At the December 2021 Democracy Summit, President Joe Biden committed critical seed money to a new initiative to save independent media from “extinction”. President Emmanuel Macron also pledged to ...
Hossein Derakhshan
Hossein Derakhshan is an Iranian-Canadian writer and researcher who focuses on the long-term socio-political impacts of media and technology. In the early 2000s he introduced blogging to Iran which earned him the title of “blogfather.” He was imprisoned in Tehran for six years for his writings and online activism. Hossein was a 2018 spring fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, based at Harvard Kennedy School, USA.
He is the author of The Web We Have to Save, a co-author of Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking, and he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Libération, MIT Technology Review, Wired, and other outlets. While at the Shorenstein Center he focused on alternative futures for online and offline journalism, information disorder, and alternative algorithms.
Is the global village becoming a Potemkin village? Back in the optimistic 90s, many were certain that the Internet would spell the end of ‘Potemkin villages’ and bring a new era of media pluralism...
Journalism is crumbling, mainly because people around the world seem reluctant to pay for facts, while they are spending ever more for emotions: from Spotify to Netflix. For journalism, this is the be...
Big data, when combined with certain algorithms, can be lethal. It makes citizens naked to states and corporations, prone to manipulation and abuse. Is it possible to resist their tyranny and expand f...
The capture of traditional media by Facebook and its implications for free speech and privacy. Facebook, Apple and Google have all recently made significant strides in the field of publishing, with...
Journalism in the post-web era: what we have lost, what we have gained and what it is becoming
#ijf16talk by Hossein Derakhshan. Moderated by Carola Frediani.
