Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT
introduction by Alessandra Renzi
One of the promises of the World Wide Web is better international communication and understanding. Twenty years into the commercial web, it’s clear that this hope is as much hype as reality, and that the rise of digital media is at least as helpful in reinforcing existing local social ties as building novel international ties. This talk explores the rhetoric of global-scale data visualizations to examine the idea of Imaginary Cosmopolitanism, the ways in which our social media and data systems work to persuade us that we’re encountering a fully globalized world.