Jill Lepore: evaluation

Transcript context

…What if I were to say, well, they are truly democratizing. So Brexit, the British people actually wanted. I thought it was a mistake personally, but it may not have happened or won without social media. But it did represent the popular will. And once it was voted through, there’s been remarkably little regret. So what if someone argued the problem is democracy and not social media? Yes or no? Yeah. Myself, I suspect that the problem is that we have a representative system of government, but we no longer believe in representation. We actually believe in direct democracy. And most of these tools that allow us to represent our own views, we are constantly representing our own views. Instant polling and even the rise of the referendum or growing reliance on a referendum — something as big as Brexit — that we don’t actually subscribe to the idea that we elect someone like our congresswoman, say, to represent the views of a large constituency of people. That that is an act of faith, and it is an act of community, and that we instead — and this is re-inscribed for us in our technologies — we instead believe that her job is to tally up our individual views and then act accordingly. Previous generations said that that was robotic. That would be the language of the 1950s that people would talk about. People who are elected to represent you, they’re not delegated to do what you tell them to do. You elect them to represent the views of the community. I think there’s a mismatch between what we think happens and what the system is set up to happen. People could decide, “You know what? Direct democracy is the right thing. We should get rid of the Electoral College, say. We should have instant polling so that if your congresswoman’s going to vote on an act of legislation, she should be able to get feed from every constituent and then just do what she’s told.” We might decide that that’s a way to reframe our system of government, but that’s not actually how it was built. Final question. The world of social media, we all know it’s not going away. Maybe it has some problems, but if you were to give a student or a person some piece of advice or intellectual ammunition to carry with them through this world — some book, some essay, some thought — so as to make it marginally better rather than marginally worse, what would that be?…

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