New Problems, New Publics? Dewey and New Media

This is a response to the article by Ethan Zuckerman “New Media, New Civics?” published in this issue of Policy & Internet (2014: vol. 6, issue 2). Dissatisfaction with existing governments, a broad shift to “post-representative democracy” and the rise of participatory media are leading toward the visibility of different forms of civic participation. Zuckerman’s article offers a framework to describe participatory civics in terms of theories of change used and demands places on the participant, and examines some of the implications of the rise of participatory civics, including the challenges of deliberation in a diverse and competitive digital public sphere. Henry Farrell responds.

Henry Farrell (2014), “New Problems, New Publics? Dewey and New Media,” Policy & Internet, 6, 2:176-191.

Other Writing:

Academic Article

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to revolve around whether large models are intelligent, autonomous agents. Some AI researchers and commentators speculate that we are on the cusp of creating agents with artificial general intelligence (AGI), a prospect anticipated with both elation and anxiety. There have also ...
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Academic Article

The Power and Politics of Blogs

The rise of bloggers raises the vexing question of why blogs have any influence at all, given their relatively low readership and lack of central organization. We argue that to answer this question we need to focus on two key factors—the unequal distribution of readers across weblogs, and the relatively high readership of blogs among ...
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