Oral bac anglais

Places and Forms of Power

The notion I'm going to deal with is places and forms of powers. To begin with, I'd like to give a definition of this notion: Places can be important buildings or institutions that represent a certain form of power, for example Buckingham Palace who is a symbol of the British monarchy. A place can also be a country or a state – China is a major economic power in today’s world.

In politics, power is the ability to control others, events, or resources; the ability to make things happen despite obstacles, resistance, or opposition (counter power). In order to live together members of a community have to accept rules, regulations, laws. This helps to create social cohesion but can also provoke conflicts and tensions between those who have power, the rich people, and those who don’t, poor people.

We wonder how operates the empowerment of citizens? Which places? In what ways? and in what forms?To answer to these questions, my presentation will fall into 3 parts: First of all, I will concentrate on new technologies; then I will analyse how new technologies have empowered citizens; before finally focusing on the limits of citizens empowerment.

New Technologies

First we will see the different tools that are easily accessible to citizens and what they can do with them. There are tools for share information and other tools to search and find information. So I’m going to talk about the power of the media as google or wikileaks. Google is one of the largest Internet market companies. This search engine allows you to find all sorts of information in any field. So it’s a form of power because google is popular throughout the world, milions of people use it every day. We can also talk about social networks like twitter, instagram, which is a form of new technologies because they revolutionize the world and these web site are very famous all over the world. Thanks to social networks, each people can share with other people, pictures, musics ..

Thanks to the various existing media, they allow us to inform us and make us our own opinion on any subject. However, information has no borders, so we can constantly enrich our knowledge and react. But information can sometimes be diffused adversely. This famous sentence: "Too much information kills information" can sometimes tell the truth. Internet has massively developed the disinformation. We can speak of the case of Wikileaks who publish a lot of false information. It’s a website which publishes anonymously information supposed to be censored, or about corruption and oppressive regimes. So this is a form of counter power because wikileaks attacks established authorities.

How new technologies have empowered citizens

Now I'm going to show that the new technologies have empowered citizens. We can see how people can organize rapidly thanks to technologies. This is the case of the flash mob that represent mobilization of individuals, that is to say, the gathering of a group of people in a public place to perform actions agreed upon in advance, before dispersing quickly. The gathering is usually organized through the Internet,