In less than a generation, the Internet has altered the daily lives of individuals in ways few would have conceived in its nascent stages. Initially a playground for the computer savvy, the world of blogs and tweets has given equal voice to anyone with a computer and a web connection.
It is also where Americans increasingly look for news and information -- according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, last year the Internet surpassed newspapers as the source of national and international news, nearly doubling from the year before. Barack Obama channeled the power of the Internet to reach millions during his presidential campaign, and his administration has launched innovative methods to use the Internet to govern.
Debaters include:
Pro: Andrew Keen, author, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture Pro: Farhad Manjoo, journalist for Slate, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society
Con: Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia Con: Micah L. Sifry, editor, Personal Democracy Forum
Bio
Andrew Keen
Andrew Keen is a Silicon Valley author, broadcaster and entrepreneur whose provocative book Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture was recently acclaimed by The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani as "shrewdly argued" and written "with acuity and passion."
Keen is a prominent media personality who has appeared on the Colbert Report, McNeil-Lehrer Newsnight show, The Today Show, Fox News, CNN International, NPR's Weekend Edition, BBC Newsnight and many other television and radio shows in America and overseas. He has written for The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the London Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, Fast Company and Entertainment Weekly and has been featured in numerous publications including Time Magazine, The New York Times, US News and World Report, BusinessWeek, Wired, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, the Independent & MSNBC.
Keen is also a Silicon Valley media entrepreneur, having founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a well known first generation Internet music company. He was educated at the universities of London and California.
Farhad Manjoo
Farhad Manjoo is an author and a staff writer for Salon.com.
Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. While there, he wrote for and then served as editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun student newspaper. Before taking a staff position at Salon.com, he wrote for Wired News. Manjoo frequently writes on new media, politics and controversies in journalism.
Manjoo is the author of the book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, published in March, 2008.
Micah Sifry
Micah Sifry is co-founder and editor of Personal Democracy Forum, a website and annual conference that covers the ways technology is changing politics, and TechPresident.com, an award-winning group blog on how American politicians are using the web and how the web is using them.
In addition to organizing the annual Personal Democracy Forum conference with his partner Andrew Rasiej, he consults on how political organizations, campaigns, non-profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world. In that capacity, he has been a senior technology adviser to the Sunlight Foundation since its founding in 2006.
He is the co-editor of Rebooting America, an anthology of writing on how the Internet and new technology can be used to reinvent American democracy, co-author of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of The Iraq War Reader (Touchstone, 2003) and The Gulf War Reader (Times Books, 1991). His personal blog is at micah.sifry.com.
Paul Solman
Paul Solman has been a business, economics and occasional art correspondent for PBS NewsHour since 1985. He answers viewer questions on The Business Desk. He is also the presenter for and author of "Discovering Economics with Paul Solman," a series of videos distributed by McGraw-Hill.
Solman is part of a national consortium to teach "Financial Literacy" to Americans at every educational level. His work has won various awards, including several Emmys, two Peabodys, and a Loeb award.
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity which operates Wikipedia.org, and as the co-founder of Wikia.com.
Wales received his Bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University and his Master's in finance from University of Alabama. He was appointed a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in 2005 and in 2006, he joined the Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Creative Commons.
In January of 2001, Wales started Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and today Wikipedia and its sister projects are among the top-five most visited sites on the web. In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, to support Wikipedia.org. The Foundation, now based in downtown San Francisco, boasts a staff of close to thirty focusing on fundraising, technology, and programming relating to the expansion of Wikipedia. Wales now sits on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, and as founder continues to act as a key spokesperson.
In 2004, Wales co-founded Wikia.com, a completely separate company that enables groups of people to share information and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Wikia's community-created wikis range from video games and movies to finance and environmental issues. Wikia's network is now ranked in the top 75 of all websites according to Quantcast.com, and strong growth continues.
