Technologies of protest: Insurgent Social Movements and the First Amendment in the era of the internet

• useful source on how the early internet was used to organise on both sides, and how internet opened opportunities for wider perspectives to be shared

• read in full later

• View from 2001 on digital divide

  • “Affluent groups and Caucasians are more likely to be connected to the Internet than the poor and most racial minorities; likewise, older Americans are less likely to be Internet users than younger. But for the United States, this limitation will, in my view, be a passing one. Penetration of the Internet has already achieved the levels associated with radio in 1930 and television in 1955, and the divide is rapidly narrowing. Already, the American gap in Internet access between women and men, and between urban and rural residents, has vanished, and the rates of Internet connection among Hispanic and African Americans are rising more rapidly than the rates among the racial majority.”
  • The capacity to make use of the Internet is still, at this point, contingent on levels of literacy and technological sophistication that are unevenly distributed in American society and are likely to remain so in the near future. Thus, even with the comparable levels of physical access that are likely to emerge in the near future, the potential of the Internet for organizing among middle-class women, for example, is likely to be greater than its potential among impoverished members of the disabled community left behind by the American educational system. The open question is whether this differential will be greater than the existing inequalities in political and associational participation.”

• p.143 “digital attention deficit” - very early comments on data noise and datapocalypse and The Age of Noise

• “filters will have a differential impact on less affluent and sophisticated viewers, who are unable to purchase or navigate their way to unrestricted access.”