Bret Stephens
Bret Stephens is an American journalist, editor and political commentator. The text focused on the decline of civics, and how we need to revive the art of disagreement because it is the foundation of intelligent democratic life.
The Dying Art of Disagreement was a lecture given at the Lowy Institute Media Award dinner on September 23rd, 2017. The text of the lecture was published on September 24th. This course has dealt heavily with personal identity and how it relates to culture. The text discusses identity politics, but in a different light, stating that it has created a culture that is far too sensitive to free speech. I find it very interesting that Stephens perceives social identification as …show more content…
The use of social media in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary elections was published on January 15th, 2013. This course has extensively dealt with culture studies, and the interaction of national leaders and their citizens has much to say about a country's culture. The study analyzed the use of social media by both candidates and citizens in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary election campaign. I found the results to be remarkably interesting, they showed that the significance of social media was generally modest. This is seemingly in stark contrast to the considerable influence it had in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This could be attributed to the increase in use thus the influence of social media, or maybe social media campaigning really didn’t have any significant effect on the 2016 election. Furthermore, the finding that showed that although candidates did utilize social media extensively, online electoral patterns were normalized. Also, that citizens’ use of social media during the campaign was very low. This is exceptionally different to Twitter and Facebook use in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, where Tweets made national waves and Facebook spread heavily bias or simply fact news. Nevertheless, this can be attributed to the selectivity of the study, only focusing on a single Finnish parliament seat, while the other was the election of arguably the most powerful leadership position on