{"id":3874,"date":"2011-01-08T14:58:35","date_gmt":"2011-01-08T14:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3874"},"modified":"2011-01-08T14:58:35","modified_gmt":"2011-01-08T14:58:35","slug":"politics_the_in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3874","title":{"rendered":"Politics &#038; The Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/babbage\/2011\/01\/politics_and_internet\">The Economist:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>FOR wizened cyberpunks, it is a seemingly timeless debate: does the internet inherently promote openness and democracy, or can it just as easily strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes? A decade ago Andrew Shapiro&#8217;s book &#8220;The Control Revolution&#8221; argued the former, while Shanthi Kalathil&#8217;s and Taylor Boas&#8217;s tome &#8220;Open Networks, Closed Regimes&#8221; dissented. This week sees the publication of &#8220;The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom&#8221; by Evgeny Morozov, which sides with the pessimists.<br \/>\nThe argument usually ends in a stalemate of competing anecdotes. Street protests organised by mobile text messages successfully oust Philippine President Joseph Estrada in 2001; Iran&#8217;s supposedly Twitter-powered Green Movement gets quashed in 2009. And so on. Clay Shirky, one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the internet, who has previously sided with cyber-utopian optimists, has now elegantly squared the circle by establishing an intellectual framework to consider the topic in &#8220;The Political Power of Social Media&#8221;, an article in the current Foreign Affairs. (Users must register to access the complete essay, but it is free.) Mr Shirky&#8217;s essay makes three principal contributions to the debate. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/babbage\/2011\/01\/politics_and_internet\">The Economist:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>FOR wizened cyberpunks, it is a seemingly timeless debate: does the internet inherently promote openness and democracy, or can it just as easily strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes? A decade ago Andrew Shapiro&#8217;s book &#8220;The Control Revolution&#8221; argued the former, while Shanthi Kalathil&#8217;s and Taylor Boas&#8217;s tome &#8220;Open Networks, Closed Regimes&#8221; dissented. This week sees the publication of &#8220;The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom&#8221; by Evgeny Morozov, which sides with the pessimists.<br \/>\nThe argument usually ends in a stalemate of competing anecdotes. Street protests organised by mobile text messages successfully oust Philippine President Joseph Estrada in 2001; Iran&#8217;s supposedly Twitter-powered Green Movement gets quashed in 2009. And so on. Clay Shirky, one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the internet, who has previously sided with cyber-utopian optimists, has now elegantly squared the circle by establishing an intellectual framework to consider the topic in &#8220;The Political Power of Social Media&#8221;, an article in the current Foreign Affairs. (Users must register to access the complete essay, but it is free.) Mr Shirky&#8217;s essay makes three principal contributions to the debate. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,14,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3874"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}