So if the president wanted to know how his policies were playing in France, I could go to one or two newspapers and find out.
But then things started to go terribly wrong. There was a constant tsunami of information that arose from this digital earthquake called the internet and social media. There was so much information in the world, so much contradictory information, that if you were an analyst you had no idea where to start looking or how to confirm anything.
It was just unprecedented in human experience. Why is an explosion of information so politically destabilizing? I suspect some people might see more information as a good thing.
What I can say is that once we saw this tsunami of information unleashed in the world, we quickly noticed that it tracked with ever-increasing levels of social and political turbulence. The question is, why? When you look at the form of modern government, when you look at our structures of power, our institutions, we tend to think of government as something that was created in the 18th century by the founders.
But the truth is that it was shaped in the Industrial Age. It is very hierarchical. It has an almost religious faith in science and expertise. And a system like this requires a semi-monopoly of information for the domain of each institution. Government needed to control political information, and the politicians and the media all kept a pretty tight circle of information. So what this tsunami of information did was take away the control of these gatekeeping institutions, and I think that initiated a crisis of authority for nearly all of them.
And you could see this happening all across the world in the early parts of this decade. In your book, you say all of this produced a mass revolt of the public against the elites or against authority. What does that mean, exactly? So most people were consuming the same content and there was a common denominator. The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass.
Well, my argument is that now the public only really unifies around what it rejects. This has profound political consequences. So this 20th-century Industrial Age-model of democracy, where rulers are at a distance from the public, is gone.
And at the same time, the public has no shared organization, no common leaders, no ideology. Instead, we have a divided populace united only by its disdain for the status quo. Why did all of this come to a head in this decade?
Is this just about the digital revolution and its consequences? We have a system built on the control of information that has increasingly lost its ability to control information. Governments, the scientific establishment, the media — all of these institutions are essentially in a state of crisis. The government in particular has always needed to control the political story told about itself. In the 20th century, when [former President John F.
Kennedy] made a terrible mistake in the Bay of Pigs invasion , there was still a rallying around him. Ultimately, he acknowledged his mistake and his popularity went up. People trusted presidents in those days because they had limited access to information, and the information they had made them mostly trustworthy. Military spokesman Zaw Min Tun said the NUG was trying to destabilise the country, including disrupting a national coronavirus vaccination programme, but it was heading for failure.
He also accused media groups of "spreading fake news" on the situation in Myanmar. Soon after February's coup, a civil disobedience movement tried to undermine military rule. Hastily formed militias have skirmished regularly with the army, although often appear to be operating independently. It is also unclear how much coordination there is among ethnic forces that have been fighting the army for decades.
The NUG's announcement on Tuesday appeared to prompt some panic buying. A video on social media showed what it said was a rush to buy essentials in a supermarket in the country's business hub of Yangon. There were also reports of fighting in border areas, including between the army and soldiers of the Karen National Union KNU , according to a post by the Karen Information Center on social media. The English Enlightenment influenced the thoughts of many of the colonial Founding Fathers as they pursued liberty, fought for their rights, and for freedom from King George III.
These ideals are reflected in the United States Constitution, which was written shortly after the Revolutionary War came to an end, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Select from these resources to teach your students about what sparked the Revolution, and the key events of the war. Revolutions have brought about some of the most radical transformations in world history and politics. Learn what led to the American, French, Latin American, and Russian revolutions, as well as the characteristics commonly shared by nearly all political uprisings.
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