially after the second round of economic liberalizations at the national level in 1991, which coincidently corresponds to the beginning of the newest phase of economic globalization. Old lessons are reviewed based on the notion of replicability of the “Kerala model” and new lessons are analyzed within...

T.T. Sreekumar

Papers

Contentions and contradictions of tourism as development option: the case of Kerala, India

Cyber kiosks and dilemmas of social inclusion in rural India

Mobile Phones and the Cultural Ecology of Fishing in Kerala, India

Decrypting e-governance: narratives, power play and participation in the gyandoot intranet

Kerala's experience of development and change