The Net Delusion



Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion talks about the Twitter revolution and explains how social media has become something that people believe in to change the world. Morozov believes that “most of the Western efforts to use the Internet in the fight against authoritarianism could best be described as trying to apply a poor cure to the wrong disease” (Morozov 31).

In other words social media cannot be the thing that changes policies or the way things are ran. Morozov sees that social media is a tool, however it cannot be the only tool used to promote change. The idea that the Internet can solve all problems is called cyber-utopianism or Internet-centrism.

Spinternet
Spinternet Morozov’s idea of modern propaganda. He believes that government propaganda still works and we believe in it even though it may be disproved. The way it is presented has been changed with time, now it is seen online. Morozov thinks that we are more likely to believe things that are online even if it is false. Governments as well as advertisers for products pay people to comment or write about what they would like their audiences to read. This blurs the lines between what is relevant and what is irrelevant to what we would like to know

thumb|right|277px|Does the internet actually inhibit, not encourage democracy? In this new RSA Animate adapted from a talk given in 2009, Evgeny Morozov presents an alternative take on 'cyber-utopianism' - the seductive idea that the internet plays a largely emancipatory role in global politics.

Cyber-realism
Morozov calls an “alternative, more down-to-earth, approach to policy making in the digital age” cyber-realism. According to Morozov the cyber-realist would, out of a list of what they would do, “acknowledge that by continuing to flirt with Internet-centrism and cyber-utopianism, policy makers are playing a risky game” and would also “believe that a world made of bytes may defy the law of gravity but absolutely nothing dictates that it should also defy the law of reason” (Morozov 319-320).