Jill Lepore: evaluation

Transcript context

…San Francisco had networking. LA had the broadcast model, which in a sense failed. And San Francisco outpaces — or the Bay Area — probably the rest of this country. Yeah, and that’s where the whole digital democracy notion comes from. That this is the leftover of a ’60s utopianism, a new Left utopianism. And that, to me, is just a very tragic story because the research that has been done that got to me — like that book, The Myth of a Digital Democracy — what people expected digitization and the rise of the Internet to do politically, those expectations have not been met. And I think it’s not an exertion intellectually to be dystopic about the consequences of these technologies. I think the exertion is actually trying to steer a middle course, and see what’s working and what’s not working, and what effect things are having, and what are the ways that those things could be measured. But when I ask my students to read Frederick Douglass’s “Pictures in Progress” from 1861, and I ask them “What’s your answer for Snapchat?” I think they generally have a dark answer. Explain a little more.…

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