This article originally appeared on The Globalist (www.theglobalist.com). Follow The Globalist on Twitter @theglobalist. By Nayef Al-Rodhan Takeaways Democracy guarantees political freedom, but can bring marginalization, exclusion, poverty, or disempowerment. The triumph of a liberal democratic order should not be the final destination of human history. Growing inequality leads to shrinking opportunity, disillusioning the voters […]
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Geopolitics of Dignity
Nayef Al-Rodhan argues that to sustainably plan for the long-term human dignity must be placed at the heart of foreign and security policy. The pursuit of freedom has long been thought of as the driving force of history. Freedom became the mantra of much of the Western interpretation of any popular uprising in a post-authoritarian […]
Games and the Internet: Fertile Ground for Cultural Change
Introduction There has been much interest in recent years in online games as an economic and social force. Virtual currencies such as Bitcoin were first created inside online games, and have been the focus of a significant study by the ECB (2012). Many researchers and policy analysts are interested in using games for serious purposes. […]
The Music Industry in an Age of Digital Distribution
In 1999 the global recorded music industry had experienced a period of growth that had lasted for almost a quarter of a century. Approximately one billion records were sold worldwide in 1974, and by the end of the century, the number of records sold was more than three times as high. At the end of […]
First the Media, Then Us: How the Internet Changed the Fundamental Nature of the Communication and Its Relationship with the Audience
In just one generation the Internet changed the way we make and experience nearly all of media. Today the very act of consuming media creates an entirely new form of it: the social data layer that tells the story of what we like, what we watch, who and what we pay attention to, and our […]
The Internet’s Influence on the Production and Consumption of Culture: Creative Destruction and New Opportunities
In this essay, I consider the impact of the Internet on the arts and media, focusing, though not exclusively, on film, journalism, and, especially, popular music, which serves as an extended case study. For many of these creative fields, the Internet has been “a disruptive technology” (Christensen 1997), reshaping industries and rendering long-established business strategies […]
The Internet: Changing the Language
It is, of course, too soon to say what permanent effect the Internet will have on languages. Electronically mediated communication (EMC) has been in routine use for only around twenty years, and this is an eyeblink in the history of a language. It takes time—a lot of time—for a change to emerge, for individuals to […]
Distributed Innovation and Creativity, Peer Production, and Commons in Networked Economy
Imagine that in late 1995 someone told you that two groups of engineers were developing a critical piece of web infrastructure—the web server software that handles all the secure communications and payments, serves up pages, and runs the core functions of websites. The first group was Microsoft, then the most valuable software company in the […]
How Is the Internet Changing the Way We Work?
Imagine you are a shopkeeper, living somewhere in Spain, in 1795. You no longer believe, as did the ancient Egyptians, that your king, Carlos IV, is literally a god, living on earth. But you still believe that he has a divine right to rule over you. You can’t imagine any country being governed well without a king […]
The Internet and Business
Given the historical significance of business as a social and political force, one might assume that there would exist ample and incisive scholarship into how business has shaped today’s Internet—implementing systems and services and advocating policies for what has become an essential infrastructure. Such an assumption would be incorrect. With some notable exceptions (including Aspray […]