Tech President has a great commentary on William Gibson’s NPR talk where he mentioned that technology not only allows Big Brother to watch us, but we also have the tools to watch Big Brother. Micah Sifry then points out some of the ways technology is working to help us out the truth (like the WikiScanner) and how that affects the current political campaign.
All the leading candidates apparently still think they are running in an environment of media scarcity, where they can carefully dribble out a few choice words to be repeated ad nauseum by the broadcast machine, and where the hundred or so reporters on the plane with them set the agenda for discussion. None can conceive of a world where being “always on” is anything but a dangerous trap, where being themselves instead of being controlled might help them better connect with voters. They don’t realize that collectively, that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of voters are watching closely, in more ways than they can imagine. They can run, but they should stop hiding.
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