(trump is an idiot)
Government in today’s society is greatly influenced by technology. For example this can be seen within the 2016 presidential election, where many of the candidates are using social media now more than ever to gain popularity. Donald Trump the republican candidate, who completely opposes democracy, uses twitter to engage the public much more aggressively in which he targets a specific demographic. Trump’s rallies cause a monumental amount of violence to occur against immigrants, but the people who take part in the rallies also forget that they are from a family of immigrants themselves. His rallies cause a lot of protest; the protesting is showing Trumps true colors. Also now there is a nonviolent resistance movement against Trump in which popular movements have brought mainstream attention and support to issues that had previously been mostly limited to the public’s knowledge. Many of the projecting issues in the 2016 election are wealth inequality, the dangers of foreign military interference, and racial inequality are part of the massive national debate because multiple social actions have used nonviolent action to bring these outlying issues into the mainstream realm.
Twitter is an example of a Lessig’s hybrid economy because it uses the posts or hash tags to help gain a support into a specific goal or allow for leverage for said goal; “A hybrid economy is one where a commercial entity leverages a sharing economy or a sharing entity leverages a commercial economy”. In this case Trump uses twitter to help gain support for his extremist’s and fascist ideals. According to Mandiberg Support is what fuel the ideas of creative commons, Creative Commons is a free culture movement so without support we let creativity die and the creative become viewed as pirates instead of innovators. “Our kids live in an age of prohibition. All sorts of aspects of their life are against the law. They live their life against the law. That way of living is extraordinarily corrosive. It is extraordinarily corrupting of the rule of law and ultimately corrupting to the premise of a democracy. If you do nothing else, after you’ve supported Creative Commons, you need to support this movement to stop this war now.” Within the Tim Berners article he talks about how the internet is the reason for almost all of the new media and social capabilities that we have today. Its base structure is rather simple, although it allows us to process much more complicated forms of data. Twitters structure for sending tweets is also very basic but it manages to create so much attention to a particular subject just by a simple hash tag or tweet. The new presidential campaign is following the ideas of Chris Anderson in a way because it the candidates use ideas and beliefs to get the support of the people to achieve a long term goal. These candidates are using social media to draw attention to them. For example Trump makes extremely racist comments and the press is drawn to him because of his ignorance. Within the target article they discuss how target gathers information about individuals by their purchases. The press uses Trumps statements to raise awareness about his fascist beliefs.
According to Anil Dash in the past few years if you made a service that let users create or share content, the expectation was that they could easily download their data, or import that data into other services with no restrictions. People spent years working on communication around data exchange purely for the benefit of the users, despite creating more competitors. Protestors who partake in the nonviolent resistance movement communicate their messages through protesting. It shows their perspective on a specific idea. Personally I believe that technology can help improve and promote democracy because technology creates awareness for problems but it also helps find solutions much faster than anticipated. Unfortunately there is always a downfall to something and in this case technology is constantly advancing and something new is being created causing the old to become outdated and obsolete. This allows for the dynamic society we live in today to function and survive.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-edge-on-twitter-cuts-both-ways-1460928021
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11450126/nonviolence-2016-elections