Social Media and Civil Society

I don't know The Daily, but I do know (or rather, am familiar with the work of) Ann Marlowe.  I think she writes an important message here:  "Antisocial networking:  New media leave brutish, sexist values untouched in Mideast".

Democracy doesn’t develop just anywhere. It’s nourished by certain kinds of civil society. It’s hard to imagine a strong democracy in a country where, say, 50 percent of the citizens routinely abuse the others. And Egypt seems to be this sort of place. An oft-cited 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights found not just that 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women in Cairo had been harassed, but that 62 percent of men admitted to perpetrating this abuse.

While democracy can grow in such an environment, it takes a very long time—decades.  Ponder that it took a century from the Emancipation Proclamation until we really started to break down racial barriers in this nation.  Worse, things got worse in the late 1800s before they started to get better in the 1940s.

Ms Marlowe makes a very important point when she says "technologies are fitted into existing social forms, benign or otherwise".  We should not forget the power that Leni Riefenstahl brought to the German Government in 1934 with Triumph of the Will.  It wasn't for good.

Regards  —  Cliff