Many tend to view social media as a way to expand their understanding of the world and its phenomena – whether those were completely new or something that the user is already familiar with. In other words, social media enables exploring new information and content on topics that one would …
In contemporary history, futurist and utopian stories (those that dreamed with a highly developed planet), never placed the improvement of the environment as one of the main topics. With a little help from technology, we have aimed to have simpler and more agile lives, as well as facilitating our existence …
Last month, the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles drawn from thousands of pages of leaked internal Facebook documents, labelled the Facebook Files, that purportedly show the ways in which the company prioritises profit over public good. Then, last Sunday (2 October), Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data …
It is generally accepted that human decision making is subject to various biases which impact outcomes. Whether in the conscious or subconscious, people were not able to escape their internal wiring for the most part. A major breakthrough which showed promise of enabling decision making without the bias was the …
As Anthony Giddens points out in his book Runaway World (1999), globalization is continuously changing our lives. This includes not only our culture, but also our physical environment. Although globalization as a phenomenon is not entirely new, there are some aspects of it, such as the birth of information technology …
Critics call online activists “lazy,” others praise the online forum as an effective message-carrier. But can we really draw one line for how online activism is operated globally? And can an increasingly digitally-first society force activism upon its participants to the point where it no longer becomes effective? Let’s talk …
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of globalisation has made promises of prosperity, and the advent of the Internet provided hope for democratisation on a global scale. But while globalisation has allowed much of the Global North to enjoy increased prosperity, it has also left many behind …
Through a series of blog posts, we will raise awareness for the disconnect between the ‘2.0’ digital world and the ‘1.5’ world of development policy and practice. We’ll discuss topics from digital campaigning and online ‘slacktivism’ to the promises of open and big data to key discussions on transparency and …
