When thinking about political figures, or rather actors, it isn’t often the case that celebrity would come into play in regards to credibility. With the current US president Donald Trump, being a rich capitalist celebrity is his only credibility. In Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, the article focuses on how information and fact is now circulated due to a change of power. Having a reality tv star as president of the US has placed enormous value on social media and the dramatic. The information, or the “text”, is consumed through Trump’s main platform, Twitter, or circulated through fake news on Facebook, or debated on TV. The question is, what has caused us to teeter away from data and professionalism–“the analog.” It isn’t the president to blame entirely, but perhaps the digital era and pleasure his audience seeks from media and the many forms and genres it comes in.
What should the purpose of the internet be, especially for the political? Mark Poster in Information Please argues that the purpose of the internet has been primary for the development and sustainability of global economies. The internet has elicited international consumerism by the form of accessible communication. However, the internet should be used for more than the benefit of the economy but for global communication and engagement. Poster also asks us to rethink the term citizen and “the machine heterogenesis” of the human which I am not quite sure what he is referring to.
There is no arguing that technology and media platforms have a huge role in politics at this time. We see that in the above examples, especially in regards to Trump. Paul Starr in his Foreign Affairs article “Big Tech and the Business of Surveillance” points out that the power technology holds in politics and society will only cause more opposition towards technology. Many blame these platforms for what content and conversations are produced from them. Starr writes, “Nationalism is on the march today, and the technology industry is in its path: countries that want to chart their own destiny will not continue to allow U.S. companies to control their platforms for communication and politics.” When we talk about chart, we can literally think about marking on the internet in which things become materialized. But what is Starr referring to when he is discussing the liberation from the US and its use of technology?