We're going to move quickly through the next lesson, which covers why information and news, while we sometimes think are small parts of our lives, are things that we are inherently tied to.
This lesson has three interrelated themes to remember:
There is a constant struggle to control information. Information is powerful and people go to unimaginable lengths to spread it and to control it. Technology has always served to amplify the power of information.
In Lesson 1, we talked about the historic force of Gutenberg’s press and Zuckerberg’s social media movement. The printing press served to multiply the power of information, leading the way to greater democratization of access to information, something which ruling elites have jealously guarded since the beginning of recorded history.
The advent of the Internet and more recently Social Media have further democratized not just access to information but also the spreading of it.
In the following example, watch the actions of a lone protestor in China in 1989.
The Tank Man, or the Unknown Protester, is the nickname of an anonymous man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests by force. The man achieved widespread international recognition due to the videotape and photographs taken of the incident.
This iconic video has long been banned and next to impossible to see on the Internet in China.
Whenever the anniversary of June 4 rolls around, Chinese Internet censors try to block any term that might refer to June 4, but China’s internet users have been empowered by social media.
They have clever ways of evading censorship – instead of June 4 1989, they tried 1089 for a while. Most recently they used May 35 or 535 (may 31 plus 4 days). The government stopped that too, but the human creativity unleashed by social media countered with this picture, which went viral before the censors could stop it.
But the struggle to control information is not just some cat and mouse game played out on the Internet.