Wales has received a Pioneer Award, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize in 2011, the Monaco Media Prize, the 2009 Nokia Foundation annual award, the Business Process Award at the 7th Annual Innovation Awards and Summit by The Economist, The 2008 Global Brand Icon of the Year Award,and on behalf of the Wikimedia project the Quadriga award of Werkstatt Deutschland for A Mission of Enlightenment. In 2007, The World Economic Forum recognized Wales as one of the 'Young Global Leaders.' This prestigious award acknowledges the top 250 young leaders for their professional accomplishments, their commitment to society and their potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world. In addition, Wales received the 'Time 100 Award' in 2006, as he was named one of the world's most influential people in the 'Scientists & Thinkers' category.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, The Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen, and Personal Democracy Forum co-founder Micah Sifry discuss the lack of civility in online interactions.
They identify the issue as a pitfall of anonymity, which Sifry calls a "double-edged sword."
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982–83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols (seechat). In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.
Great conversation
Freedom, Free Domain, No concept of Free thinking, Internet is more Marketing, Money makes the internet go round, A TRANSITION PHASE, biology interfacing technology!
Morality is neglected, more porno, child abuse, and extreme influence through technology.
Ignorance is to ignore yourself or others, The Ancient Cyclop, one eye that can only see itself.
The ability to express yourself to the rest of the World, is very exciting to a growing consciousness. Global consciousness the collective conscious on the move!. Information doubling itself so quickly that personal participation becomes automatic and so the collective unconsciousness surfaces, looks goofy, but so are dreams. Humanity`s need for attention and then expresses anything!
Manifestations are far more rapid on the NET, like A Fishing Net to get caught in, OR a circus net to break your fall,
like Albert E., said the past, present and future all happens at once, on the net this is true!
Have Fun with this Mystery Gift, from the collective consciousness.
It does not, will not , could not, the internet is no threat but fantasy, hang Loose, there is power in flexibility.
Freedom of INFO, is freedom of thinking out loud, a, in your face relationship, face to face, naked truth!
Let freedom Reign!
Civility is education, as in language.
Teach your children well! What can we be, that our children can see!
Its all reality, so be free to get real. ... RUMI..there is a place beyond right and wrong, beyond competition, I will meet you their.
Or HEY HEY You, you, get off of my cloud! Freedom for the net. The Aquisition of Knowledge holds the responsibility to Share, Share Freely!
Such a familiar motif in debates: It's either for or against on some abstract level. E.g. "the great thing about the internet is anonymity" versus "anonymity is the biggest problem on the internet". Why, I should think that anonymity is great for some things and very bad for others, whether on or off the internet.
I blog at my own site and comment pretty much all over the internet using 'Lary9' which I've had for 15 years---but my blog name is quickly and easily traceable back to a profile source which identifies me quite unanonymously. My experience has been that when I've established my comment bona fides at another site or blog, this staus as a regular,(along with my real name profile & info)tends to insure civil discourse both with myself and others.
anonymity is not the problem, its the people. If you put up walls (make rules/laws) people will find ways around them, encourage people to do the right thing, not force them.
Oh no......
They're figuring it out...
Anonymous is going to return. Now that this is on the internet, you guys just opened a can of worms. Like worms from a Lovecraft novel.
Haha, gods help us all if the script kiddies have grown up.
I think they both missed a huge part of the issue, which is the something ive coined as the " digital bystandard effect" and that is the idea that there are so many people on the internet that even with name and identity profiles, people behave much differently than in real life. That is to say, on the internet soon we will be one out of 6 billion voices and even if you are a real person who is not anonymous what are the chances you will ever come into contact with anyone you blog with? I think this effect is quite clear on video games, where teenagers to males in their 30s have tags which are extremely personal and carry a lot of value in the idea of linking a real person to a profile. However these progamers say the most juvinile and ridiculously fowl things in the world when playing games online or xbox live. this same phenominom it also well documented in porn chatrooms and chat roulette. you may not be linked to a profile but your face and name are there for the world to see, and people still behave in ways, they would never dream of acting in day to day life.
I wonder if, ironically, people will all interpret and reject these arguments as they wish, depending on their ideology.
At the risk of proving myself right, I think that those who put themselves into silos on the internet would have done that without the internet. After all, they always did before.
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