By Elizabeth Filippouli I just read a very interesting blog piece in Harvard Business Review, written by Melbourne Business School’s economic professor, Joshua Gans. Gans argues (quite rightly in my opinion) that “Facebook is currently the largest news organization”. Without a doubt, over the past years, the world of digital media has been changing at [...]

By Elizabeth Filippouli Until the 1990s, almost all television channels in the Arab countries were government-owned and rigidly controlled. News bulletins were dominated by footage covering ceremonial occasions of state and this was the case no matter if the country was a republic or a monarchy. The news would revolve around “the ruler receiving newly [...]

by Elizabeth Filippouli Al Jazeera started the revolution. Twitter has given it a new, radical, twist making it possible. The events in Tunisia are not a random revolt related to happenstance. Over the past few days, and clearly because poverty and injustice had sunk them to an abyss of desperation, people in Tunisia (of all [...]

By Elizabeth Filippouli “…a seismic transformation in what and how people learn about the world around them. Power is moving away from journalists as gatekeepers over what the public knows. Citizens are assuming a more active role as assemblers, editors and even creators of their own news. “ (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2006) Twitter, [...]

by Elizabeth Filippouli We have entered an era of electronically extended bodies living at the intersecting points of the physical and virtual worlds of occupation and interaction through virtual as well as physical presence. However, modern communications technology, by itself, will be neither democracy’s saviour nor its terminator. Grossman (Grossman, 1995) believes that, “unquestionably it [...]

By Elizabeth Filippouli While the Internet is a sphere where every contribution, every piece of information, every view and every idea can be found, for the sake of a healthy democracy it is crucial that information is processed in such a way as to generate decisions based on the whole pattern of changes and as [...]

by Elizabeth Filippouli Man has always attempted to position and define himself in time and space, to approach and interpret the significance of events, to discover through these events the purpose embedded in the current of evolution which carries him along. If we provisionally give a name to our time, we may call it the digital [...]

By Elizabeth Filippouli For years now there is one single note that never leaves my message board above my desk: “The World has changed since you woke up this morning”. The reason why I feel the need to daily keep an eye on this phrase is because I don’t want to allow my memory to [...]

By Elizabeth Filippouli The generations growing up in the new era of ‘Globonomy’ are taking advantage of the New Interactive Technologies (NIT) to network and connect with other people. As a result they build virtual social circles, valuable pools of international ‘friends’, groups of like-minded individuals to share their free time with and exchange information, [...]

“In a Democracy, people do not live in echo chambers or information cocoons. They see and hear a wide range of topics and ideas. They do so even if they did not, and would not, choose to see and to hear those topics and those ideas in advance”. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 by Elizabeth [...]