he two groups making most use of librarieswere “students and housewives” (women users outnumbered men by twoto one), but neither group was well served; and among employed men,6 percent of whites borrowed books, but only 0.1 percent of Black min-ers.18 These were dreadful numbers.
reading as a leading indicator of cultural shift to help provide power to women and non-whites.
Was the Great Books idea being pressed towards "men" a means of pushing back against this in some sense?
cultural democratization as a sometimes contentious process.
some of the cultural democratization at that time presumed free time as well as conscious choice to make the effort... what about those who have patience for neither?
what about the economic choices to participate or not?
The current mass media such as t elevision, books, and magazines are one-directional, and are produced by a centralized process. This can be positive, since respected editors can filter material to ensure consistency and high quality, but more widely accessible narrowcasting to specific audiences could enable livelier decentralized discussions. Democratic processes for presenting opposing views, caucusing within factions, and finding satisfactory compromises are productive for legislative, commercial, and scholarly pursuits.
Social media has to some extent democratized the access to media, however there are not nearly enough processes for creating negative feedback to dampen ideas which shouldn't or wouldn't have gained footholds in a mass society.
We need more friction in some portions of the social media space to prevent the dissemination of un-useful, negative, and destructive ideas swamping out the positive ones. The accelerative force of algorithmic feeds for the most extreme ideas in particular is one of the most caustic ideas of the last quarter of a century.
Naudé, W. (2020). Entrepreneurial Recovery from COVID-19: Decentralization, Democratization, Demand, Distribution, and Demography. IZA Discussion Paper, 13436.
Barlow, Pepita, Rachel Loopstra, Valerie Tarasuk, and Aaron Reeves. “Liberal Trade Policy and Food Insecurity across the Income Distribution: An Observational Analysis in 132 Countries, 2014–17.” The Lancet Global Health 8, no. 8 (August 1, 2020): e1090–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30263-1.
Fraser, N., Neiman, S., Mouffe, C., Sassen, S., Müller, J.-W., Rodrik, D., Piketty, T., Zucman, G., Chang, H.-J., & others, and many. (2020, May 15). Humans are not resources. Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work | Thomas Piketty and others. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/15/humans-resources-coronavirus-democratise-work-health-lives-market
Differential Effects of Capital-Enhancing and Recreational Internet Use on Citizens’ Demand for Democracy
Is internet freedom a tool for democracy or authoritarianism?
I chose this article because its topic speaks to our time. Also, this article has a lot of great links out just in case you want to learn more about the topics the authors speak of.
It gives us a higher chance of creating safe AI. AIs trained on open data are more likely to be neutral and trustworthy instead of biased by the interests of the corporation who created and trained them.
This is the most interesting point in the entire article!