Irina Raicu

We asked more than two dozen people who think deeply about the intersection of technology and civics to reflect on two straightforward questions: Is technology hurting democracy? And can technology help save democracy? We’ll publish a new essay every day for the next several weeks, beginning with Shannon Vallor’s “Lessons From Isaac Asimov’s Multivac.”

[Commentary] Social media scholars talk a lot about “context collapse,” the term that describes what happens when, on a platform like Facebook, users find that they can’t communicate freely with their friends while their relatives are reading the same posts, or with their relatives while the employers get to read, too, etc. The mix of audiences (on Facebook especially) has led to miscommunications, conflicts and, increasingly, self-censorship. Keeping up with the news is important.

Communicating with friends and family is important, too. But maybe it’s time to separate the “news” from the newsfeed again — not because either of them is unnecessary or frivolous, but because they deserve different kinds of attention. Blended together, they now blur into a whole less meaningful than its parts.

[Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University.]