+972's Person of the Year: Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden’s disclosures exposing the extent of NSA surveillance taught us more about our relationship with government than any other exposure or event. In fact, we learned about relationships we didn’t even know we had. But the Snowden leaks didn’t just change what we know; they sparked a discussion that could very well change the dynamics of power in the coming age.
By Noam Sheizaf
The technological revolution represents the most significant change of our lifetime. The Internet has changed everything: our behavior, our ethics, our economy and even our sex lives. But it is politics, not the music industry, where the most profound changes have taken place. Political participation today starts on the Internet and only later moves to the street, workplaces and polling booths.
Israel’s social justice movement – the largest mass protest the country has ever seen – was organized on Facebook. Social media changed the Palestinian national struggle forever: it brought together displaced communities and shed light on grassroots struggles. If it wasn’t for social media, few would have learned of places like Nabi Saleh and Bil’in. The mainstream media never took interest in Palestinian grassroots leaders – only when they were labeled terrorists did they become worthy of attention – but social media has changed that too.
As journalists, we are experiencing firsthand how the Internet has altered our profession, putting some of us out of work while creating new opportunities for others, ones that we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. A project like +972 Magazine could not have existed without the platforms provided by WordPress and Google, Facebook and Twitter.
But as much as we are aware of the significance of these massive changes, the small amount of attention we pay to the battle over the Internet is astonishing. Until we are faced with a specific problem – a website crashing, a webpage removed, a Facebook account hacked – we tend to take it all for granted.
Rather, we used to tend to take things for granted. That is, until a soft-spoken, geeky-looking computer specialist showed us how fragile the new freedoms provided by technology are and the degree to which the virtual universe is exposed to manipulation and abuse. He showed us how underdeveloped our thinking is on privacy and political participation in this virtual space. He showed us just how exposed we are in the face of power in this virtual world – more than we could have ever imagined, let alone agreed to, in our more physical existence.
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