{"id":38659,"date":"2011-02-07T01:53:41","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T01:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/among-cyber-intellectuals-in-america-a\/"},"modified":"2011-02-07T01:53:41","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T01:53:41","slug":"among-cyber-intellectuals-in-america-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/among-cyber-intellectuals-in-america-a\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Among cyber-intellectuals in America, a fascinating debate has broken out about whether social media can do as much harm as good in totalitarian states like Egypt. In his fiercely argued new book, \u201cThe Net Delusion,\u201d Evgeny Morozov, a young scholar who was born in Belarus, challenges the conventional wisdom of what he calls \u201ccyber-utopianism.\u201d Among other mischievous facts, he reports that there were only 19,235 registered Twitter accounts in Iran (0.027 percent of the population) on the eve of what many American pundits rebranded its \u201cTwitter Revolution.\u201d More damning, Morozov also demonstrates how the digital tools so useful to citizens in a free society can be co-opted by tech-savvy dictators, police states and garden-variety autocrats to spread propaganda and to track (and arrest) conveniently networked dissidents, from Iran to Venezuela. Hugo Ch\u00e1vez first vilified Twitter as a \u201cconspiracy,\u201d but now has 1.2 million followers imbibing his self-sanctifying Tweets. This provocative debate isn\u2019t even being acknowledged in most American coverage of the Internet\u2019s role in the current uprisings. The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/06\/opinion\/06rich.html\">Wallflowers at the Revolution &#8211; NYTimes.com<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Among cyber-intellectuals in America, a fascinating debate has broken out about whether social media can do as much harm as good in totalitarian states like Egypt. In his fiercely argued new book, \u201cThe Net Delusion,\u201d Evgeny Morozov, a young scholar who was born in Belarus, challenges the conventional wisdom of what he calls \u201ccyber-utopianism.\u201d Among [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[780,1539,781],"class_list":{"0":"post-38659","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-quote","5":"hentry","6":"tag-edp","7":"tag-emergent-digital-practices","9":"post_format-post-format-quote"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-a3x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}