Places and form of power

Places and form of Power:

Documents : 

• TEXT & PICTURE: Flash Mobs

• Organized on social network
• Broadcast by CNN (America news channel)
• Flash Mobs is sudden and planned gathering of people in a particular place.
• In the picture we see a group of people dancing, we can guess they are having fun
• The titles of the two texts (Culture Performance / Flash looting) indicate that flash mobs may have quite different goals: the first place the accent on the cultural and positive aspects of some flash mobs.
• The second article denounce the fact that those gathering cause a citywide looting while there was a blackout in the summer of 1977, but not because alarm systems were down, but because a whole lot of hot, angry, frustrated people had an excuse to act en masse.
• The media can certainly accelerate or even reproduce this process: Radio gave Hitler a way to unify angry crowds as never before.
• Social media are being used to orchestrate “flash” looting of stores, a mob beating was organized in Wisconsin, as were attacks in Cleveland, Chicago, and Washington.
• By putting what had formerly been the capability of broadcast networks in the hands of everyone owning a smartphone, have we unwittingly (involontairement) empowered the “mob”.

• PICTURE & C.O: Empowered Citizens

• On the picture ➔ women recording police-man with her “iPad” (ntm), she may be a reporter.
• the police-men in the background are demonstrating in the streets.
• Phones are ubiquitous (omnipresent).
• In the C.O ➔ every citizen is empowered potentially as a journalist, as a reporter to the world that surround him/her thanks to the built-in camera on their phone.
• That may prove useful to prevent wrong doing by the police for example.
• So today more and more citizen can act like reporter.

• C.O: The Rise and fall of WikiLeaks

• The creator of WikiLeaks just gets the fuck out of prison
• His website was created in 2006
• They published secret documents to denounce corruption and oppressive regime
• He faces multiple accusation of spying.

Definition:

We are going to talk about the notion “Places and forms of power”. To illustrate the notion, I’ve chosen to talk about the power of citizens in today’s society because nowadays the citizens have the ability to exercise authority and they are able to influence the behaviour of others. It also seems that they have been giving more power in the past years

Problematic:

Is the empowerment of citizens a reality?

Plan:

1. New Technologies give more power to citizens:

• Many technologies have been invented and created in the recent years.
• Phones with built-in camera

1. However, citizens are still powerless in some situation:

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