The use of social media during the protest actions in Iran last yeas was visible across the globe. But did the net really aid the political opposition? Belarusian academic Evgeny Morozov remains sceptical. He represents the theory that the net actually empowers dictatorships and facilitates more control. We have invited him to the re:publica 2010 to discuss the topic.
Evgeny Morozov twitters and blogs and contributes at foreignpolicy.com.
During a TED-Talk last year, Evgney Morozov discussed: How the Net aids dictatorships.
At re:publica 2010 he will present: “A Twitter Revolution without revoluationaries? What we know and what we don’t know about the impact of the Internet on authoritarian states.”
It’s become common for pundits and politicians alike to laud the Internet as the ultimate technology of liberation that could crush authoritarian regimes and replace them with democracies. We have seen a barrage of such predictions in the wake of the so-called “Twitter revolution” in Iran. But is it really true? How are authoritarian governments responding to the Internet threat? Could the Internet be the very technology that would prolong their stay in power? In this talk, Evgeny Morozov, a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University, will examine how far we can go in predicting the Internet’s true impact on authoritarianism.
