The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Tech expert Michael Schrage calls voicemail "an anachronism" whose time has come and gone. Could e-mail be next? Schrage argues that people prefer scanning texts than listening to voice messages. Highlighting it as a demographic phenomenon he says, “I don’t think there’s anybody I know under the age of 30 who listens to their voicemail.” The era of e-mail is going to vanish too because people are using LinkedIn and Facebook, Yammer and other social media...
Today the speed at which we spread information is so fast that a single email can launch a worldwide awareness campaign, as with the Occupy movement. Yet as techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci seeks to show, the ease of social media can actually hurt social change in the long run. From Gezi Park to the Arab Spring to Ukraine to Hong Kong, she shows how today's movements can miss out on the benefits of doing things the hard (and slow) way. Technology does empower in multiple ways, but easier...
Loneliness has become the most common ailment of the modern world. One of the possible reasons for this is the online social network. We're collecting friends like stamps and not distinguishing between quantity and quality. We're exchanging the deep meaning and intimacy of friendship for chats instead of having conversations. By doing so, we're sacrificing conversation for mere connection. And so a paradoxical situation is created in which we claim to have many friends while actually...
"Journalism is really being remade all the time," says leading new-media academic, Adrienne Russell, who examines the underlying cultural changes that reflect the new news reality. A new style of networked journalism has taken shape in the larger media landscape based on new products, tools, new players and sensibilities.
While the rise of the web and the fall of newspapers has heightened anxieties about the watchdogging role of journalism, Russell argues that journalism is also...
