Broken promises : New media revolution in the Arab world - Opinion - Al Jazeera English. Enrico de Angelis
▻http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/01/broken-promises-new-media-revolu-20141146138839881.html
But even if we have to abandon the idea of the Internet as an “intrinsically democratic” medium, this does not mean that it cannot still play a relevant role for democratic change in the near future. For this to happen, we have to rethink critically the practices behind the use of new technologies: using social networks, producing hashtags and promoting single campaigns is not enough anymore.
One key point goes under the name of centralisation: The need to develop a generation of intermediaries capable of filtering and contextualising the overwhelming, amateur content produced through the web. This operation requires a slowing down of the frantic interaction which characterises networked communication: The contents are there, but we need to manage them properly and use them to serve democratic logics. If the rule of new media production is “publish, then filter”, we have to reverse it.
In this sense, the Arab world is an extraordinary laboratory for experimentation: web aggregators, citizen media outlets, portals for archiving contents are flourishing day after day, testing new ways to deal with contemporary flows of contents. This would help to develop a pluralist networked public sphere while at the same time avoiding some of the problems intrinsic to digital forms of communication.