Rebuilding Civic Communities: Editorial

- Johnese Robertson  In previous weeks we’ve discussed the decline of civic engagement and social connectedness.  But how can we rebuild those civic communities? Can we continue to rebuild them while we are encouraged to stay at home and distance ourselves from others?  This week our class blog posts aim to discuss rebuilding those civic …

COVID: The Anti-Human Virus

Douglass Rushkoff in his Our Tech and Our Markets Have an Anti-Human Agenda describes a growing world that has lost fundamental human values from an agenda constructed by competitiveness in our technologies, markets, and media. Rushkoff claims that this competitiveness distracts us from inherent human interaction, and ironically, the digital networks that should connect us …

Different Civic Engagements

Just as it is important for an active civilian to be literate in media -  understanding the cons and schemes that reside within social networking and platforms. It’s also just as important for us to be knowledgeable about civic engagement.  Engagement from a large sum of people became an especially present issue after the 2016 …

Cambridge Analytica – Weapon of Mass Destruction

Cambridge Analytica was a data mining, data brokerage, and strategic communication consultant firm. The personal data of up to 50 million Facebook users were acquired via a third-party survey: “This Is Your Digital Life”. Only 270,000 Facebook users directly used the survey, but the rest of the users that were targetted were obtained through their …