I paperet The Blog vs Big Brother: Information and Communication Technologies and Human Rights, 1980–2005 stiller kollega Indra de Soysa ved NTNU og Lucía Liste Muñoz (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain)
spørsmål om hvordan nye kommunikasjonsteknologier påvirker menneskerettigheter. Her er artikkelen og under er et sammendrag av funnene:
Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) mark the current wave of globalization. Skeptics of globalization, particularly neo-marxists, suggest that the new technology will hamstring governments at the expense of ordinary people, leading to exploitation and social dissatisfaction. Others suggest that the new technologies will empower people at the expense of states, improving human rights and social justice by raising the costs of social control by
predatory rulers. We address the issue by specifically assessing the effects of older technologies relative to new ones, rather than what has been tested in large-N studies to date.
We find very clear results suggesting that new ICTs, particularly access to the internet, has benefits for human rights net of a whole host of controls when assessed against the effects of older technologies. Our results are robust to a host of different controls, testing methods, and to the inclusion of time trends as a separate variable. The results taken together do not provide cause for concern that new technologies will stifle human rights and social development, demobilizing dissent.
For meg er det også interessant at måten jeg fant dette paperet på, var ikke gjennom forfatternes blogger, eller via mitt institutt, men en omtale av paperet på .
Her er lenke til den.
