Democracy and the Internet in 2017
Undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines such as social science, engineering, business, etc. attended the lecture. The talk broadly focused on:
- The relationship between democracy and the internet. Why/how are they are closely related.
- The internet's role in changing information exchange and communication. I drew on examples like the Arab Spring/Elections/Political change.
- The growing usage of internet platforms for elections and also governance. Problematising the fact that these few private platforms seem to monopolise the internet, are only restricted to a certain elite audience, cannot be conflated with actual governance etc.
- Fake News.
- Algorithmic curation and filter bubbles.