Back to home

  Subject: Events

  Location: Online event

  Start Date: December 17, 2025

  End Date: December 17, 2025

Share :     Facebook     Twitter     Email     Whatsapp    

Smartphone Democracy Francois Brochet book discussion

◀

▶

This book explains how 20th century "representative democracy" changed into 21st century "direct democracy" in Europe. NYC also just changed If you have noticed that smartphones have radically changed our social activity over the last two decades, do you think that smartphones have radically changed our political activity as well? Francois Brochet does. In Smartphone Democracy, he carefully deconstructs patterns of smartphone use as well as their effects on political systems. He concludes that no matter how hard we try, 21st-century political processes cannot be replaced by the previous 20th-century norms that were used to generate the familiar patterns of our representative democracies. We have slowly developed new habits that derive from our quick reactions to smartphones. Over a couple of decades, these habits have made voting on a yearly (or four-year basis) too slow for the multitudes. The result is a political change seen in the phenomenal growth of global populist movements often characterized by millions of internet users liking, sharing, tweeting, "truthing", re-tweeting, or "re-truthing" their preferences. And all of this informational sharing is under the control of a charismatic leader whose data analysts help shape decisions made by governments. The iphones and social platforms that were invented in the early 2000's quickly spread throughout the world. There are currently 7.4b smartphones in use and 5.4b social media users worldwide. Beginning in 2007, Barack Obama and his knowledgeable tech team first used only texting to collect 2.2m volunteers who then interacted with 10 million voters. This resulted in his gaining 3 million donors and a vast majority of support among both 18-30 year-old voters and Black/Hispanic voters which led to his victory in the 2008 presidential election. His "Yes We Can" slogan was picked up in Spain by the Podermos (meaning