Skip to content
Who's in the Video
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served[…]
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

What used to be the provenance of the wealthy and powerful is now much more democratized, says Walt.

The Digital Revolution

Stephen Walt: I think we’re also seeing a revolution for how information itself is handled. This interview is a little bit part of that to the extent that this gets web cast and pod cast. And until relatively recently, if you were wealthy and powerful, you also could have a lot of impact on information. You could buy a newspaper. You could buy a broadcasting network. You could hire a publicist to make sure your ideas got on whoever did have a newspaper . . . things like that. And if you didn’t have those things, your capacity to get heard was much less. I think one of the consequences of the Internet and . . . and the gradual spreading out of sources of information is that people who don’t have a whole lot of resources can, by sort of sheer wit, or brilliance, or energy become a voice . . . become heard. Not all of them, right? The blogosphere, for example, tends to be a few people everybody reads or many people read, and millions of people that nobody reads. But still those other people aren’t necessarily in a wealthy, powerful . . . connected to wealthy or powerful institutions. And I think over time we may see this world in which information has become a . . . much more democratized as well. But where that’s going to take us I’m not sure.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Image courtesy of Faraways / Shutterstock.com.


Related
The integration of artificial intelligence into public health could have revolutionary implications for the global south—if only it can get online.